Beijing meddling looms over elections
Skeptics fear Russian-style influence campaign.
As Taiwan TAIPEI, TAIWAN — prepares to hold local elections Saturday, concerns are growing that Beijing’s long effort to sway the island’s politics has been armed with a new weapon: a Russia-style influence campaign.
The island’s elections for city mayors and county and village leaders will in part serve as a report card on President Tsai Ing-wen, whose administration has come under immense pressure from Beijing. But Taiwan officials are sounding alarms at what they say is a campaign by Beijing to spread disinformation that serves its agenda by exploiting the island’s freewheeling public discourse.
“There are those people who mistakenly think that if you simply shout falsehoods loudly, they’ll become real,” Tsai wrote on Facebook last week. “We must not let them succeed.”
Taiwan officials say the population of 23 million is regularly fed misleading information in the news media and on social networks that range from unverified footage of large-scale Chinese military drills to false reports of stranded travelers being abandoned by the island’s government.
The onslaught of misinformation seems aimed at undermining the Tsai administration and her governing Democratic Progressive Party, which that leans toward independence — while helping politicians deemed more sympathetic to Beijing and unification, who are typically with the opposition party Kuomintang.
China’s ruling Communist Party considers Taiwan part of its territory, and wants to bring the democratic island under its control. Tsai became president in May 2016 and has refused to meet China’s demand that she endorse Beijing’s so-called One China principle, which holds that the mainland and the island are one.
In response, Beijing has sought to isolate Taiwan by drawing away its diplomatic allies, pressuring companies to erase references to Taiwan as a separate country and stepping up military drills.
Taiwan authorities say they suspect that Beijing is also illegally funneling money to political campaigns through Taiwanese businesses in mainland China. Late last month, the government said that it was building cases against candidates who were being funded by Beijing and that it had shut down two underground money exchanges through which funds earmarked for influencing the election had been flowing.
Taiwan’s government fears the use of social media misinformation campaigns are a new front for meddling.
Beijing denies any kind of interference in Taiwan. A spokesman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, Ma Xiaoguang, described Tsai’s Facebook comments as “fake news.” Ma said wider allegations about meddling were “completely fabricated. We hope our Taiwanese compatriots won’t believe it.”
Taiwan leaders say propaganda is now carried over the strait through posts on Facebook, the chat app Line and a popular online bulletin board known as PTT.
In September, PTT drew scrutiny for carrying a widely shared post that claimed that Taiwanese travelers stranded in Japan were being rescued by buses sent by China’s consulate — but only on the condition that they declared themselves Chinese.
The post, which was carried by Chinese media, led to criticism from the Taiwanese public that their government had failed them.
Su Chii-Cherng, Taiwan’s top diplomat in Osaka, Japan, killed himself, leaving a note saying that the “news” had been troubling him.