(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Holger Chen cuts a fierce profile with his skull-tattooed biceps, each bigger than a human head, and the oft-broken nose of a fighter. A mixed martial arts fighter, ex-Marine, former gangster, and owner of a chain of fitness clubs in Taiwan named after Genghis Khan, Chen has become an emblem of what he calls “defensive democracy” against disinformation from China. In his YouTube broadcasts, watched by hundreds of thousands of people, he rails against “brainwashing” by websites linked to China and throws rhetorical punches at pro-Beijing television stations and newspapers that support Taiwan’s unification with the mainland.
Chen is tapping public anger in a place that ranks No. 1 out of 202 in perceived foreign dissemination of false information, according to a recent study by the V-Dem Institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg. “They’re using our strengths, like free speech, as weak points to attack us,” Chen says over expensive tea served in incongruously delicate cups at his studio on the outskirts of Taipei. With his normal speaking voice on the verge of a shout, it doesn’t take much to get him into fighting mode. “We need to protect our country!” he bellows.
After decades of China’s veiled threats to invade and a long-running campaign to get Taiwan’s allies to shift their diplomatic allegiance to Beijing, researchers, government officials, and lawmakers in Taipei all say that China is pursuing a new tactic in the runup to Taiwan’s Jan. 11 presidential vote: election meddling. “China is following the steps from Russia,” says Tzeng Yi-suo, head of cyberwarfare at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, which is advising Taiwan’s government on ways to counteract the interference. “In our election campaign periods, there is a most striking influence campaign coming from the Chinese Communist Party.”
The incumbent president, Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), has called “information warfare being waged from China” a threat to Taiwan’s democratic principles. Her chief challenger, Han Kuo-yu, from the Kuomintang (KMT) party, supports closer ties with the mainland. Last year, Han was elected mayor of Kaohsiung, a DPP stronghold, helped by overwhelmingly favorable coverage on Taiwan’s most-watched cable news station and what researchers say was a campaign of false claims and misleading information orchestrated by China. The DPP acknowledges that its own missteps and a strong campaign by Han contributed to last year’s election rout, but it’s hoping for a better showing in January. Tsai has been riding on renewed popularity since protests in Hong Kong crystallized fears about the “One Country, Two Systems” model of unification, which China’s President Xi Jinping has also pushed for Taiwan.
A spokesman for Han’s campaign said in a statement that any claim Han benefited from Chinese disinformation is “completely groundless.” He added that the DPP’s anti-China platform will isolate Taiwan from the rest of the world and “not only undermine economic growth and development in Taiwan but also destabilize cross-strait relations.”
China’s disinformation apparatus goes well beyond what it considers its borders, according to an analysis published by Harvard researchers in April. Using proxies around the world and some of the same social media platforms it bans at home, the government in Beijing posts 448 million comments a year aimed at promoting a pro-China agenda or sowing discord, the researchers found. In August, Twitter Inc. suspended 936 mainland Chinese accounts, part of a larger network of 200,000 spam accounts it disabled because of what it called a “significant state-backed operation” working to undermine Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations. On Sept. 20 it suspended an additional 10,000. Facebook Inc. and YouTube have disabled accounts for similar reasons. In December, new foreign-influence laws went into effect in Australia aimed at blocking China’s efforts to sway politics and key decision-makers in that country.
In Taiwan, guarantees of free speech and expression pose a dilemma: How does a society balance the fight against information warfare with the right of its people to publish their political views freely? “It’s a line between democratic freedoms of speech and the national security of Taiwan under attack from the Chinese government, and it’s a very difficult line to draw,” says Lee Chun-yi, secretary general of the DPP’s legislative caucus. There are two major factors to consider, he says: whether speech has been directly funded by China, and whether China-based entities originated, spread, or otherwise aided coordinated disinformation.
Lee and DPP researchers have identified 22 websites in Taiwan they say fall on the disinformation side of that line. They exhibit similar page designs, often publish the same news, and have ties to the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council in Beijing, the Chinese government’s chief administrative authority in charge of promoting unification. All 22 sites, as well as one operated by the Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing, featured a story about the selection of an administrator, who had served as an official under the previous pro-China president, to lead Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Echoing Chinese Communist Party language designed to diminish Taiwan’s political institutions, the piece portrayed Tsai as the force behind a wave of anti-China repression and warned that if her government blocked the appointment, Tsai would lose her reelection bid.
“We think this network is the Chinese government,” says Lee, pointing to printouts of the research in his office. “When you have the same news from the same source point on the same day, there’s something wrong.” The party is drafting legislation to ban direct funding from Chinese entities for news outlets and campaigns, and to require registration for foreign agents. The Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing didn’t respond to questions sent by fax.
Puma Shen, an assistant professor at National Taipei University, has spent months analyzing the spread of disinformation from China with a team of researchers at DoubleThink Labs, an organization he chairs. He describes one incident that occurred last November: During one of the Kaohsiung mayoral debates, an article was published on more than a dozen websites implying that the DPP candidate was stupid because he was wearing an earpiece and seemingly taking directions from an unseen adviser. Photographs of the event didn’t show him wearing an earpiece, but immediately after the stories were published, searches for information about the debate in five Chinese provinces, as identified by their internet service providers, caused Google to return the false article as the top result. Two weeks later, the DPP candidate lost to Han, who’s now running for president on the KMT ticket. That bit of disinformation wasn’t the only factor, Shen says, but it helped.
At a presentation to government officials and foreign diplomats in Taipei in September, Shen said that while China lacks Russia’s sophistication, it’s rapidly advancing. In July and August, he told the group, there was a marked increase in news that appeared to originate in China showing how difficult life in the U.S. has become as a result of the trade war. Such reports aim to raise doubts about Tsai’s DPP government and its friendly relationship with the U.S., Shen says. “China’s message is to get people to think, What is this government doing being close to the U.S. in this trade war? Maybe it should be closer to China.”
Shen’s group says it has found Chinese-language websites, search boosters, and a network of content farms working together to sow disinformation from China and other countries. These overseas sites post the same news item at about the same time and then count on search boosters in China to move them to the top of Google pages, Shen says. The content farms appear to operate in a coordinated fashion from the same IP addresses. Often, the telltale sign that text originated in China is the use of the mainland’s simplified characters, rather than the traditional ones used in Taiwan, he says.
Chinese agencies have been launching an estimated 30 million cyberattacks against Taiwan a month, according to the government’s director general of cybersecurity, Jyan Hong-wei. The patterns indicate Chinese state involvement, he says. All came between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., with a break for lunch from noon to 1:30 p.m. Most are exploratory, looking for vulnerabilities, but several thousand have resulted in full-blown attacks. Six last year were successful, he says, adding that it’s possible sensitive information already obtained by China could be released before the January vote. The information war will likely heat up about two months before, Shen and other researchers say; they’ve already noticed a surge in posts on Taiwanese sites from China’s 50-cent army, or wu mao, named for the amount of money people are said to receive from the government every time they promote China or attack policies and articles not in the country’s interest. Two years ago, DPP legislator Karen Yu Wan-ju found it easy to spot them on her Facebook fan page. Now that’s changing. “Lately, some strange accounts are based in Taiwan and use traditional characters,” Yu says, scrolling through her page and pointing out suspicious posts. “What I worry is that these cyber armies are becoming one of us.”
Shen and others have asked Google and Facebook to change the way they display posts to downplay manipulated or outright false news. “We have to provide the standard,” he says, adding that both companies have been receptive. In August, Facebook and Twitter announced they would no longer accept paid posts from Chinese state-owned news outlets. And in September, Google said it would change its algorithm to show original news sources higher in searches than duplicate sites that copy and disseminate. “We have teams of people dedicated to protecting Taiwan’s upcoming elections,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in an email.
In the meantime, Taiwan’s National Communications Commission has taken action against Want Want China Times Media Group, a prominent media organization that has been accused of having ties to China. Owned by Tsai Eng-meng, who made a fortune selling rice crackers and is now Taiwan’s richest man according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Want Want operates the pro-unification China Times newspaper and television network Chung T’ien, known as CTi. In the runup to local elections last year, the commission found, the network’s CTi TV News devoted about 70% of its airtime to Han, the KMT mayoral candidate. The commission fined the network NT$5.03 million ($164,000) for violations of broadcast regulations, including failure to fact-check and harming public order. The company says it has reduced its coverage of Han. “The number of issues around China-related content has risen significantly in recent years,” says the commission’s acting chairman, Chen Yaw-shyang. “The question for us is whether this increase still falls within our protections for freedom of speech, or whether it touches upon national security issues.”
Want Want China Holdings Ltd., a Hong Kong-traded snack maker and beverage unit that’s Tsai’s main source of wealth, has acknowledged receiving subsidies from the Chinese government, but it said the money went to that business only. The media company is a separate personal investment of Tsai’s, according to a representative. “I absolutely have not taken any money I shouldn’t have taken,” Tsai was quoted saying in a YouTube video the company posted.
Still, the DPP’s Lee and other legislators say the admission shows Want Want is too close to China’s government for comfort. Chen, the martial artist, urges a tougher line. “I want everyone to boycott them and the government to legislate against them,” he says. “If we keep watching their news over and over, there doesn’t even need to be a war. We can just surrender to China right now.” —With Cindy Wang and Adela Lin
To contact the authors of this story: Sheridan Prasso in Hong Kong at sprasso@bloomberg.netSamson Ellis in Taipei at sellis29@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Robert Friedman at rfriedman5@bloomberg.net, Jillian Goodman
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