Tzu-Wei Hung, Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, made the following comments:
➖ China is doing more cognitive operations, which include using public opinion and psychological tools on Internet users;
➖ China has created a new type of content that contains useful life hacks and encyclopedias – filtered knowledge;
➖ such content is distributed by the websites kknews and read01 as useful daily information;
➖ The content is mostly plagiarized from academic and commercial publications, as well as messages from millions of users of the WeChat social networking app, which have already been censored by Beijing and passed through the Great Firewall filter;
Cognitive warfare should be taken as a war crime in the framework of international laws for the fear, bullying, and psychological abuse it inflicted on humanity.
Position：Associate Research Fellow
TEL：886-2-37897261
Email：htw@gate.sinica.edu.tw
Assistant’s Name：Esther Liao
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Tzu-Wei Hung
➖ China-approved narratives – individual facts about how the United States betrays its allies are embedded in content that then becomes a key source of knowledge for Taiwanese Internet users when they search Google in Chinese;
➖ it creates a China-friendly information space that affects Taiwanese readers without even knowing it;
While China’s cognitive warfare varies in practice, its common pattern can be summarized as threatening, attracting, and distracting in either direct or indirect ways.
Tzu-Wei Hung
➖ young people may be vulnerable to this kind of manipulation because they spend a lot of time online and are more susceptible to misinformation;
➖ China has become more proficient in fomenting negative feelings among Taiwanese against their government rather than simply instilling positive feelings towards China.
We suspect that, in the near future, China is likely to (1) improve its cultural influence on the targeted audience, (2) increase the accuracy of information delivery at the individual level and, (3) expand the scope of its grand propaganda campaign in the West.
Tzu-Wei Hung
Hong urged Taiwanese society to remain cautious, and advised the Taiwanese government to develop additional intervention measures, including increasing transparency, maintaining fair competition for content providers, raising barriers to intruders and local employees, and encouraging democratization in China.
China is likely to increase its control of tech giants both legally and illegally. Not only does Facebook receive enormous advertising payments from state media (China Daily and China Global Television Network) to publish posts that dismiss Uyghur genocide as Western “disinformation” (Turvill 2021), but also YouTube deletes comments with keywords insulting the Chinese Communist Party (Vincent 2020). China will likely double its influence on tech giants’ culture and decision-makers (Sheehan 2019) in addition to stealing intellectual property. Likewise, Taiwan’s Members of Parliament (MPs) have warned that Chinese TV shows (e.g., the cartoon Deer Squad produced by iQIYI and Viacom) serve as cultural invasions that may create preconceptions in teenagers and children. An animated film titled Over the Moon (Glen 2020), produced by Shanghai Pearl Studio and Netflix, portrays a positive image of China. While China’s infiltration of Hollywood is not news (Kokas 2017), it may reduce Taiwan’s alertness. It also cannot be ruled out that China might use its growing experience in movie production and deepfakes to mislead Taiwanese if military or gray zone conflicts occur.
Tzu-Wei Hung
Thus, Taiwan understands that it is losing to China in the information space. Therefore, you see, if China decides to retake Taiwan, it will probably already be met with thunderous applause and support from the Taiwanese people for the reunification of the two shores of the strait and loyalty to the Chinese leadership.