A Beijing-based think tank last week published a poll showing that the majority of Chinese consider “international military intervention in Taiwan” one of the top threats facing China.
Arguably, the sole purpose of the poll, which was conducted by the Tsinghua University Center for International Security and Strategy, is to serve as propaganda. A poll conducted in China, where freedom of speech is curtailed, cannot accurately reflect public opinion. Chinese would be reluctant to publicly express their true opinion, especially when it contradicts the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) narrative, as doing so would likely be construed as subversive behavior.
RAND Corp Hu Taiwan Policy Initiative director Raymond Kuo (郭泓均) said as much. Commenting on a separate poll, he said that the number that expressed a dissenting view in that poll was likely only one-quarter of the true number.
Even if Chinese were to express themselves truthfully in a poll, the information would be of little use to policymakers in Beijing. Direct elections are held only at the local level in China, where nominees are controlled and vetted by the CCP. Hence, Chinese policymakers are not held accountable to the public.
While Beijing has been shown to take public opinion into account on rare occasions — for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic when successive lockdowns led to widespread protests, eventually prompting Beijing to ease restrictions — protests are dangerous and invariably lead to many arrests.
The poll might have been in part a response to recent surveys by the Pew Research Center in Washington, which for the past few years have shown that the majority of the US public holds a negative view of China. In 2020, the survey showed that about 74 percent of Americans felt China handled the pandemic poorly, while 55 percent said they had “no confidence at all” in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) handling of international affairs.
Tsinghua is a public university, and it is not unlikely that the CCP commissioned the poll in an attempt to convince the Chinese public that negative views of the US are the norm in China, just as negative views of China are prevalent in the US. This might have been done to fan the flames of nationalism, which the CCP has done in the past to deflect attention from restrictions on personal freedoms by portraying “foreign interference” as a more pressing threat that Chinese should rally against.
That the South China Morning Post also reported on the poll suggests that the CCP intends to use it as propaganda in Hong Kong. Hong Kong no longer enjoys press freedom, and it is not a stretch to assume that it was the CCP’s idea for the news outlet to run the report.
The report was subsequently picked up by Chinese-language media in Taiwan, giving the CCP a wider audience for its message that it is the US — rather than China — that is the real aggressor in the Indo-Pacific region, and that Beijing’s military buildup is for self-defense and not expansionism. China has probably taken cues from Russia, which has tried to paint its war of aggression against Ukraine as a self-defense measure intended to keep NATO at bay.
Taiwanese have freer access to information than Chinese do, but the government must still ensure that media literacy in Taiwan is kept high, as China has been ramping up its cognitive warfare.
The government should use information campaigns to improve public awareness of Chinese disinformation, and work with news and social media companies, with the assistance of artificial intelligence technology, to flag content identified as disinformation. Schools should also teach children about disinformation and other threats from China, and conduct audits to limit the impact of China-friendly educators.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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