As Taipei Celebrates Diversity, Anti-LGBT Group Warns of ‘Nefarious’ Western Influence

The conservative Happiness of the Next Generation Alliance has called on Taiwanese to resist machinations by Western countries to undermine the nation’s ‘good morals’ 

An estimated 140,000 people from Taiwan and across Asia gathered on Saturday, Oct. 27, to take part in the 2018 Taipei LGBT Pride parade. The largest in Asia, this year’s event encouraged Taiwanese participants of voter age to vote in favor of marriage equality in a referendum which will be held concurrently with nationwide municipal elections on Nov. 24. 

As always, the tens of thousands of participants joined various routes around Taipei before meeting up on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office for an evening of concerts. Various foreign diplomatic missions, among them the E.U., U.S., U.K. Australia and Canada, also led delegations during the march, distributing flags and balloons bearing the rainbow colors. 

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The Hard Edge of Sharp Power: Understanding China’s Influence Operations Abroad

In recent years, China has invested billions of dollars in an effort to boost its visibility and improve its image abroad. However, unbeknownst to many Canadians, the Chinese Communist Party has expanded its efforts, and is now increasingly relying more on unsavoury influence operations that use co-optation, bribery, incentivization, disinformation, censorship, and other methods 

Defined as “sharp power,” these sorts of activities are part of a strategy employed by authoritarian regimes to penetrate into the political, social, and economic systems of target countries in order to align them with authoritarian interests. 

To address China’s influence operations, we must first understand them. With that in mind, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute has released a new report titled The Hard Edge of Sharp Power: Understanding China’s Influence Operations Abroad. My full report for MLI is available here.

Xinjiang Will Be China’s Palestine

By so utterly mishandling Xinjiang, Beijing has opened a new front along its peripheries, one that could result in terrible violence against a growing list of Chinese ‘soft targets’ in Africa, South and Central Asia 

Among many of the troubling developments that have occurred in China in recent years, mounting — and by now incontrovertible — evidence that the Chinese regime is engaged in the social, cultural, and religious cleansing of Xinjiang’s Uighur muslims, complete with concentration camp-style “reeducation schools,” is by far the most disturbing. 

According to various investigations, supported by on-site reporting and satellite imagery, as many as 1/10th of Xinjiang’s 10 million ethnic Uighurs are currently detained in secret re-education camps around the supposedly autonomous region. Beijing, which has launched a major propaganda campaign to counter the growing scrutiny, claims that the Uighurs who are currently found in the so-called “vocational schools” have joined willingly. 

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The True 'Pivot to Asia' Is Here

The Indo-Pacific region is on the frontline of the greatest challenge to the international liberal order since the 1930s 

After years of ad hoc and flaccid engagement with the Indo-Pacific region, the United States is finally back, and the effects are already being felt. 

For far too long, a resurgent China was allowed to create facts on the ground and at sea which challenged the regional, rules-based order that had underpinned the international system since the end of World War II. Despite the Obama administration’s talk about a “pivot” and “rebalance” to Asia, Washington was largely disengaged from a region that, during the same period, had continued to gain in importance. Unopposed but by a handful of small states, China was able in 2013 to unilaterally declare an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea, and later on to “occupy” almost all of the disputed South China Sea and militarize its presence there. By the time the world finally awakened, it was too late: a new status quo had been created at sea, one which even an international court ruling had been incapable of reversing. 

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Chinese Interference in Taiwan’s Elections is Part of a Two-Pronged Attack on Democracy

For the November elections, vote buying is no longer the purely local problem it once was. It is now directly tied to Beijing’s sustained assault on the very legitimacy of Taiwan’s democracy 

The Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau (MJIB) on Monday confirmed long-suspected fears that Beijing has ramped up its efforts to interfere in the nationwide municipal elections next month. 

According to MJIB Director-General Leu Wen-jong, the bureau is currently investigating 33 cases of suspected Chinese funding of various candidates in the Nov. 24 elections, with evidence that the money is coming directly from the Chinese government. In most cases, the funds were reportedly funneled to candidates favored by Beijing via Taiwanese businesspeople with operations in China. 

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The Impact of China's Disinformation Operations Against Taiwan

Amid escalating tensions in the Taiwan Strait, China has intensified its disinformation activities (“fake news”) targeting Taiwan as part of a multifaceted attempt to coerce, confuse, and corrode Taiwanese society. This all-out strategy targets the Taiwanese government, Taiwanese society, and the democratic institutions and practices that underpin the nation today

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Taiwan’s ‘Soft Power’ is Severely Underfunded — And China is Partly Responsible

There is no reason why bright young minds, research centers, web site operators, film producers and others who are committed to a free and democratic Taiwan should starve while Beijing spends billions on similar initiatives

China has invested billions of dollars in recent years to increase the appeal of its so-called “China model” and shape the global environment in its favor. As incidents in Sweden and the U.K. in recent weeks have demonstrated, the Chinese can still be rather self-defeatingly clumsy in their public diplomacy efforts. But don’t get fooled: Beijing is dead serious about this strategy: it has put its money where its mouth is, and it will get better at it. Among other things, it has acquired film studios abroad, established a global media presence, organized conferences, and used educational centers to spread its ideology. When such traditional endeavors have failed, it has used more devious means, such as political and information warfare, to get what it wants.

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China’s Dangerous ‘Bottom-Up’ Ultranationalism and the 85℃ Incident: a Warning

By allowing netizens to define its cross-Strait policy, Beijing risks losing control of the situation and could cause severe harm to an already tense relationship 

China’s punitive “strategy” on Taiwan once again escalated this week after the Taiwanese coffee chain 85℃ Bakery Cafe came under assault by Chinese ultranationalists over a visit to one of its stores in Los Angeles by Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. 

The ire was sparked by President Tsai’s visit to the coffee shop, where staff, excited to be meeting the democratically elected head of state, gave her store paraphernalia as a gift (Chinese disinformation claimed the package was stuffed with money). 

After photos of the encounter were made public, Chinese ultranationalists kicked into action and accused the chain, which operates 859 stores in China and made 64% of its Q1 revenue there, of supporting Taiwan independence. Threats of a boycott (described by the South China Morning Post as a “zealous online campaign”) were sent to the company’s Weibo account, and its Taiwan website was was knocked offline by what is believe to have been a cyber attack. The next day, Long Mingbiao, deputy director of the State Council’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO), said China would “never allow” a company that (purportedly) supports Taiwanese independence to operate in China. 

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Conflict in the Taiwan Strait Is No Mere ‘Family Struggle’—It’s Part of Something Much Greater

Whether we like it or not, Taiwan is in the frontline of an ongoing battle — and it is heating up — to determine the kind of world we and our children will live in for years to come 

In his latest article for the National Interest, Lyle J. Goldstein, a research professor in the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) at the United States Naval War College, builds upon a theme he explored in his 2015 book Meeting China Halfway and counters his critic, Gordon Chang, with a series of arguments that simply do not stand the test of scrutiny. 

The gist of Goldstein’s argument is that the United States should not risk the lives of tens of thousands of its servicemen and women in the defense of Taiwan should the democratic island-nation of twenty-three million people come under military assault from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). One of the reasons why the United States should avoid doing so, he avers, is that conflict in the Taiwan Strait is little more than a “family quarrel,” unfinished business from the Chinese Civil War that led to the defeat of the Kuomintang (KMT), which at the time ruled over the Republic of China (ROC), at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which after evicting the KMT in 1949 established the PRC. 

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WATCH: China's Military Just Released a New Video Showing Off Its Most Powerful Weapons

The video is brimful with the grandiosity that is now associated with the military under Xi Jinping: a lot of ammunition is fired, and the very latest in China’s military technology — combat aircraft, a carrier battle group, long-range ballistic missiles, submarines and armored vehicles — is on full, proud, active display 

On Aug. 1 a video titled “I am a Chinese Soldier” began circulating in China and quickly went viral on social media as the country marked Army Day. 

The slick, 2 min 20 second production emphasizes the personal sacrifices made by members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), who leave their families behind to resolutely defend the nation and its claimed territory. 

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‘Peaceful Unification’ Is Dead and Buried

The Chinese Communist Party uses ‘peaceful’ as a cover, a smokescreen to isolate and sideline whomever opposes its objective of annexing Taiwan. It is in fact coercive, one-sided, certainly not magnanimous, and increasingly punitive in its response to the resistance this project has encountered 

Hardly a week goes by without Chinese leader Xi Jinping, a spokesperson at the State Council’s Taiwan Affairs Office, or a political commentator at some institute somewhere in China emphasizing China’s desire for “peaceful unification” with Taiwan. The expression has a nice, soothing din to it — after all, who opposes peace, or the peaceful resolution of a decades-long conflict? Only radicals, extremists, or groups with unsavory ties to foreign imperialist powers could possibly seek to derail such lofty goals. 

There are two fundamental problems with that formulation. 

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China’s Bullying of Taiwan Highlights its Helplessness Against the Drift of Taiwanese Society

Beijing’s hopes for a gradual unification of Taiwan with China have been frustrated, not by Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP, but by Taiwanese society’s growing drift from China. Unable to admit this, China has resorted to heavy-handed tactics that is pushing the Taiwanese further away 

The election of Tsai Ing-wen of the Taiwan-centric Democratic Progressive Party in January 2016 marked the end of a phase in cross-strait relations when Beijing still believed in the possibility of winning the hearts and minds of the Taiwanese through “goodwill” and economic incentives. Since then, Beijing has embraced a strategy that seeks to corner, isolate and punish Taiwan for its intransigence on the unification question. 

Although many would ascribe that change in attitude to the 2016 elections and blame the Tsai administration’s refusal to acknowledge the so-called “1992 consensus” for the souring relations, this reckoning actually occurred earlier – two years earlier, in 2014, when the Sunflower student movement derailed the partial rapprochement that had prevailed since 2008 under former president Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang. More than an incident over a particular trade agreement, the movement epitomised a society’s refusal to associate too closely with authoritarian China, a reality that not only contributed to Tsai’s victory but also to the KMT’s dismissal of its initial candidate for the presidency, who was regarded as too ideologically close to Beijing – even for the blue camp’s taste. 

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Disinformation Targets Legitimacy of Taiwan’s Passport

A rumor claiming that Taiwanese can no longer use their passport to board international flights and that the E.U. had revised its visa-free entry policy for Taiwanese nationals has forced the Taiwanese government to respond. Expect more such incidents as China ramps up its disinformation campaign 

Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday was forced to step in and deny an Internet rumor that from July 25 international airlines no longer recognized the Republic of China (Taiwan) passport and that Taiwanese nationals no longer enjoyed visa-free entry into the U.K. and the E.U. 

The rumors, which spread on various online platforms including the popular Line application, stemmed from a message alleging that a Taiwanese national had been unable to board an Air Canada flight because the airline no longer recognized the ROC passport “due to pressure from China” and the fact that “Taiwan is not recognized as a country.” Only after presenting his Taiwan ID card was the man allowed to board the plane, the message claimed. “Two people with Taiwanese passports have already been denied boarding, so please remember to bring your [Taiwan] ID card,” it said. 

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Unity Is Key to Countering China’s ‘Sharp Power’

China is in conflict with a world order and a system of rules and beliefs that it now regards as an impediment to its ambitions. As its influence activities corrode the democratic firewall that unites and protects us, we must respond with our own united front 

As the world begins to understand the scope and ramifications of China’s “sharp power,” it has become evident that in the 21st century, Taiwan will be an indispensable partner to the international community as it strives to counter efforts by revisionist forces and defend the democratic values that we cherish. More than ever, it is clear that China’s unending — and intensifying — assault on Taiwan is an assault on the entire liberal democratic order that has underpinned our societies since the end of World War II. 

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China’s Great Squeeze Strategy Against Tsai Ing-wen

Beijing seeks to isolate Taiwan and condition its people and the international community to accept a ‘new normal.’ It also seeks to widen differences not only between the ‘blue’ and ‘green’ camps in Taiwan politics, but also between the ‘mainstream’ and ‘radical’ greens and thus spark a dangerous vicious circle 

Beijing has precious few partners left back in Taiwan to help it engineer the “peaceful” unification that is at the core of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s “great rejuvenation” ambitions. In fact, trends over the years and Beijing’s inability to come up with a formula that can have a modicum of appeal among the Taiwanese have put the lie to the notion that unification can occur without a largely coercive component. 

Forget the Taiwan Affairs Office’s “31 incentives” unveiled earlier this year, or the trickle of delegations by marginal members of the “blue” and “red” camps to Beijing, or the United Front forums organized here and there to cultivate a pro-Beijing youth among the Taiwanese. None of those measures will succeed in generating enough momentum to shift overall perceptions of China in Taiwan. 

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It's Time to Stop China's Seaward Expansion

Through our inattention, we have lost control of the South China Sea, which Beijing now occupies and has militarized. It is now time to push back, and the best place to do so is in the East China Sea 

There was a time, when President Barack Obama was still in the White House, when the U.S.-led coalition in the Asia-Pacific could have responded to, and perhaps countered, the creeping occupation and militarization of the South China Sea. According to many security experts, the window for such action has now closed, and Beijing has successfully created irreversible facts on the ground. If that is indeed the case, then freedom of navigation operations (FONOPS) and other measures are too little, too late. China has engineered a new status quo in the South China Sea, and efforts to counter its larger ambitions should henceforth focus elsewhere. 

What is perhaps most surprising about what has occurred in the South China Sea in the past decade isn’t so much that China has succeeded in building a series of artificial islands and militarizing what it regards as its “lake,” but rather that the international community would be caught unawares by the current state of affairs. From the outset, Beijing telegraphed its intentions in the South China Sea, and if it has become a no-go zone for others in the region, and for the United States, it is largely the result of our inattention and our failure to read the tea leaves. 

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Threatened Ban on Hong Kong National Party Signals Beijing’s Weakness

One hell of a contrast: As Beijing renders illegal small political parties in the Hong Kong experiment with autonomy, Taiwan has moved in the opposite direction, even allowing the existence of political parties that openly advocate for unification 

Hong Kong authorities this week signaled that the pro-independence Hong Kong National Party (HKNP) could be banned under the Societies Ordinance. 

If HKNP is banned, it would be illegal to be a member of the party, to raise funds for it or to act on its behalf. Violators could face up to three years imprisonment and a HK$12,000 fine. Party leaders have been given three weeks to make the case as to why HKNP should not be slapped a prohibition order, which would ostensibly be issued “in the interest of national security.” 

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Xi-Lien Meeting: Same Old Platitudes, With Two Possible Gems

Given how little the two men gave us to run with, all we’re left with is what wasn’t said, or things half-said, which may give us a glimpse of the unconscious elements that fuel the narrative. If we’re lucky, those may yield opportunities for conflict resolution 

Anyone who expected substance from last Friday’s meeting in Beijing between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and former Kuomintang (KMT) chairman Lien Chan was probably asking for the impossible. As expected, the two men mostly regurgitated the same old platitudes about “one China” and the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” 

The fact that Xi can only meet someone like Lien, whose relevance in Taiwanese affairs has markedly dimmed over the years, speaks volumes about Beijing’s inability to entertain contact with people who can actually influence the shape and direction of Taiwanese politics. In fact, Xi has largely limited himself to meetings with people, like the 81-year-old Lien, the unelectable Hung Hsiu-chu (dumped by her own party ahead of the 2016 elections), and Yok Mu-ming, chairman of the marginal pro-unification New Party, who are unlikely to challenge him and whose views, I must add, are completely out of sync with the large majority of Taiwanese — in both the “green” and “blue” camps.  

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Taiwan in Dead Center of China’s Greater Territorial Ambitions

Beijing is determined to rewrite the rules in the Asia-Pacific region. No matter who occupies the Presidential Office in Taipei, that will be a problem for them 

China on Monday accused the United States of “playing psychological games” and “harming peace and stability” after two U.S. Navy warships transited the Taiwan Strait over the weekend, the first such passage since July 2017. 

The Japan-based USS Mustin and USS Benfold Arleigh Burke-class destroyers made the transit in international waters late on Saturday evening as part of routine freedom of navigation passages. U.S. Pacific Fleet spokesman Capt. Charlie Brown said that “U.S. Navy ships transit between the South China Sea and East China Sea via the Taiwan Strait and have done so for many years.” 

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Neutrality for Taiwan: A Dangerous Proposal

Former vice president Annette Lu and her supporters have floated the idea of a ‘neutral’ Taiwan that is ‘devoted to peace.’ Not only is that proposal based on a naive view of China, it could take Taiwan down the road to ruin 

Sometime in 2014, former vice president Annette Lu and other luminaries launched her Peace and Neutrality for Taiwan Alliance, an initiative that seeks to secure genuine political neutrality for Taiwan as the region becomes a battleground for U.S. and Chinese influence. 

Under Lu’s proposal, which would come in the form of a referendum, Taiwan would “give up confrontation with China, and … proclaim to the world that we want peace and neutrality. “We will forge friendship with every country that is friendly to us, including China,” she told a press conference last year. 

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