TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on Wednesday (Jan. 27) released a report on important lessons to be learned from how Taiwan deals with disinformation from China.
The report, titled “Protecting Democracy in an Age of Disinformation: Lessons from Taiwan,” was the collaborative effort of Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project; Scott Kennedy, director of CSIS’ Chinese Business and Economics; Freeman Chair in China Studies Jude Blanchette; and former Freeman Chair in China Studies Scott Livingston.
The authors noted that Taiwan has long had to deal with external meddling in its politics, including disinformation from Beijing. They observed that China’s efforts to influence Taiwanese domestic politics increased “in both intensity and severity” after President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took office in 2016, with Beijing continuing to target the “basic underpinnings” of Taiwan’s democracy.
“The disinformation campaigns carried out by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are often obscured by the secrecy and opacity of [its] ‘united front’ approach,” the authors explained, which makes it difficult to accurately gauge the severity of disinformation and hard to implement effective solutions.
The report also mentioned the challenges of responding to the “constantly changing nature” of CCP disinformation activities. It stated that new technologies, modern approaches to media and communication, and the ability to learn from the successful strategies of other “malign actors,” such as Russia, have made the CCP’s current disinformation operations more capable of “exploiting media and social media platforms in target countries.”
While China's disinformation campaigns are a clear threat, they are only “one part of a larger disinformation problem facing democracies in this era of instant and omnipresent communication technologies,” the authors said. They added that the common experience of Taiwan and the U.S. suggests political rivals are “incentivized to exaggerate and weaponize charges of ‘foreign interference’ against each other.”
These charges, they said, often destroy the underlying trust in a democracy — more so than foreign disinformation itself.
The authors stated that Taiwan’s “multilayered response” to foreign-directed disinformation offers important lessons for the U.S. as Washington confronts similar attacks from China:
- Utilizing new digital tools to improve government information services and provide responses to disinformation efforts.
- Creating more media-literate citizens through education and training.
- Rooting these initiatives in a wider defense of free speech, democratic norms, governance institutions, and civil society.
