Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: LuxTonnerre/WikiCommons/CC BY 2.0
THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT has sought to claim that the Taiwanese government is behind a series of cyberattacks on Chinese government websites, defacing them with messages critical of the Chinese government. The Chinese government claims this to be the doing of a group called “Anonymous 64,” which it claims is a front for ICEFCOM’s Cyber Warfare Unit. ICEFCOM is a section of the Taiwanese military that deals with information warfare, cybersecurity, and information management.
The Taiwanese government has denied this, while framing China as simply attempting to pin blame for cyberattacks conducted by Internet hacker group Anonymous on the Taiwanese government.
It is notable that the Chinese government is trying to pin blame on Taiwan for similar activities to what it has been accused of in the past. Indeed, this has also occurred in the past with regards to Chinese United Front activity. Around the 2019 Hong Kong protests, as China leaned into claims that external forces were orchestrating the protests, China claimed to have arrested tens of thousands of Chinese spies.
At the same time, one notes that China may be increasingly attempting to depict Taiwan as an aggressor toward it. This can also be observed in the wake of a speedboat collision in June that left two Chinese fishermen who were intruding in Kinmen territorial waters dead, when the Chinese vessel attempted to flee and collided with a Coast Guard Administration vessel that was in pursuit. Afterward, the Chinese government attempted to depict the incident as one of many acts of aggression by the Taiwanese Coast Guard against Chinese fishers.
Photo credit: Nagyman/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 2.0
This is not the first time that China has claimed nefarious activity by Taiwan. Around the time of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, China claimed that Taiwan had played a role in fomenting unrest against it. During this period, China also claimed on more than one occasion to have arrested thousands of Taiwanese spies. By contrast, even though there are Taiwanese detained in China over their political activity, the Taiwanese government did not report Taiwanese to be missing in China in such large numbers.
Likewise, in 2020, the three Taiwanese men were charged with breaching the National Security Act. Specifically, two of the three men were accused of traveling to China in order to receive training regarding disinformation efforts. The three were administrators on the Chinese forum Diba and were, in part, accused of organizing disinformation campaigns on social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Line to generate the perception that the Tsai administration has engaged in election fraud, and is covering up deaths from COVID-19.
What proves noteworthy, however, is that the disinformation efforts conducted by the three Taiwanese men also placed a great deal of effort on attempting to depict the Milk Tea Alliance phenomenon as deliberately engineered by the Taiwanese government in collaboration with the American government. The Milk Tea Alliance refers to online exchanges between netizens from Taiwan, Thailand, and Hong Kong, often mocking the authoritarianism of the Chinese government. The attempt, then, was to frame the Milk Tea Alliance as along the lines of being an American-engineered “color revolution.” Disinformation to create this perception involved creating false documents indicating correspondence between Taiwanese authorities and American government officials, coordinating efforts at providing aid to students in Thailand.
China would be seeking to frame Taiwan as conducting similar activities to its use of the United Front, in attempting to undermine Taiwan’s democracy and sway elections toward its preferred political aspirations. This would be a way of distracting from its own activities, as well as framing Taiwan as being the truly nefarious force in the world. The aim would be to distract, but also refocus attention, perhaps not unlike how the TPP and KMT have leaned into political narratives accusing the DPP of enacting a “Green Terror” as of late, which the KMT has sometimes alleged to be worse than the White Terror–though, if so, one wonders where the thousands of dead bodies are. Still, it is to be seen if such framing by China has greater impact outside of echo chambers that already lean toward pro-China politics, even if the attempt may be to impact those who could be swayed by either political camp.