Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Chien Chi-hung/Presidential Office/CC BY 2.0
THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT has framed Taiwanese hackers as behind cyberattacks on a technology company in Guangzhou.
The cyberattacks, according to Chinese authorities, targeted ten provinces overall and affected electricity, water, and other services, aiming to gather technical data and other information, and have been on the increase. While China has framed Taiwan as behind the attacks, Chinese authorities state that hackers used VPN with IP locations from the US, France, Japan, and other locations.
The claim by China is ironic. Taiwan experiences tens of thousands of cyberattacks by China daily. Cyberattacks could be particularly dangerous for Taiwan in an invasion scenario, in which China would seek to disable Taiwan’s electricity and water grid.
With China ramping up aggression toward Taiwan, Taiwan also needs to be highly cautious of when China claims the opposite–that Taiwan is conducting acts of aggression toward China. If China were to carry out an invasion of Taiwan, China would seek to establish a pretext for conducting an invasion.
This is partly why the KMT’s recent claims comparing the ruling DPP to Nazis have drawn attention, in that they remind of similar attempts in Ukraine, in which Russia justified its full-scale invasion with the claim that it was reacting to Nazis in Ukraine. In a similar light, China has lashed out at the expulsion of Chinese livestreamers, claiming that the DPP targets Chinese in Taiwan. Incidents of Chinese fishing vessels intruding in Taiwanese territorial waters that were driven away by the Taiwanese Coast Guard were also claimed to be Taiwanese harassment of Chinese fishers. Claiming that Taiwan is engaged in malicious cyberattacks against China could be another part of building up a pretext for invasion.
This is not the first time that China has made such claims. In late 2024, China claimed that the Taiwanese government was behind a series of cyberattacks on Chinese government websites, defacing them with messages critical of the Chinese government. The Chinese government claimed 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.
More generally, China has tried to frame Taiwan as behind nefarious activity directed against it. 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. This does not seem to be a true claim, as 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.
Chinese-led disinformation efforts also portrayed Taiwan as behind the Milk Tea Alliance. 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.
It is to be seen what China next attempts as part of efforts to frame Taiwan as an aggressor against it. Apart from cyberattacks, accidents or other incidents are likely to be leveraged on.