ABSTRACT
Using Taiwan's 2020 elections as an example to elucidate the nature of Chinese propaganda and disinformation, this chapter seeks to identify China's motives, tactics, and actors in its foreign information warfare. The sharp power model shows that China's motives are to destabilise democracy and weaken governance in a target country. Its tactics include worsening existing social, political, economic, and generational divides and controlling and absorbing traditional media financially. Its actors are not only Chinese national and provincial governments but also agents from the target country employed by the Chinese state. Through media monitoring of Taiwanese news outlets and 40 in-language (Mandarin and English) expert interviews, this chapter argues that Taiwan successfully combatted and defeated Chinese propaganda and disinformation in the 2020 presidential and legislative elections through a whole-of-society approach: 1) the government became better at debunking fake news and raising awareness of these attacks; 2) civil society became more alert and created non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to detect, debunk, and block fake news online; and 3) and companies such as Facebook and LINE became faster at finding and removing fake accounts and disinformation.
