The United States, Taiwan, and Hong Kong scholars have analyzed the Chinese Communist Party’s unification and infiltration tactics in Taiwan and Hong Kong and concluded that the Beijing authorities are replicating a similar model around the world with their massive economic power, but that it is difficult to determine its effectiveness because of the negative effects of its aggressiveness.
In order to study and analyze how China conducts its influence activities in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other regions, Andrew Nathan, a leading U.S. expert on China and professor of political science at Columbia University, and Hong Kong and Taiwan experts have compiled a collection of essays entitled “More than Sharp Power: The Chinese Communist Party’s Infiltration of Taiwan and Hong Kong,” which analyzes China’s influence in five areas: elections, economy, media, entertainment, and religion. It analyzes China’s methods and patterns of infiltration in Taiwan and Hong Kong in five areas: elections, economy, media, entertainment, and religion.
Taiwan and Hong Kong as Top Targets of Chinese Influence
In an online discussion on this topic held last week at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Lai pointed out that Taiwan and Hong Kong are considered by China to be places where it “absolutely must gain control” because they are related to China’s own security, making them the most important targets for Chinese influence. The case studies presented in the book are extremely informative.
Wu Jiemin, a researcher at the Institute of Social Research at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, is one of the co-editors of the book. He says that united front is a “marvelous weapon” of the Chinese Communist Party, and that it has taken united front tactics to the “extreme” in target areas such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, where, in order to achieve full infiltration, the CCP must have local individuals and organizations working for them, most of whom Most of these people are there for material gain, and because they are already members of the local community, they are an important part of the infiltration operation, which is the biggest difference between the Chinese influence model and the Russian model.
Wu Jiemin, who is also the director of the Center for Contemporary China at Tsinghua University in Taiwan, points out that there are three forms of Chinese influence activities: first, coercion from the outside, that is, direct pressure; second, infiltration from within, that is, non-direct pressure through local personnel; and third, erosion of political boundaries, that is, direct pressure plus various hybrid strategies. The third is the erosion of political boundaries.
The 1992 Consensus is the most successful united front
He cited China’s infiltration of Taiwan’s elections as an example, saying that the most successful unification tactic of the Chinese Communist Party in Taiwan to date was the “1992 Consensus” campaign conducted during the 2012 presidential election in Taiwan. This so-called consensus is like a political mantra that is constantly recited by KMT politicians.”
In the economic sphere, Wu said mainland Chinese tourists are an important way for the Beijing authorities to infiltrate Taiwanese society and an important economic bargaining chip for China against Taiwan. The number of Chinese tourists has been climbing since the KMT took power in 2008, but after the DPP returned to power in 2016, Beijing pressured Tsai by drastically reducing the number of Chinese tourists. China’s influence is also clearly visible in the media, entertainment and religious sectors.
Wu Jiemin noted that most of Taiwan’s larger palaces are controlled by local factions, and that the Zhenlan Palace in Taichung is a key outpost of the Chinese Communist Party’s unified war on Taiwan’s grassroots society and an event arranger for Chinese officials when they visit Taiwan, where a Chinese official went directly to Zhenlan Palace during his visit to Taiwan a few days before voting day in the 2016 presidential election, where he held a secret meeting with 29 local people and told them who they should support.
One might be curious as to what these local grassroots and religious figures could gain for this, Wu Jiemin said, adding that according to his analysis, local factions in Taiwan could receive huge land development benefits in exchange for assisting the Chinese authorities, which is why Zheng Lizhong, then deputy director of the State Council’s Taiwan Affairs Office, was welcomed throughout Taiwan during his visit in 2012.
China exerts acute power over other countries
In addition to Taiwan, Wu said that cases of China exerting influence on Taiwan can also be seen in other countries and regions in recent years, such as the SAD missile controversy in South Korea, and countries such as Australia, Canada and the Czech Republic, all of which have been subjected to economic sanctions by China for different reasons, and the cases in these places have extreme similarities with Taiwan, so after doing case studies of Hong Kong and Taiwan, it is important to next study how these So after doing a case study of Hong Kong and Taiwan, it is also important to examine how these countries can regain China’s influence.
Wu describes the use of China’s acute power as a “commercialization of united front work. He says, “China’s exchanges with its foreign partners may appear to be purely commercial in nature, with no harm or benefit to each other, but when you look deeper, you can always uncover the hidden political motives of the Chinese side.”
Ma Ngok, an associate professor in the Department of Government and Public Administration at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, is responsible for the book’s case study on Hong Kong’s elections, though he says his chapter was written before the 2019 Hong Kong anti-sending China incident, after which the political situation in Hong Kong changed dramatically, though the framework of the book’s research on the rest of Hong Kong remains largely applicable.
Beijing’s direct pressure on Hong Kong
According to Ma Ngok, the situation in Hong Kong is different from that in Taiwan because Hong Kong is directly under Chinese sovereignty and China has direct influence over Hong Kong. All changes to the Basic Law regarding democratic elections require Beijing’s approval, and Beijing can directly lay down rules on Hong Kong, which it did in 2020, and before that, Beijing had also disqualified some Hong Kong legislators through its interpretation of the Basic Law.
But Ma Ngok also pointed out that according to his research on Hong Kong elections over the years, China is the most important factor influencing Hong Kong’s elections, where Hong Kong’s attitude toward Beijing, Hong Kong’s democratization and the human rights situation are all developments that China pays close attention to, so China has had indirect influence on Hong Kong’s elections since the direct election of the Legislative Council back in 1991.
Ma Ngok said 2019 was the year that turned Hong Kong’s fortunes around (a game changer), the year the anti-Send-China movement changed everything, that movement was seen by Beijing as a separatist movement, protesters lobbied the United States and the West to impose sanctions on Hong Kong, the democrats got a landslide victory in the District Council elections and are also likely to win a majority in the 2020 Legislative Council elections, thus This election was then postponed on the grounds of the epidemic.
He said Beijing believed that even after cultivating local collaborators, it would not be able to resist the political wave of democratization in Hong Kong in 2019, so it began to exert more direct influence on Hong Kong by implementing a Hong Kong version of the national security law in June 2020, postponing the Legislative Council election scheduled for September, and disqualifying four Legislative Council members in November, leading to the collective resignation of the remaining pro-democracy legislators in January 2021. In March, 55 pro-democracy candidates, politicians and activists are arrested on charges of “subversion,” and the Chinese National People’s Congress makes a decision to change Hong Kong’s electoral system.
Despair over Hong Kong’s future
Ma Ngok said that all of these direct influences exerted by China on Hong Kong are direct regulations imposed by the central government on Hong Kong, and that Hong Kong as a local government is constitutionally unable to resist them. The difficulty for Hong Kong civil society to speak out has increased, and more and more people are talking about immigration, which also creates a “sense of hopelessness”.
For Hong Kong’s future prospects, Ma Ngok believes that in the short term, we should not see large-scale resistance to the government, as in 2019, because Hong Kong people still have some limited freedom, although they will worry that these freedoms will also gradually disappear.
As for whether the example of Hong Kong is instructive for Taiwan, will Beijing simply take a hard line against Taiwan after all the soft power, sharp power and unified war infiltration approaches have failed, as it did with Hong Kong?
Ma says he doesn’t know the answer to this question because the shift in the situation in Hong Kong in 2019 has overturned all of China’s original plans, and before that, Kuomintang’s South Korean Yu was also considered likely to win the presidential election, but what happened in Hong Kong led to a DPP victory and a change in the Taiwanese people’s impression of China, and he is not sure how serious China is about unifying Taiwan by force, but it should not be in line with China’s outwardly proclaimed He is not sure how serious China is about unifying Taiwan, but it should not be in line with China’s image of peaceful rise, so he believes that perhaps China is also currently hesitant about what option it should take with Taiwan.
China’s expanding influence around the world
While Taiwan and Hong Kong are the main targets of the Chinese Communist Party’s united front, Chinese influence activities have been expanding globally in recent years, with China’s Belt and Road and other economic initiatives spreading across Africa, Latin America, the Pacific, Southeast Asia and Europe, many of which also face the challenge of China’s united front within their own borders.
In his book, he analyzes how China exerts influence in other countries, including the Belt and Road Initiative, which invests trillions of dollars in infrastructure in 80 countries, as well as countries with which China has economic agreements, said Columbia University professor Le Anh Duong.
“I found a basic pattern that in every country there will be pro- and anti-China factions, and usually the government in power is pro-China because they think a good deal with China will build something, maybe get some loans, and maybe in many countries some corrupt private payments.”
There may be people in these countries who are critical of these deals, but Lai said once the opposition is in power, they too may change their original opposition position and establish deals with China, for example, the previous Najib government in Malaysia is a prime example, Najib’s deals with China were criticized by opposition leader Mahathir as corrupt and bringing huge debt to Malaysia, but Mahathir came to power also ran to China and made deals with it afterwards, “so China’s presence everywhere is controversial.”
Economy is an important element of sharp power
Lai concluded that, as Wu mentioned in the case of Taiwan, the economy is an important element in China’s influence activities because “money talks,” and Western countries such as the United States and Japan do not have as much money to invest in other countries as China does, although China’s rapid rise and its “war wolves” are not as important. However, China’s rapid rise and its “wolf” diplomacy has been seen by many countries as too aggressive, and therefore has caused a lot of shock and top back, so the answer to the question of how effective China’s sharp power is is actually quite complicated.
Although the international community has criticized China’s “war wolf” diplomacy, the Chinese government considers it a rehash of the “China threat theory”, and Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a regular press conference late last year that aggressiveness has never been a Chinese diplomatic tradition, but “China is not the China of a hundred years ago”, and “in order to safeguard national interests and dignity, and to safeguard international fairness and justice, what is the harm of being a war wolf?”
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