Awash in Disinformation Before Vote, Taiwan Points Finger at China

Taiwan is on high alert for digital-age trickery and deception that Beijing is using to try to swing a crucial election.
By Raymond Zhong

TAIPEI, Taiwan — At first glance, the bespectacled YouTuber railing against Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, just seems like a concerned citizen making an appeal to his fellow Taiwanese.
He speaks Taiwanese-accented Mandarin, with the occasional phrase in Taiwanese dialect.
His captions are written with the traditional Chinese characters used in Taiwan, not the simplified ones used in China.
With outrage in his voice, he accuses Ms. Tsai of selling out “our beloved land of Taiwan” to Japan and the United States.
The man, Zhang Xida, does not say in his videos whom he works for.
But other websites and videos make it clear: He is a host for China National Radio, the Beijing-run broadcaster.
As Taiwan gears up for a major election this week, officials and researchers worry that China is experimenting with social media manipulation to sway the vote.
Doing so would be easy, they fear, in the island’s rowdy democracy, where the news cycle is fast and voters are already awash in false or highly partisan information.
China has been upfront about its dislike for President Tsai, who opposes closer ties with Beijing.
The Communist Party claims Taiwan as part of China’s territory, and it has long deployed propaganda and intimidation to try to influence elections here.
Polls suggest, however, that Beijing’s heavy-handed ways might be backfiring and driving voters to embrace Ms. Tsai.
Thousands of Taiwan citizens marched last month against “red media,” or local news organizations influenced by the Chinese government.
That is why Beijing may be turning to subtler, digital-age methods to inflame and divide.
Recently, there have been Facebook posts saying falsely that Joshua Wong, a Hong Kong democracy activist who has fans in Taiwan, had attacked an old man.
There were posts about nonexistent protests outside Taiwan’s presidential house, and hoax messages warning that ballots for the opposition Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, would be automatically invalidated.
In the southern city of Kaohsiung, thousands marched at a Dec. 21 rally to oppose pro-Beijing Han Kuo-yu, the presidential candidate for the Kuomintang.

So many rumors and falsehoods circulate on Taiwanese social media that it can be hard to tell whether they originate in Taiwan or in China, and whether they are the work of private provocateurs or of state agents.
Taiwan’s National Security Bureau in May issued a downbeat assessment of Chinese-backed disinformation on the island, urging a “‘whole of government’ and ‘whole of society’ response.”
“False information is the last step in an information war,” the bureau’s report said.
“If you find false information, that means you have already been thoroughly infiltrated.”
Taiwanese society has woken up to the threat.
The government has strengthened laws against spreading harmful rumors.
Companies including Facebook, Google and the messaging service Line have agreed to police their platforms more stringently.
Government departments and civil society groups now race to debunk hoaxes as quickly as they appear.
The election will put these efforts — and the resilience of Taiwan’s democracy — to the test.
“The ultimate goal, just like what Russia tried to do in the United States, is to crush people’s confidence in the democratic system,” said Tzeng Yi-suo of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a think tank funded by the government of Taiwan.
In Taiwan, civil society groups such as FakenewsCleaner have worked to fact check social media posts and educate the public about disinformation.

Fears of Chinese meddling became acute in recent months after a man named Wang Liqiang sought asylum in Australia claiming he had worked for Chinese intelligence to fund pro-Beijing candidates in Taiwan, buy off media groups and conduct social media attacks.
And there are other signs that Beijing is working to upgrade its techniques of information warfare.
Twitter, which is blocked in mainland China, recently took down a vast network of accounts that it described as Chinese state-backed trolls trying to discredit Hong Kong’s protesters.
A 2018 paper in a journal linked to the United Front Work Department, a Communist Party organ that organizes overseas political networking, argued that Beijing had failed to shape Taiwanese public discourse in favor of unification with China.
In November, the United Front Work Department held a conference in Beijing on internet influence activities, according to an official social media account.
The department’s head, You Quan, said the United Front would help people such as social media influencers, live-streamers and professional e-sports players to “play an active role in guiding public opinion.”
“We understand that the people who are sowing discord are also building a community, that they are also learning from each other’s playbooks,” said Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister.
“There are new innovations happening literally every day.”
In Taiwan, Chinese internet trolls were once easily spotted because they posted using the simplified Chinese characters found only on the mainland.
That happens less these days, though there are still linguistic slip-ups.

Audrey Tang, the digital minister of Taiwan.

In one of the YouTube videos from Zhang, the China National Radio employee, a character in the description is incorrectly translated into traditional Chinese from simplified Chinese.
Zhang did not respond to a message seeking comment.
In December, Taiwan’s justice ministry warned about a fake government notice saying Taiwan was deporting protesters who had fled Hong Kong.
The hoax first appeared on the Chinese social platform Weibo, the ministry said, before spreading to a Chinese nationalist Facebook group.
Sometimes, Chinese trolls amplify rumors already floating around in Taiwan, Mr. Shen said.
He is also on the lookout for Taiwanese social media accounts that may be bought or supported by Chinese operatives.
Ahead of midterm elections in 2018, his team had been monitoring several YouTube channels that discussed Taiwanese politics.
The day after voting ended, the channels disappeared.
After Yu Hsin-Hsien was elected to the City Council that year in Taoyuan, a city near Taipei, mysterious strangers began inquiring about buying his Facebook page, which had around 280,000 followers.
Mr. Yu, 30, immediately suspected China.
His suspicions grew after he demanded an extravagantly high price and the buyers accepted.
Mr. Yu, who represents Ms. Tsai’s party, the Democratic Progressive Party, did not sell.
“Someone approaches a just-elected legislator and offers to buy his oldest weapon,” Mr. Yu said. “What’s his motive? To serve the public? It can’t be.”
Recently, internet users in Taiwan noticed a group of influencers, many of them pretty young women, posting messages on Facebook and Instagram with the hashtag #DeclareMyDeterminationToVote. The posts did not mention candidates or parties, but the people included selfies with a fist at their chest, a gesture often used by Han Kuo-yu, the Kuomintang’s presidential candidate.
Han’s campaign denied involvement.
But some have speculated that China’s United Front might be responsible.
The United Front Work Department did not respond to a fax requesting comment.
One line of attack against Ms. Tsai has added to the atmosphere of mistrust and high conspiracy ahead of this week’s vote.
Politicians and media outlets have questioned whether Ms. Tsai’s doctoral dissertation is authentic, even though her alma mater, the London School of Economics, has confirmed that it is.

Taiwan's citizens battle pro-China fake news campaigns as election nears

Contest is in effect a referendum on the future of the nation’s relationship with China
By Lily Kuo and Lillian Yang
Protesters against Taiwan’s pro-China KMT presidential candidate Han Kuo-yu during a protest in Kaohsiung.

Citizen groups in Taiwan are fighting a Russian-style influence and misinformation campaign that originated across the strait in mainland China with just weeks to go before it votes for its next president,
Taiwan goes to the polls on 11 January to decide between two main candidates, incumbent president Tsai Ing-Wen of the Democratic Progressive party (DPP) under whom ties with Beijing have become fraught, and Han Kuo-Yu of the Kuomintang party (KMT), which advocates closer engagement with China.
The contest is in large part a referendum on the future of Taiwan’s relationship with Beijing, which sees the independent nation as a renegade "province" that one day must return to the fold.
Han is Beijing’s favoured candidate while Tsai’s party has been campaigning on the slogan: “Resist China, Defend Taiwan”.
In a televised debate with her rivals for the job on Sunday, Tsai said China’s “expanding ambitions” were the biggest threat to its democracy. 

Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen.

Citizen groups in Taiwan say the openness of one of the freest societies in Asia is being used against it by groups in China to wage an online disinformation campaign, made more potent by their shared language, Mandarin.
A recent study by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden found that Taiwan was the most exposed to foreign dissemination of false information.
False reports include claims Tsai’s doctorate degree was fake or that Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong kicked an elderly man when he visited Taiwan in October and met members of the DPP.
“China has multiple ways of pushing misinformation. We’ve found that content mills are no longer simply producing fake information. More and more, they are manipulating opinions,” said Jarvis Chiu, senior manager for the Institute for Information Industry, which has been assisting government efforts to prevent disinformation.
According to Chiu, an army of trolls will leave thousands of comments under a candidate’s post or a news article, shifting the focus of the debate.
Fake social media accounts also share pro-Beijing content or inflate the number of likes such content gets.
“Subliminal attacks” include repeatedly searching for one candidate’s name to influence search algorithm results.
“China won’t give up this practice. It will only increase and because it is non-military, it won’t get much global attention,” Chiu said.
The uncertain status of Taiwan, functionally independent but not internationally recognised, has been an issue in every campaign since direct elections were introduced in the 1990s following decades of martial law under the KMT.
This year, the question of how Taiwan should deal with Beijing looms even larger after years of increasingly strident rhetoric from China.
On Thursday, China sailed its new aircraft carrier, Shandong, through the Taiwan Strait in a move critics described an effort to intimidate voters.
Months of witnessing Beijing’s inflexible response to protesters in Hong Kong have cast even more doubt on the city’s “one country, two systems” framework, once touted as a possible model for Taiwan.
“There’s a sword hanging over everyone all the time,” said Shelley Rigger, a professor of east Asian politics with a focus on Taiwan at Davidson College.
“It’s exhausting to know that you’re being threatened and that the entity that is threatening you is getting more and more powerful all the time.”
In an attempt to push back against the campaign, citizen watchdog groups are manning social media, debunking rumours and trying to trace questionable content back to its source.
Prosecutors have been charging those who spread disinformation.
The party in office is trying to pass a law that would prohibit support from foreign “infiltration sources” to a political party.
“Taiwanese people have only just started understanding what is happening. It’s still the very beginning,” said Summer Chen, of Taiwan FactCheck Center which works on debunking disinformation on Facebook.
“It is a crisis and all of Taiwan needs to be researching this.”
A series of snappy Youtube tutorials educate viewers on the nature and methods of disinformation warfare.
“Taiwan has become the main laboratory for information warfare from China. If China wants to practice its methods, Taiwan is the starting point,” Puma Shen, who runs DoubleThink Labs, which monitors how false information, explains in one of the videos.
Those working on the issue say it is difficult to definitely say these attacks originated in China or link them to Chinese state actors, which makes the work of raising awareness harder.
“I believe that there is cooperation with China, but how much China knows, how much of this is from the Chinese government or people in Taiwan who are pro-China, we don’t know,” said Vivian Chen, a recent graduate studying medicine from Taipei.
China’s efforts to influence events in Taiwan stretch a long way back and go beyond online information warfare, to include traditional media, incentives for citizens or businesses who cooperate with China, group trips and donations to temples and other grassroots organisations.
Last month when Chinese defector Wang Liqiang detailed ways he had been instructed to interfere in Taiwan’s midterm elections in 2018 as well as the upcoming race, few in Taiwan were surprised.
“The story was not as shocking in Taiwan as it was in other parts of the world,” said Lev Nachman, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine, studying social movements and focusing on Taiwan.
“It is not news to Taiwanese people that China has been co-opting local organisations for political influence.”
Observers say it is unlikely efforts to influence voters will affect the outcome of the race, where voters will also choose representatives for the legislature.
According to polls, Tsai is ahead of her rival, helped by months of protests in Hong Kong and concerns about Beijing, and an improved economy.

Sinicization and Satellization : Suddenly, the Chinese Threat to Australia Is Very Real

After a businessman said Chinese agents sought to implant him in Parliament, that revelation and other espionage cases have finally signaled the end of a “let’s get rich together” era.
By Damien Cave and Jamie Tarabay

Chinese tourists taking photographs outside Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, in January.

CANBERRA, Australia — A Chinese defector to Australia who detailed political interference by Beijing. 

A businessman found dead after telling the authorities about a Chinese plot to install him in Parliament. 

Suspicious men following critics of Beijing in major Australian cities.
For a country that just wants calm commerce with China — the propellant behind 28 years of steady growth — the revelations of the past week have delivered a jolt.
Fears of Chinese interference once seemed to hover indistinctly over Australia. 

Now, Beijing’s political ambitions, and the espionage operations that further them, suddenly feel local, concrete and ever-present.“It’s become the inescapable issue,” said Hugh White, a former intelligence official who teaches strategic studies at the Australian National University. 

“We’ve underestimated how quickly China’s power has grown along with its ambition to use that power.”
American officials often describe Australia as a test case, the ally close enough to Beijing to see what could be coming for others.
In public and in private, they’ve pushed Australia’s leaders to confront China more directly — pressure that may only grow after President Trump signed legislation to impose sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials over human rights abuses in Hong Kong.

A rally last month in Hong Kong in support of a bill in the American Congress.

Even as it confronts the specter of brazen espionage, Australia’s government has yet to draw clear boundaries for an autocratic giant that is both an economic partner and a threat to freedom — a conundrum faced by many countries, but more acutely by Australia.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison continues to insist that Australia need not choose between China and the United States. 

A new foreign interference law has barely been enforced, and secrecy is so ingrained that even lawmakers and experts lack the in-depth information they need.
As a result, the country’s intelligence agencies have raised alarms about China in ways that most Australian politicians avoid. 

The agencies have never been flush with expertise on China, including Chinese speakers, yet they are now in charge of disentangling complex claims of Chinese nefarious deeds.
In the most troubling recent case, first reported by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, the Australian authorities have confirmed that they are investigating accusations made by Nick Zhao, an Australian businessman who told intelligence officials that he had been the target of a plot to install him in Parliament as a Chinese agent.

Mr. Zhao, a 32-year-old luxury car dealer, was a member of his local Liberal Party branch. 

He was a “perfect target for cultivation,” according to Andrew Hastie, a federal lawmaker and tough critic of Beijing who was briefed on the case. 

He told The Age that Mr. Zhao was “a bit of a high-roller in Melbourne, living beyond his means.”
Another businessman with ties to the Chinese government, Mr. Zhao said, offered to provide a million Australian dollars ($677,000) to finance his election campaign for Parliament. 

But a few months later, in March, Mr. Zhao was found dead in a hotel room. 

The state’s coroner is investigating the cause of death.
In a rare statement, Mike Burgess, the head of Australia’s domestic spy agency, said on Monday that his organization was aware of Mr. Zhao’s case and was taking it very seriously.

Last week, a young asylum seeker named Wang Liqiang presented himself to the Australian authorities as an important intelligence asset — an assistant to a Hong Kong businessman who is responsible for spying, propaganda and disinformation campaigns aimed at quashing dissent in Hong Kong and undermining democracy in Taiwan.

Xiang Xin, the man Mr. Wang identified as his former boss, has denied having anything to do with him, or even knowing him.
The challenge of the case is just beginning. 

The detailed 17-page account that Mr. Wang gave to the authorities as part of an asylum application is being taken seriously by law enforcement agencies worldwide.

Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice detained Xiang and another executive with the company Mr. Wang said he worked for, China Innovation Investment Limited. 

Investigators in Taiwan are looking into assertions that their business acted on behalf of Chinese intelligence agencies.
Other details in Mr. Wang’s account — about the kidnapping of booksellers in Hong Kong, spying on Hong Kong university students, and the theft of military technology from the United States — are still being examined by Australian officials.
“Australia’s peak intelligence agencies are being put to the test,” said John Fitzgerald, a China specialist at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. 

“It’s a tough call, and they cannot afford to get it wrong.”

Chinese mole: Questions of loyalty continue to swirl around a Liberal Party member of Parliament, Gladys Liu.

What’s clear, though, is that they are helping to push the public away from supporting cozy relations. Polls showed a hardening of Australian attitudes about China even before the past week.
Now Mr. Hastie, the Liberal Party lawmaker who chairs Parliament’s joint intelligence committee, says his office has been overwhelmed by people across the country who have emailed, called and even sent handwritten letters expressing outrage and anxiety about China’s actions in Australia.
Questions of loyalty continue to swirl around another Liberal Party member of Parliament, Gladys Liu, who fumbled responses to questions in September about her membership in various groups linked to the Chinese Communist Party.

Massive Chinese fifth column: Chinese student-spies shouting at pro-Hong Kong protesters outside the University of South Australia in Adelaide in August.

The espionage cases also follow several months of rising tensions at Australian universities, where protests by students from Hong Kong have been disrupted with violence by opponents from the Chinese mainland.
Several student activists have told the authorities that they have been followed or photographed by people associated with the Chinese Consulate.
It’s even happened to at least one high-profile former official, John Garnaut. 

A longtime journalist who produced a classified report on Chinese interference for former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2017, he recently acknowledged publicly that he had been stalked by people who appeared to be Chinese agents — in some cases when he was with his family.
These actions of apparent aggression point to a version of China that Australians hardly know. 

For decades, Australia has based its relations with Beijing on a simple idea: Let’s get rich together. 

And the mining companies that are especially close to Mr. Morrison’s conservative government have been the biggest winners.
But now more than ever, the country is seeing that for the Communist Party under Xi Jinping, it’s no longer just about wealth and trade.
“The transactions aren’t satisfying them enough; they want more,” said John Blaxland, a professor of international security and intelligence studies at the Australian National University. 

“They want to gain influence over decisions about the further involvement of the United States, about further protestations to Chinese actions in the South China Sea, in the South Pacific, in Taiwan.”
Mr. Blaxland, along with American officials, often points out that Australia’s biggest export to China, iron ore, is hard to obtain elsewhere reliably and at the prices Australia’s companies charge. 

That suggests that the country has more leverage than its leaders might think.Mr. Hastie, who was recently denied a visa to travel to China as part of a study group that included other members of Parliament, agreed. 

In an interview, he said the recent revelations were “the first time the Australian public has a concrete example of what we are facing.”
Now, he added, it’s time to adapt.

Taiwan Detains 2 Executives of Firm Accused of Spying for China

The executives were detained as officials look into accusations that the company’s workers intervened in Taiwan’s looming national election campaign.
By Steven Lee Myers and Chris Horton

The building listed as the address of China Innovation Investment Limited in Hong Kong on Saturday.

BEIJING — Taiwan has detained two executives of a Hong Kong-based company accused of acting as a front for Chinese intelligence agencies working to undercut democracy in Hong Kong and Taiwan, the official news agency there reported on Tuesday.
Taiwan’s justice ministry ordered the two executives, Xiang Xin and Kung Ching, to remain in Taiwan while investigators looked into the assertions of a defector in Australia that their company, China Innovation Investment Limited, acted on behalf of Chinese intelligence.
The defector, Wang Liqiang, said he worked for the company and took part in — or knew of — covert intelligence operations that included buying media coverage, creating thousands of social media accounts to attack Taiwan’s governing party and funneling donations to favored candidates of the opposition party, the Kuomintang.
Mr. Wang, 26, detailed his accusations in a 17-page appeal for asylum in Australia, where his wife and child had previously moved to study. 

People briefed on his appeal in Australia said his claims were considered serious and reliable enough to warrant a deeper investigation.
Xiang, the executive director of the company, denied even knowing Mr. Wang, and the company said that Mr. Wang was not an employee.
Xiang and Kung, a deputy, were in Taiwan when the accusations emerged last week, and were stopped at Taoyuan International Airport on Sunday and questioned by prosecutors in Taipei.
The Taipei district prosecutors office is investigating Xiang and Kung under suspicion of violating Taiwan’s National Security Act.
“At present, the two individuals are barred from leaving Taiwan,” a spokeswoman for the office, Chen Yu-ping, said in a phone interview. 

“They have both been willing to cooperate with our investigation.”
If charged, the two men could face up to five years in prison.
The accusations against them came only weeks before Taiwan’s Jan. 11 presidential election and underscored what officials and experts have long warned: that China would attempt to interfere in the campaign. 

China has made no secret of its opposition to the incumbent, Tsai Ing-wen, who was elected in 2016.

Her challenger from the Kuomintang is Han Kuo-yu, a populist who was elected mayor last year of the southern city of Kaohsiung. 

Mr. Wang alleged that the Chinese had directly supported Mr. Han’s candidacy in those elections with donations funneled through Hong Kong.
The accusations have roiled politics in Taiwan, as well as in Australia, where reports about Chinese influence in the government have become a political lightning rod.
Ms. Tsai, speaking to more than 10,000 supporters at a Sunday rally in Taichung, Taiwan’s second-largest city, reiterated her warnings about China, saying the Communist Party’s goal was to prevent her re-election.
“China’s ability to influence Taiwan’s election will only increase, it’s not going to decrease,” she told the rally. 

“China will do whatever it takes to take down the presidential candidate they detest. Are you ready? Are you ready to protect democracy together and stand up to Chinese meddling?”

Defecting Chinese Spy Reveals Regime’s Extensive Influence Operations

BY FRANK FANG

Wang Liqiang, a former Chinese spy, has defected to Australia and offered to provide information about his espionage work to the Australian government. 

Recent revelations by a man claiming to be a Chinese spy have made international headlines, blowing the lid off the regime’s espionage operations in Australia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
Wang “William” Liqiang sought asylum in Australia and offered the country’s top intelligence agency a trove of information on how the communist Chinese regime funds and directs operations to sabotage the democratic movement in Hong Kong, meddle in Taiwanese elections, and infiltrate Australian political circles, according to a series of reports from Nov. 22 by Nine Network, an Australian media group.
His claims support longstanding concerns about Beijing’s attempts to subvert and undermine its opponents abroad.
In an earlier interview with the The Epoch Times, the 27-year-old said he decided to defect after becoming disillusioned with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) malign ambitions.
“As I grew older and my worldview changed, I gradually realized the damage that the CCP’s authoritarianism was doing to democracy and human rights around the around,” Wang said.
“My opposition to the Party and communism became ever-clearer, so I made plans to leave this organization.”
Wang’s going public marks the first time a Chinese spy has blown his or her cover.

Recruitment
In a detailed statement provided to The Epoch Times, Wang describes how he came to work as a spy for the Chinese regime.
Wang hails from Fujian, the southeast Chinese province across the strait from democratic Taiwan. The son of a local Communist Party official, Wang had a middle-class upbringing and majored in oil painting at the Anhui University of Finance and Economics. 

Photos from Wang’s time in school show awards he won for his artwork.
At the end of his education, a senior university official suggested that Wang should work at China Innovation Investment Limited (CIIL), a Hong Kong-based company specializing in technology, finance, and media. 

In 2014, Wang began working with the firm.
While CIIL presents itself as an investment firm focusing on listed and unlisted Chinese defense assets, Wang soon discovered that it was a major front for the Party’s overseas espionage, serving multiple Chinese security organs and CCP officials.
According to Nine Network, Wang was in the good graces of CIIL CEO Xiang Xin and entered the “inner sanctum” of the company by giving Xiang’s wife painting lessons. 

That gave him wide access to information about both ongoing and past cases of Chinese intelligence operations, much of it connected to the Party’s acquisition of military technology.
Wang said Xiang and his wife, Kung Ching, were both Chinese agents. 

He said Xiang had changed his name from Xiang Nianxin to Xiang Xin before being sent by Chinese military officials to Hong Kong to acquire CIIL and investment company China Trends Holdings Limited.
On Nov. 24, Xiang and Kung were stopped by Taiwanese authorities at Taipei’s main airport and asked to cooperate in an investigation of suspected violations of the country’s National Security Act.
They both deny knowing Wang.

Hong Kong 
Both CIIL and China Trends Holdings were controlled by the Chinese military, specifically the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) General Staff Department.
Both CIIL and China Trends Holdings have issued statements rejecting Wang’s claims, denying any involvement in espionage activities.
Xiang would provide intelligence reports to the PLA General Staff Department about individuals in Hong Kong who may have made comments critical of the Chinese regime or on other topics deemed sensitive by the Party.
Xiang’s PLA handler also directed him to collect information on activists and Falun Gong adherents in the city.
Adherents of the Falun Gong spiritual practice have been persecuted by the regime since 1999, and have been subject to arbitrary detention, forced labor, brainwashing, and torture.
The two companies targeted students in the city. 

They set up an education foundation in Hong Kong to develop agents and promote Beijing’s policies to students in Hong Kong. 

The foundation received 500 million yuan (about $71 million) annually from the Chinese regime to carry out its operations.
Wang said he recruited mainland Chinese students to gather information about individuals and groups deemed a threat to the regime.
“I promoted the Chinese regime’s policies … to these students and had them collect intelligence on the Hong Kong independence [movement] and views opposing the regime.”
Most of the recruited Chinese students came from two Chinese universities: Nanjing University of Science and Technology in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu, and Shantou University in southern China’s Guangdong Province.
The Nanjing University of Science and Technology and other Chinese universities have alumni associations in Hong Kong, many of which have members who are Chinese agents.
Wang was involved in an operation that led to the abduction of five Hong Kong booksellers in 2015. 

The booksellers later reappeared in detention in mainland China and participated in forced televised confessions.
Wang said the operation was organized by people inside CIIL in coordination with the PLA.
He said he was shocked that the regime was able to pull off the kidnappings.
“I didn’t think it was possible for the Chinese regime to arrest someone in Hong Kong because of ‘one country, two systems,’” Wang said, referring to the framework under which the regime pledged to afford the city a high level of autonomy and freedoms.

Taiwan
Speaking to Vision Times, Wang said that the majority of infiltration activities in Taiwan were carried out by Xiang’s wife, Kung Ching.
The regime sees the self-ruled island as a renegade province and has never ruled out using military force to reunite it with the mainland. 

In recent years, it has stepped up efforts to infiltrate the media and influence elections in Taiwan.
Wang said he took part in the online campaign to attack Taiwan’s ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) prior to the general elections in November 2018, in an effort to support the opposition party, the Kuomingtang (KMT), which has a Beijing-friendly stance.
He said that their group had more than 200,000 social media accounts, and many other fan pages to support their effort.
CIIL spent 1.5 billion yuan (about $213 million) on Taiwan’s media outlets alone to help in their efforts to influence the 2018 elections, he said.
Wang said they organized Chinese and Hong Kong students studying in Taiwan and Chinese tourists to aid in promoting pro-Beijing candidates running for the 2018 elections.
Overseas Chinese donations also went to pro-Beijing candidates, said Wang. 

More than 20 million yuan (about $2.8 million) went to Han Kuo-yu, who won a local election to become the mayor of the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung.
Han is now running for president as the KMT candidate.
For the 2018 elections, the DPP suffered a major defeat, losing seven of its regional seats to the KMT. 

The KMT now controls 15 cities and counties, compared to six held by the DPP.
Wang described the 2018 elections as a victory for the Chinese regime.
Wang said many of Taiwan’s elite were in their pocket, including the head of a local daily newspaper, the head of a university, the general manager of a cultural center, several politicians, and gang leaders. 

These people were each paid 2 million to 5 million yuan ($284,155 to $710,388) annually to assist Wang and his group in their infiltration efforts.
In the upcoming 2020 presidential election, Wang said Beijing’s goal is to unseat president Tsai Ing-wen’s reelection bid.
He said that Kung wanted him to go to Taiwan on May 28 to assist her in influence operations targeting Taiwan’s media and the internet. 

But he had a change of heart.
“I saw what’s happening in Hong Kong. And I didn’t want to personally turn Taiwan into Hong Kong. So I decided to quit,” Wang told Vision Times, referring to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong against Beijing’s encroachment in the city.
So on April 23, Wang left his post in Hong Kong to visit his wife and baby son in Sydney, having been granted approval by Kung.
He is now staying at a secret location as he cooperates with the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation, the country’s top intelligence agency.
Being in Australia, however, doesn’t guarantee safety, because Beijing has spy cells in the country who could abduct him and his family and send them back to China, Wang said.
Despite the risks, Wang stands by his decision to defect.
“I thought and rethought it time and time again.”
“I wondered if this decision would be a good thing or a bad thing for my life. I couldn’t tell you definitively, but I firmly believe that if I had stayed with [the CCP], I would come to no good end.”

Fears raised for safety of defecting Chinese spy Wang Liqiang

Intelligence agent who has applied for asylum in Australia is now a target of Chinese killers

By Christopher Knaus and Ben Doherty

Security experts have urged Wang Liqiang’s minders to ‘double up’ protection.

The Australian minders of the Chinese defector Wang Liqiang have been urged to “double up” protection duties as experts raise significant fears about his safety.
Chinese state media have sought to discredit Wang as a convicted “fraudster”, liar and a fake after he publicly revealed his role within Chinese intelligence and his bid for Australia’s protection on Saturday in the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers.
The Chinese government released a notice from the Shanghai public security bureau stating it was investigating him for fraud, and released an online court record suggesting a fraud conviction was recorded in 2016. 

Wang’s lawyer in Australia, George Newhouse, told Guardian Australia: “He denies those allegations.”
Wang is staying in an undisclosed location in Sydney. 

He is in the country on a tourist visa and has formally applied for asylum. 

Guardian Australia has been told he holds significant concerns for his own and his family’s safety.

One of the experts who helped investigate Wang’s claims, Alex Joske of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said there was reason to doubt the allegations aired by the Chinese government about his fraud conviction. 

He said it was clear from the Chinese police statements that Wang was now “a target”.
“He’d be a target of the Chinese government and we can see from the allegations that the Chinese government has made, those accusations from the police, that they are trying to go after him,” Joske said.
John Blaxland, a security and intelligence expert at the Australian National University, said the extraordinary revelations of China’s actions were unlike anything Australia has seen “in a generation”.
He said significant protective precautions must be taken to guard Wang against retribution. 

“If I was his minders, I would be looking to double up on protection duties,” he told the Guardian.
“And he must have minders. I’m assuming that someone is looking out for him and there are some protective measures in place. There’s a lot of egg being thrown around and it’s stuck on a lot of people’s faces.”
Asked about what was being done to keep Wang safe, prime minister Scott Morrison said simply that the public could “expect the same protections to apply to anyone who is living in our country, whether on a visa or any other arrangement”.
“Well he’s in Australia. He’s in Australia. And we have the rule of law in Australia,” Morrison said.
The concerns for Wang come after the death of Bo “Nick” Zhao in a Melbourne hotel room in March – which passed almost unnoticed at the time.
Nine newspapers reported allegations on Monday that Zhao had been approached by Chinese businessmen in Melbourne to run for federal parliament, effectively as an agent of Beijing.
Zhao, a 32-year-old car dealer who had run into financial difficulties, was found dead by a cleaner in a hotel room in Glen Waverley on 3 March this year.
Former colleagues remember him as quiet but determined.
Yvan Lieutier, who worked with Zhao through a Heidelberg car dealership for five months, told the Guardian he was a “very quiet” young man, but one who was “was pretty ambitious for his age”.
He was approached to run for parliament in early 2019, and reported the approach to Asio several weeks before his death.
A cause of death has not been established and Victoria police have referred Zhao’s death to the coroner.
Police said: “Local police prepared a report for the coroner in relation to the death of a 31-year-old man in Glen Waverley on 3 March 2019. As this matter is currently before the coroner, it would not be appropriate to comment further at this time.”
The Victorian coroner’s court confirmed that its investigation into Zhao’s death was “open and ongoing” but that no decision had been taken on if, or when, a public hearing might be held.
Blaxland said the reports of Chinese influence, if accurate, were “grave”. 

“If what we are reading is correct, then we face a challenge the likes of which we have not seen in a generation,” he told Guardian Australia.

Chongyi Feng, an associate professor in China Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, said Wang’s claims required further investigation by Australian intelligence authorities.
“The claim by Mr Wang confirms many things that have been reported and discussed over the last two years,” Feng said. 

“It is crystal clear that the Australian government and public should have done more and should do more to address Chinese interference. We already have effective new laws [targeting foreign interference], but those laws should be implemented with greater vigour.”
Zhao’s death needed “to be investigated very thoroughly,” he said.
Feng said he believed political concerns over Australia’s economic relationship with China were the most significant factor in an unwillingness to push back harder against Beijing.
“The intelligence officials of Australia understand what is happening, but … political leaders need to do more to address this, even if those actions might offend the Beijing authorities and may cause some commercial loss or lost business deals. Australia should put human rights and democracy before commercial interests.”
Asio’s director general, Mike Burgess, said his agency “was previously aware of matters that have been reported ... and has been actively investigating them.
“Given that the matter in question is subject to a coronial inquiry, and as not to prejudice our investigations, it would be inappropriate to comment further.”
Burgess said allegations of foreign interference were treated seriously, and that hostile foreign powers posed a significant threat to Australia.
“As the director general of security, I am committed to protecting Australia’s democracy and sovereignty,” he said.
“Hostile foreign intelligence activity continues to pose a real threat to our nation and its security. Asio will continue to confront and counter foreign interference and espionage in Australia.”
Wang has claimed in media interviews that he is a spy seeking to defect to Australia, and willing to reveal secrets of Chinese efforts to infiltrate and influence Australia’s political system.
He had engaged in espionage activities in Hong Kong, including helping to organise the October 2015 kidnapping of Lee Bo, the owner of Causeway Bay Bookshop, who was targeted by Beijing for allegedly distributing dissident materials.
Wang said Beijing covertly controls listed companies to finance intelligence operations, including surveilling dissidents, co-opting media organisations, and running “cyber armies” to shift political opinion.