By Kathrin Hille in Tainan
Officially, Lu Aihua retired from politics eight years ago.
But as the campaign for Taiwan’s local elections on Saturday reached fever pitch last week, Lu received a visit from government investigators who are probing whether he is helping China interfere in the upcoming polls.
“The investigators are asking if the money the Chinese Communists are paying me comes with instructions to back a particular candidate or a particular party in the election,” says Lu, an influential former lawmaker in the southern city of Tainan.
China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and threatens to invade if the island insists on keeping its independence indefinitely.
Since the pro-independence Democratic Progressive party (DPP) won the presidency and a parliamentary majority in 2016, Beijing has ramped up pressure against Taipei on all fronts: military posturing, poaching its diplomatic allies, pushing airlines and hotels to refer to Taiwan as part of China, drastically cutting tour groups to the island and reducing agricultural imports from DPP strongholds.
Now, Beijing is trying to meddle from within as the island’s voters prepare to pick mayors, regional and local lawmakers, as well as borough wardens and village heads.
China is seeking to corrode Taiwan’s body politic through infiltration and disinformation — an action that echoes the growing debate in a number of western countries over attempts by China to weaken democratic governments.
“You have started noticing such tactics in the west since Donald Trump was elected [US president] and since Russia meddled in the US election — you even have a new term for it: ‘sharp power’,” says Chiu Chui-cheng, deputy minister of the Mainland Affairs Council, Taiwan’s cabinet level agency for relations with China.
“Nobody knows better about sharp power than we do — we are at the front lines!”
Although Saturday’s election will focus on local issues, politicians and experts say it is likely to predetermine the future of cross-Strait relations because a DPP defeat could block the road to re-election in 2020 for President Tsai Ing-wen, the prime target of Beijing’s wrath.
Foreign diplomats in Taipei say any indications of Beijing meddling in this week’s polls are noteworthy for western democracies grappling with the question of how to deal with a China that is openly challenging the norms and values established by the democratic west.
Washington this year for the first time accused China of meddling in US elections.
In Australia, debate is growing over Chinese interference in academic teaching and research.
New Zealand has had scandals over MPs’ links with Chinese Communist party organisations.
Against this backdrop, researchers from the National Endowment for Democracy coined the term sharp power, which Taiwan is identifying as an exact description of its problem.
In a paper published in 2017, they argued that influence wielded by Beijing and Moscow through the media, culture, think-tanks and academia should not be confused with soft power.
The influence of China and Russia can “pierce, penetrate or perforate the political and information environments in the targeted countries,” they wrote.
“Sharp power enables the authoritarians to cut into the fabric of a society, stoking and amplifying existing divisions. Russia has been especially adept at exploiting rifts within democracies.”
China has made no secret of its intention to do just that to Taiwan.
In an editorial in December 2016, months after the DPP’s victory, the Global Times, a nationalist tabloid owned by the Communist party’s mouthpiece People’s Daily, wrote in an editorial: “We will Lebanonise Taiwan if necessary,” suggesting that China could turn opposing ethnic, political and social groups inside Taiwan against each other as has happened in the Middle Eastern country.
“Many people have been focusing on China boasting that their fighter jets are circling our airspace and that their aircraft carrier is sailing through the Taiwan Strait. But that is not what worries me most,” says a senior Taiwanese national security official.
“What worries me most is infiltration and manipulation. You may call it sharp power, or you could just call it political warfare, or United Front work.”
Taiwan has been the target of United Front tactics — the art of influencing and manipulating adversaries going back decades — from Beijing ever since the Kuomintang (KMT) fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing the Chinese civil war, dragging the island, which had until only four years earlier been a Japanese colony, into conflict with the Chinese Communist party.
But Beijing’s tactics are changing.
Xi Jinping’s predecessor, Hu Jintao tried to build relations with the KMT, wooing Taiwanese investors in China, and seeking to lure the island’s population of 23m with closer economic ties.
But the radical rejection of closer relations with China by Taiwan’s young generation in the 2014 Sunflower protests and the DPP’s subsequent landslide election victory two years later marked a failure of Hu’s policy.
China has since tweaked its approach, replacing macro policies with measures to target narrow groups or even individuals.
A former senior official with oversight of the Investigation Bureau, Taiwan’s FBI equivalent, says the bureau is observing a shift in Chinese infiltration.
“They are no longer betting on Taiwanese businessmen in the mainland, and they are no longer relying on the KMT. They are actively working on cultivating their own people here,” he says.
“They are reaching deep down to the grassroots of our society, and into the power base of the DPP.”
President Tsai Ing-wen at a ceremony to commission two new frigates into the Taiwan navy earlier this month.
That is where Lu comes in.
A tanned, wiry man with a 40-year career in the KMT under his belt, Lu is a “pillar”, or zhuangjiao in Mandarin — a grassroots power broker.
For local employers, temple community leaders, farmers’ and fishermen’s associations’ executives or even organised crime figures who help parties or individual politicians win elections, the zhuangjiao are a remnant of the KMT’s more than 40 years of authoritarian rule, which later became a tool for politicians across the spectrum when Taiwan democratised in the early 1990s.
With tactics ranging from friendly neighbourhood chats, to backroom deals, to mobilisation and outright vote buying, they are part of the soft underbelly of Taiwan’s raucous politics.
DPP officials say these traditional political structures were an easy target for exploitation by China.
“I have run election campaigns and I know how it works. Money changes hands but people tell you ‘I don’t want a receipt’”, says the former senior official with oversight of the Investigation Bureau.
“Our campaign finance accounting system is hollow, it doesn’t catch this kind of thing going on at the grassroots level.”
Taipei city mayoral candidate Yao Wen-chih of the DPP speaks to supporters at a campaign rally.
According to political analysts, Taiwan’s zhuangjiao are less powerful than they were 20 years ago. But they still voice concern that they offer an opening for Chinese sharp power.
“The population is urbanising, and it’s getting ever more difficult to mobilise and buy votes through traditional patron-client systems, and this trend continued all the way through 2016, with the KMT and the old forces being squeezed out,” says Lin Thung-hong, a researcher who looks at the Chinese impact on Taiwanese society at Academia Sinica, the country’s top academic research institution. “During this election, it’s crucial for us to find out whether this patron-client system has been brought under the control of a new patron, if it has been inherited by the Chinese Communist party.”
Lu dismisses the idea that he could possibly buy votes or finance a campaign on behalf of a Chinese master, but he does openly push Beijing’s case.
Over the past seven years, he has sold agricultural products from Tainan — a DPP stronghold — to the government of Zhuhai, a city in the Pearl River Delta.
He admits that Chinese officials have asked him to inform them when he expected the price of certain Taiwanese agricultural produce to drop, so they could step in and buy it.
While the government in Taipei says Beijing cut agricultural imports from southern Taiwan to punish the DPP’s voters after the 2016 result, Lu claims the opposite.
“China is very willing to help us, this little brother of theirs, but it is Taiwan itself that is rejecting them for political reasons,” he says.
Both farmers and fishermen in rural southern Tainan complain about a contracting market for their produce.
“Things are terrible,” says Tao Langyi, who farms milkfish near Tainan.
“The Chinese bought our fish on contract for three years in a row, but that stopped in 2016. It’s very hard for us now.”
Government officials accuse Beijing of exploiting real economic problems and creating fake ones with disinformation campaigns via Line, the messaging app popular in Taiwan.
“What they are doing is very similar to what the Russians did in America,” says the senior national security official.
“In the US, the deprived white population of the rust belt were easy prey. Here, it’s our Tainan farmers and fishermen.”
Polls suggest that sentiment is turning more broadly against the DPP with disappointment spreading among Taiwan’s notoriously fickle voters over the government’s record on issues from air pollution to gay marriage.
The Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation, an independent research organisation, last week reported that only 23.5 per cent of voters identified themselves as DPP supporters while 35.4 per cent said they identified with the KMT and 36 per cent described themselves as independent — a radical shift from the DPP’s all-out victory two years ago.
Analysts caution, however, against interpreting this swing as a sign that the Taiwanese are moving to embrace China.
According to Academia Sinica, attitudes towards Beijing have barely shifted, with those identifying as Taiwanese or both Taiwanese and Chinese still far outnumbering those identifying as Chinese.
Local warden for the DPP Li Fu-hsiang waves to residents of his borough in Tainan
While government investigators are asking questions about Lu’s pineapple and fish diplomacy, their probe was actually triggered by another incident: In January, he convinced Li Fu-hsiang, a borough warden for the DPP in Yongkang, to bring two dozen borough wardens to Zhuhai hosted by officials from the Taiwan Affairs Office and the United Front Work department, the Communist party section in charge of foreign influencing operations.
The trip led to an outcry in the DPP.
“From this you can see how deep China’s hands are reaching into our elections,” says Lin Yi-chin, a DPP city councillor in Tainan who is campaigning for re-election.
“But it is so hard to do something about it. People love money — that Li Fu-hsiang supports me in the election doesn’t mean that he can’t be cheap and greedy.”
Such internal conflict in the DPP is part of Beijing’s calculus.
“In a solidly green [DPP] constituency like Tainan, they can’t hope to turn people to the KMT, but they can aim at sowing discord within the DPP,” says Academia Sinica’s Mr Lin.
Both Lu and Li dismiss the idea of improper conduct.
Lu justified the trip saying that it had helped Tainan local officials engage with Chinese counterparts and convinced them that China could be the solution to local economic problems caused, he says, by the DPP’s aversion to Beijing.
Li denies there were any serious discussions in Zhuhai, and says: “It was just a fun trip, just tourism.”
‘No hope’ candidate stirs mayoral contest
When Han Kuo-yu announced seven months ago that he was running for mayor in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second-largest municipality, few took notice.
His political career had been going nowhere since he lost his legislator’s seat in 2001.
His own party, the opposition KMT, agreed to his candidacy only because it considered challenging the Democratic Progressive party, which has governed in the port city for 20 years, a lost cause.
But with three days to go until the election, several Taiwanese media polls have Han leading the DPP incumbent.
The 61-year-old is offering a cocktail of populist and sometimes outlandish policies: he promises to transform Kaohsiung’s ageing industrial economy into an innovative powerhouse; help everyone “make a fortune”; more than double its population to 5m; and proposes to drill for oil on Taiping, an island in the South China Sea claimed by several countries but controlled by Taiwan.
While Han, was treated like a clown when peddling such ideas earlier in the campaign, he has rocketed to stardom over the past three months.
His campaign rallies have become carnival-like events.
His main event on Saturday attracted 80,000 people according to the police, rivalling that of the DPP mayor on the same day.
DPP campaign strategists and some independent observers see the astonishing turnround as a product of Chinese manipulation.
In a highly unusual pattern, the candidate’s name has been ranking much higher in internet searches in some Chinese provinces — where ordinary people rarely know individual Taiwanese politicians — than in Taiwan in recent weeks.
Moreover, Taiwanese TV channels, backed by pro-China businessmen, have been broadcasting features and talk shows with breathless primetime coverage of Han.
The candidate’s victory is far from certain — Taiwanese election polls are notoriously unreliable.
But Han has already shaken up the country’s politics.
