RISK FALLING BEHIND: If institutional responses lag, China would exploit the nation’s open society to create a breeding ground for cognitive warfare, the expert said
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By Chen Yu-fu and Sam Garcia / Staff reporter, with staff writer
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Taiwan needs not just technical, real-time countermeasures, but a more comprehensive legal framework and strong inter-ministerial cooperation to face China’s increasingly institutionalized cognitive warfare campaigns, an academic familiar with cross-strait affairs said yesterday.
The National Security Bureau (NSB) yesterday outlined China’s five main methods of cognitive warfare against Taiwan: analyzing social sentiment, disseminating disinformation, infiltrating public opinion with abnormal accounts, generating realistic content with artificial intelligence and hacking Taiwanese accounts.
Taiwan needs to bolster its legal framework, inter-ministerial cooperation and societal resistance to face China’s cognitive warfare, Tunghai University Cross-Strait Research Center deputy executive director Hung Pu-chao (洪浦釗) said.
The logo for the DeepSeek artificial intelligence service is displayed on a cellphone next to a Chinese flag and a monitor showing a Chinese flag in an illustration photograph taken in Beijing on Feb. 17 last year.
Photo: Bloomberg
If Taiwan’s institutional responses lag behind China’s operational pace, the nation’s democratic and open society would be repeatedly exploited, becoming a breeding ground for cognitive warfare, Hung said.
China’s five methods as reported by the NSB show a clear operational procedure, he said.
First, China collects information about political figures, opinion leaders and social networks, then identifies social fault lines and emotional hot spots, the academic said.
Next, it disseminates controversial information through social media, exploiting Taiwan’s open democratic environment to amplify conflicts, causing social division and unrest, he said.
China uses Taiwan’s democratic system as its operational interface, causing suspicion, division and eroding trust within society to weaken its overall defense, he said.
“We cannot use laws from the analog era to fight cognitive warfare in the digital age,” Hung said.
Taiwan’s most obvious shortcomings are not in the government’s intelligence capabilities, but in the responsive bottlenecks at the institutional level, he said.
National security legislation has often been stuck within the opposition-led Legislative Yuan, which is in an institutional deadlock that China can repeatedly exploit, he said.
When national security is politicized, any risk warning can be labeled as partisan, weakening Taiwan’s collective defense, Hung said.
China does not need to convince everyone, heightening political polarization alone achieves its cognitive warfare goals, he said.
Cognitive security can no longer be the responsibility of just national security agencies, but needs to involve cooperation between multiple ministries, he said.
The Ministry of Digital Affairs could implement technical countermeasures, the Ministry of Justice could enforce legal accountability and the Ministry of Education could promote media literacy, he said.
The government should focus less on passive responses and clarifications, and more on exposing China’s methods and narrative logic, Hung added.
When the public sees through China’s cognitive warfare, it acts as a “social vaccine,” weakening disinformation and embedding cognitive security into democratic defense, he said.
