Taiwan Investigates Reports of Communist China’s Influence at Local TV Station

Taiwanese flags on a street lane as tourists walk past in Kinmen Islands, Taiwan, on Aug. 11, 2022. Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images

Taiwan’s government has opened an investigation into an allegation that a Chinese reporter working for China’s state-run media Xinhua tried to manipulate the content of a Taiwanese local political talk show.

Liang Wen-chieh, deputy head and spokesperson of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, told reporters at a press conference on June 27 that a multiagency probe had been launched to investigate the issue. He said the Xinhua correspondent arrived in Taiwan in February and left in May.

He said local authorities had never tried to control what Chinese reporters said while in Taiwan. As a result, Taiwan has never expelled a Chinese reporter in connection to freedom of speech, he noted.

“We have only one condition, which is that anyone from China who is permitted to enter Taiwan must not make any comments that harm Taiwan’s sovereignty,” Mr. Liang said.

He didn’t identify the Xinhua reporter or the local television station behind the political talk show.

The Taiwanese agencies involved in the probe include the Ministry of Culture, the ​​National Communications Commission (NCC), the country’s media regulator, and the Mainland Affairs Council, a cabinet-level administrative agency responsible for handling affairs concerning China, according to Mr. Liang.

Rights groups and security experts have found that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exploits the openness of Western societies to manipulate foreign media content by leveraging tactics such as propaganda, disinformation, and censorship.

The Case

The case first surfaced on June 25, when Taiwanese newspaper Liberty Times reported, citing an unnamed source, that China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, an agency under the State Council, had been contacting several Taiwanese television stations with a proposal since the start of this year. The proposal was that in exchange for certain business opportunities in China, local stations would allow Chinese reporters stationed in Taiwan to participate in the production of their political talk shows.

According to the report, one unnamed Taiwanese television station agreed to the proposal, and Xinhua reporter Zhao Bo took part in the production of the station’s new political talk show. During the recording of the show’s first episode, Mr. Bo showed up and monitored the process, the outlet noted.

On June 25, the NCC stated that it was investigating whether any local media had violated Article 27 of Taiwan’s Satellite Broadcasting Act, according to Taiwan’s government-run Central News Agency. Article 27 outlines whether the content of programs or advertisements by a satellite media company “violate compulsory or prohibition regulations under the law.” 

If a violation occurred, the NCC may impose a fine of up to NT$2 million (about $61,500) and order the company to “suspend the program or advertisement transmission,” in accordance with Article 48 of the Satellite Broadcasting Act.

The NCC also stated that the Ministry of Culture would decide whether the television station in question has violated Article 33-1 of the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area.

Article 33-1 states that individuals, organizations, and institutions in Taiwan aren’t allowed to engage in “any form of cooperative activity with the agencies, institutions, or organizations of the Mainland Area which are political parties, the military, the administration or of any political nature.”

Concerns

Wang Ting-yu, a senior legislator for Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) who sits on the parliament’s foreign affairs and national defense committee, called on the government to disallow Xinhua from sending correspondents to Taiwan, according to his June 25 Facebook post.

“China’s Xinhua News Agency is directly under communist China’s Propaganda Department. It is an affiliated organization of the Chinese Communist Party,” Mr. Wang wrote. “It is, of course, illegal for local television stations to cooperate with it.”

The legislator also called on the island’s national security agencies and the Ministry of Justice’s investigation bureau to investigate the matter.

According to a 2022 report on Beijing’s global media influence, the Washington-based advocacy group Freedom House found that 16 of the 30 countries examined were experiencing a “high” or “very high” degree of media influence from China. Taiwan and the United States were in the “very high” category.

Regarding Beijing’s tactics against Taiwan, the advocacy group stated that China offered subsidized trips to Taiwanese journalists, launched cyberattacks against media outlets carrying content critical of the CCP, and made covert partnerships with local media.

“Chinese state-produced content is regularly placed in local media through illegal but widespread paid advertorials, coproduction deals, or content-sharing agreements,” the group’s report reads. “Such content is not clearly labeled as the product of Chinese state entities, and it may look like an independently written or produced news article, broadcast program, or other media material.”