We understand democratic erosion as democratically elected leaders eroding the mechanisms of fair democracy after entering office. What happens when the threat is external? As the percentage of citizens who identify as “Taiwanese” instead of “Chinese” grows, so do the efforts of mainland China to push for unification. In the age of the internet, China has moved to employ a new weapon: disinformation.
It’s not just that China is promoting anti-US sentiments. This kind of foreign disinformation aggressively undermines democratic legitimacy and compromises free and fair elections by targeting citizens. Bots spreading pro-authoritarian narratives will weaken democracy in the same way an elected leader would. We must consider the China-Taiwan case in the definition of democratic erosion.
China’s Taiwanese Disinformation Campaign and Its Effects
Misinformation refers to misleading and incorrect information. Disinformation is information deliberately intended to deceive its audiences, like propaganda. Taiwan’s National Security Bureau (NSB) published a report in 2024 detailing a 60% increase in Chinese disinformation, with young people being the primary targets.
The NSB identified 28,216 fake accounts in total. These accounts spread altered memes and videos. They overwhelm comment sections. Other strategies include impersonating Taiwanese military officials and citizens via hacking their accounts. Artificial intelligence is used to create deepfakes of Taiwanese politicians and their speeches.
In an updated 2025 report, the security bureau stated it detected over half a million pieces of “controversial information” on media platforms such as TikTok and Facebook. This report also provides detailed evidence of China’s use of artificial intelligence to generate and spread polarizing messages.
Chinese disinformation commonly targets Taiwan-U.S. relations. It appears to ramp up during election season. During the 2020 presidential election, China spread rumors that President Tsai Ing-Wen’s doctoral degree was fake. CCP sources also claimed that her victory was rigged by the CIA. Two rumors blasted into the public eye before the 2024 legislative and presidential elections. Number one: poisonous pork was being imported from the U.S. and passed off as Taiwanese. Number two: blood was secretly being stolen from Taiwanese citizens and given to the U.S. to develop bioweapons against China.
Skepticism of the safety quality of U.S. pork has long been debated among Taiwanese citizens, but it coincidentally reemerged from obscurity just before an important presidential election. Although President Tsai Ing-Wen won by a wide margin, the large wave of anti-Democratic Progressive Party propaganda was deeply concerning to many.
According to an anti-disinformation group with the Taiwan FactCheck Center, the years of disinformation and propaganda have already created mistrust and polarised the exhausted Taiwanese citizens. Instead of trusting facts, citizens are more likely to judge the credibility of a statement based on their political affiliation.
Background
Taiwan’s sovereignty has long been a point of contention between Taiwan and mainland China. The Qing Empire officially controlled Taiwan in the 17th century. It was then taken by Japan, which relinquished it after Japan’s World War Two defeat. After the conflict between General Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalist forces and Mao Zedong’s communist forces, Chiang’s forces fled in defeat to Taiwan and established the Republic of China.
Both sides of the conflict point to these historical factors as arguments for whether or not Taiwan is an independent and sovereign entity. The People’s Republic of China (mainland China) maintains that Taiwan belongs to it.
Taiwanese Resistance
Taiwanese civil-society organizations are ramping up their efforts to discredit false news and educate citizens about the dangers of spreading false information. Services such as Taiwan FactCheck Center help to promote transparency and validate public claims.
Taiwan also passed the Radio and Television Act and the Anti-Infiltration Act, and is currently working on legislation that would strengthen punishment against online fraud and cybercrimes. If these bills pass, revenue-earning social media companies operating in Taiwan would have to maintain legal representatives to answer government questions about moderating certain content.
Implications for Taiwanese and Global Democracy
Because of financial reasons, tech giants like Google, Meta, and X have fired employees dedicated to fighting disinformation. Authoritarian regimes are more than happy to fill these information gaps left behind.
We are seeing one of the foundational concepts of democracy, free and fair elections, being attacked in real time. But, instead of from a national political force, this attack comes from an outside authoritarian influence. Without accurate information and trust in the electoral system, free and fair elections cannot happen. When a foreign power tries to influence elections, it leads to a decrease in legitimacy and an increase in polarization.
When trust in democratic institutions has been efficiently eroded, authoritarian actors can more easily fill that gap. This is exactly what China hopes to accomplish by sowing doubt within Taiwan-U.S. relations.
Taiwan is both figuratively and literally a separation between authoritarianism and democracy. It is part of the “first island chain”, an area of U.S.-friendly territories that separates China and the U.S. Taiwan is also responsible for manufacturing the electronic chips that power much of the world’s devices. If China were to take Taiwan, it would have control over a driver of the global economy, and it would become that much easier for China to assert global control and challenge the U.S.
I think the most salient fact you present is how distrustful and exhausted Taiwanese citizens are, and how they feel they can only discern information based on political affiliation. This lays the foundation for your argument, which is very compelling based on what you have presented on how China seeks to subvert Taiwanese governance.
Hi, Isabella!
I enjoyed reading your blog post. You expanded the conversation on democratic erosion by showing how it now involves strategic foreign interference, particularly from authoritarian regimes like China. This defies the traditional understanding that backsliding is primarily caused by domestic players. Citing Dahl, democracy is not only based on free and fair elections but also on an informed and engaged citizenry. This is exactly what China’s disinformation efforts aim to do by manipulating public debate and eroding institutional confidence. Your argument resonates with growing scholarly concerns about the use of indirect tactics to delegitimize democracy from within.
China’s application of “sharp power” to control information through indirect means is particularly evident in Taiwan’s constant struggle against disinformation. Taiwan’s civic society and legal mechanisms act as democratic immune systems, but their potency is hampered by the larger neoliberal digital ecosystem. Social media platforms’ choice to relax content moderation undermines those defenses. This makes me wonder: Can democracy survive if powerful platforms don’t take responsibility? And how effective are grassroots efforts if they lack resources?
This dynamic parallels a paper I read in class, Arugay and Baquisal’s (2022) analysis of the Philippine 2022 elections. Their paper illustrates how social media became a vector for disinformation campaigns that revived authoritarian nostalgia and conspiracy narratives, heightening polarization and weakening democratic legitimacy. Taiwan’s experience is strikingly similar: targeted disinformation corrodes public trust and impairs the deliberative dialogue democracy depends on.
Framing Taiwan as both a geopolitical flashpoint and a symbol of democratic resistance brings out the global stakes of this issue. Your work makes a compelling case: defending democracy today isn’t just about domestic reforms. Rather, it also demands confronting sophisticated authoritarian influence from abroad. Democratic backsliding, in this sense, is no longer a national affliction but a global struggle.
Great point, Isabella! Cyber interference as a tool to undermine democracy is indeed a rising concern that we must pay close attention to, especially with the current situation of global democratic backsliding. I would also like to add that China’s disinformation campaigns are not unique to Taiwan as they have also targeted other countries, such as the Philippines given the ongoing tensions over the South China Sea and its alliance with the U.S. Also, as elections are at the heart of democracy, it’s not surprising that China would target the electoral process with its disinformation campaign. Additionally, this tactic could reflect the broader geopolitical power struggle between the U.S. and China. Therefore, an immediate response should not be from Taiwan alone. The U.S. and its allies must strengthen both their own cyber power and diplomatic cyber agreements to counter these virtual threats. If Taiwan cannot do an effective defense, the impact will be felt not just domestically but also internationally, especially in its ongoing assertion of sovereignty and recognition as an independent state on the global stage. This case could also call for the immediate collaborative cyber power strategies among democratic nations to safeguard the integrity not just of their own institutions but as well as their neighboring countries.