Naked on the Mental Defense Front — The Blank Spot Civil Defense Preppers Need to Face
TC Lee | Chairman of CDAT, Founder of the Ganghu Civil Defense Team
After a certain event wrapped up, it was supposed to be time for a full debrief. Everyone sitting together, talking through what went well, what needed adjusting — a pretty standard process.
But the room was suddenly filled with emotion. Someone started making emotionally charged accusations, trying to pull people in the room to their side. The mood shifted from a debrief into something else entirely.
I don’t know if the people who started it were even aware of what they were doing. Maybe they genuinely weren’t.
But I saw one thing clearly: this group had zero resistance to this kind of maneuver.
No one called it out. No one said, “hold on, this isn’t what we’re here for.” The emotion flowed in, and most people, confused, just went along with it. The damage was done, regardless of whether the person who set it off knew they were doing damage.
I’ve thought about this for a long time since.
I only got into civil defense work last year — it hasn’t even been a year yet. But in that time, talking with a lot of veterans who’ve been in this space much longer, one observation has become increasingly clear to me:
Taiwan’s civil defense community has genuinely grown a lot in technical skill. First aid, communications, tactics, supplies, home hardening — someone is seriously working on every one of these, one course after another.
But there’s one thing fewer people are discussing, and maybe it’s not being addressed at all: understanding the true nature of the enemy.
Beyond “what to do when war breaks out” and “where the missiles will land,” civil defense preparation also needs to grapple with more fundamental questions — what is the Chinese Communist Party? How does it operate? What are its goals? What methods does it use?
We’re all in a rush to find ways to defeat the enemy, or to defend our homes.
But we’ve forgotten to actually get to know our enemy.
It’s honestly embarrassing to say, but during the Chiang era, people had a far better grasp of the Communist Party’s true nature than we do today.
After talking this over with several veterans and colleagues, we decided to organize a lecture on exactly this.
On July 4, at the Ruey-Fu-Chang Foundation in Taipei, we invited veteran journalist Lee Chih-Te to speak on “The Invisible Network: Taiwan’s National Security Dilemma Under CCP Infiltration.”
The first premise Mr. Lee laid out reframed the entire discussion:
【The Chinese Communist Party is, in essence, an intelligence apparatus.】
It’s not a “political party” in the democratic-world sense. Its principle that “the Party comes before everything” isn’t a slogan — it’s meant literally. Everything you own in China — your career, your assets, your freedom, your family — exists because the Party permits it. And that permission comes with a price: when the Party needs you, you must be used.
So any interaction with China carries a political purpose. No exceptions. That organization that invites you on a study tour, that new friend who’s suddenly extra warm toward you, that partner offering resources for cooperation — within the CCP’s system, all of these are nodes that can be mobilized.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s how the system is designed by intent.
You haven’t personally encountered it yet simply means your moment to be used hasn’t come — and that’s not evidence that “it isn’t really like that.”
Something else stuck with me: the CCP has no reservations about talking openly about united front work.
The United Front Work Department is a formal institution, with a budget and staff. “United front” is, in the CCP’s own language, an openly stated method of work — meaning making friends with a purpose. Mr. Lee said united front work isn’t even intelligence work in the traditional sense — it’s political purpose dressed as socializing.
The problem is, people in democratic societies are used to treating friendship as something pure, something without an agenda. So when someone approaches you using united front logic, you feel nothing off about it at all. What you see is warmth, resources, opportunity. What you don’t feel is that this relationship is ultimately meant to have you be used, someday.
One concept from the lecture reminded me of that scene that had struck me as so absurd.
One of the Chinese Communist Party’s objectives is to get everyone suspicious of each other. Mutual suspicion, mutual reporting — the erosion of trust itself works in the Party’s favor, because a society that doubts itself can’t organize itself.
This logic isn’t only used inside China. It’s exported.
You don’t need to deliberately spread rumors, don’t need to manufacture conflict — you just need to get people caught up in emotion, get them to stop trusting the people around them, and the job is mostly done.
What happened at that event was probably exactly that. The people who set it off may not have done any real “work” at all — they just spoke while riding a wave of emotion. But an unguarded group got swept away by it within minutes.
Mr. Lee put it precisely: the Communist Party wants us living in a state of constant suspicion of each other. But excessive suspicion is itself falling into the trap. So we need to stay alert, without living in doubt. There’s no formula for that balance — but you have to know the problem exists before you can even start practicing it.
In the past, psychological warfare work was housed inside the military — the psychological warfare corps, the political warfare system — a Cold War-era design.
But the Communist Party’s psychological warfare was never aimed only at soldiers or politicians. It’s universal — aimed at businesspeople, academics, media, religious groups, social movements, even the algorithm on your social media feed. It doesn’t need you to know it exists in order to work.
Taiwan’s civil defense preppers keep training for: what to do when the bullets come, what to do when the bombs come, what to do when power and water go out. All of that matters.
But long before the bullets and missiles arrive, the mental defense battlefield has already opened.
We’ve been standing naked on this battlefield for a long time already. Short-form video, emotional mobilization, carefully packaged “fairness and justice,” turning your community against itself from the inside — these weapons are already active, whether or not you’re aware of them.
This topic gets discussed in academic circles and in certain political-work circles. But in the public eye, in mainstream media, it’s almost entirely absent.
It’s not that it can’t be discussed — it’s that no one is discussing it. As if this were something that doesn’t exist, doesn’t need to be discussed, understood, or dealt with.
“Can’t be discussed” is suppression. “No one discusses it” is absence. And absence is harder to notice, because you don’t know what’s missing.
Near the end of the lecture, a political-affairs worker in the audience said something that stayed with me — he said that taking the Communist Party too lightly was the thing his generation failed to do, and that failure is part of why Taiwan has ended up where it is today.
Before all the skills and tactics, one more fundamental thing needs to happen first: developing awareness of the illness.
You have to first know that you’re exposed to the risk before you’ll want to protect yourself. You have to first acknowledge that this battlefield exists before you can start preparing for it.
First-aid kits, radios, 72 hours of supplies — you may already be working on these.
But the body armor for mental defense — have we even started putting that on?