Decoding Red Infiltration — Student Reflection
Student N | Reflection
For me, July 4 was a big day.
It was the first time the Ganghu Civil Defense Team had solely hosted a large-scale lecture with over a hundred attendees — and the guests were two heavyweight figures. Lee Chih-Te, author of Hai Kun: Breaking the Waves, and Liang Wen-Chieh, Deputy Minister and Spokesperson of the Mainland Affairs Council — the man who once hammered Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office with a mug of righteous fury. On top of that, Liu Yu-Hsi from the Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience Committee and Feng Ai-Li from the public-education wargame project also showed up. Seeing people who’ve become familiar faces at civil defense events over the past six months all in the same room at once made me genuinely happy.
For the first 90 minutes, Mr. Lee Chih-Te walked us through what the Chinese Communist Party actually is, and how Chinese and Western intelligence agencies differ.
In the West, an intelligence agency is part of the government. But in China, it’s different — “the whole party turned into an intelligence apparatus” is its defining trait: “the Party leads everything.”
What does “the Party leads everything” actually mean?
A state apparatus has boundaries. The Party doesn’t. It can insert itself into any field, without limit, doing whatever it wants.
United front work means building goodwill and buying people over. And the CCP’s two other major intelligence bodies — the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of State Security — the former mainly handles domestic and international suppression, the latter investigates foreign spies operating within China.
We tend to imagine spies like the movie Infernal Affairs, where Tony Leung’s character has just one code name — 27149 — for life. But that kind of cost is too high. Far more common is the “cultivation and pull-out” method in tradecraft: identify a high-value target, then recruit them, because the value of a spy is fluid, and so is their identity.
Cases like Chang Che-Ping; the Air Force Deputy Commander; the Deputy Minister of National Defense; Chang Pei-Ning, Head of the Comprehensive Affairs Division at the Navy’s Education, Training and Doctrine Command; and Ho Chung-Chi of the Navy’s Planning Division — these are all recent examples.
Taiwan’s laws are relatively lenient when it comes to handling cases like these involving CCP spies. Unlike other countries, which apply something like the “duck test”: if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.
In Taiwan, acting as an agent carries no penalty, and the “treason” clause in the Criminal Code is effectively toothless. Worse still, many judges treat the harm caused by CCP espionage as if it barely matters.
Then there’s cognitive warfare through the internet and media.
In the closing Q&A, Deputy Minister Liang lamented that the failure to pass the Digital Intermediary Services Act was his biggest regret. In Taiwan’s online space, aside from fraud and child sexual abuse material, almost nothing else can actually be regulated.
In an era where AI and short-video production keep getting easier, platforms like Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and TikTok are all major channels for China’s external propaganda — and Taiwan has topped the list, year after year, as the country most targeted by foreign information manipulation.
And Legislator Chen Yu-Jen had the nerve to say: “The CCP’s united front work is just making friends.”
Sure. Friends made on the basis of interests and performance metrics, to be used by the Communist Party.
I really don’t know what to say to that.
I genuinely believe that being a Taiwanese today requires being extremely sharp — staying alert to everything, and learning to tell what’s real from what’s fake.
Thank you to everyone who made the event such a success, and for everything that went into that day.