TAIPEI — On December 21, Taiwan’s authorities arrested an online journalist called Lin Hsien-yuan, working for a fringe outlet called Fingermedia over a poll that — for the first time — showed the Beijing-friendly candidate on track to win the presidential election on January 13.

Taiwanese prosecutors zeroed in on the suspect polls under the democratic island’s new Anti-Infiltration Act — designed to counter Chinese interference — saying Lin’s findings were faked and orchestrated by Chinese Communist Party officials in Fujian province, on the mainland across the Taiwan Strait. The prosecutors said Lin “pretended to have interviewed or sampled more than 300 citizens” over eight rounds of polling. The so-called phone interviews, the prosecutors continued, “never took place, and he fabricated false popularity polls.”

Lin’s poll triggered a shockwave as it put Hou yu-ih from the China-leaning Kuomintang (KMT) in the lead, albeit only with a 1.22 percentage point margin. That’s certainly the momentum that Chinese President Xi Jinping wants to see before what promises to be a very tight vote on Saturday.

Beijing is determined the election should prevent a third term for the Democratic Progressive Party, which pushes Taiwanese sovereignty and closer relations with the U.S., Europe, Japan and other democratic powers. The election is being closely watched worldwide over fears that tensions over the outcome could spark military brinkmanship between Washington and Beijing in the South China Sea, centered on an island that produces more than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced microchips.

The fake polls are only one part of an all-out Chinese offensive to spread disinformation through propaganda and spycraft. Other elements of the campaign have involved outlandish claims on social media and a candidate being arrested for taking Chinese bribes in cryptocurrency.

The key message being spread from the pro-China camp is that William Lai, the candidate from the DPP, is a dictator in the wings who will start a war with his reckless pursuit of Taiwanese independence.

But it’s a messy battlefield in cyberspace. Facebook has been awash with accusations that Washington and Taipei are in league building bioweapons. Fake news has also been circulating about poisoned pork coming in from the U.S. and a nationwide shortage of eggs. Another favorite false claim is that Lai’s running mate for the vice presidency, Bi-khim Hsiao, is ineligible because she holds U.S. citizenship.

It’s all meant to add up to a picture of a country too closely in hock to the evil United States, and suggest that recession is looming thanks to the DPP. Beijing-backed bots routinely flood the social media accounts of leading DPP candidates with pro-China propaganda.

“China has been actively waging cognitive warfare against Taiwan through disinformation,” Taiwan’s Premier Chen Chien-jen told the media in reference to how Beijing uses a mixture of economic coercion, military bluster and outright falsehoods to intimidate its neighbor. “Upon receiving the disinformation, local collaborators help disseminate and echo the message, in order to destabilize Taiwanese public sentiment and society,” he added.

The use of deepfakes, and Artificial Intelligence-generated videos, images and audio clips, are also featuring in this election cycle as a tool of personality assassination.

In December, a YouTube account called “Eat Rice, No War” put out a deepfake video alleging Lai had three mistresses, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice. YouTube subsequently complied with a government request to remove the videos, and the rumor didn’t snowball into a campaign topic.

That followed a similar attempt to fake an audio file in which Ko Wen-je, the presidential candidate of the newly founded Taiwan People’s Party, mocked Lai for visiting the U.S. and “doing a job interview.” Taiwanese official investigators concluded that this was most likely a faked recording, and Ko said no such thing.

Youth vote

While the battle is essentially a scrap between the traditional forces of the DPP and KMT, Ko’s TPP is a crucial third factor because it is proving so attractive to young voters. The former Taipei mayor’s straight-talking style, and his narrative about breaking the historic two-party structure, has won him much support from a demographic group disappointed with the political class.

That means social media is an ever more important factor.

On TikTok, a popular app owned by Beijing-headquartered ByteDance, the majority of DPP-related content is critical of the party, according to Puma Shen, a party candidate who chairs Doublethink Lab, a platform tracking China’s online disinformation and information manipulation.

“An important role of China is as an amplifier, rather than manufacturing the disinformation itself,” said Shen. “Whenever China spots something worth amplifying, it does so, and the scale is beyond our resistance.”

Ko, in contrast, is widely portrayed as a cuddly, funny middle-aged man on TikTok, and that’s an image that can help him pull the youth vote away from the DPP.

The top clip, based on views and shares, shown under a search for “Taiwan election” on Tuesday featured a Ko rally the day before. “Win Taiwan back,” says the caption of the video, with more than 420,600 views. “Everyone has tears of joy when he’s onstage,” the caption continues.

Lai gets a tougher ride as an autocrat in the making. More extreme Taiwanese users on TikTok even compared him with the late Communist dictator Mao Zedong. (TikTok is unavailable in mainland China, where the censored equivalent, Douyin, is used.)

TikTok said it could not comment on the Doublethink Lab claim on anti-DPP bias before studying the metrics on which the claims were made.

Sofia Yan, who runs Numbers Protocol, a company using blockchain technology to fight disinformation, agreed, saying China was “attempting to sow disputes or confusion.” Her company is currently partnering with several Taiwanese media outlets in their election coverage to ensure the images have been uploaded in a way that creates an unalterable blockchain record as proof of authenticity.

Beijing ballot

The propaganda campaign is not confined to the digital world, and more traditional spycraft and suborning of key figures is also at play — with China allegedly working with both opposition parties seeking to unseat the DPP.

Much of the focus is on high-profile arrests.

On Wednesday, former KMT legislator Chang Hsien-yao was arrested for suspected contravention of the Anti-Infiltration Law, and was released on a NTD $1 million (€29,000) bail.

In early January, Taiwanese prosecutors detained a parliamentary candidate on suspicion of taking NTD $1 million from Chinese agents. Ma Chih-wei, detained under the same law, was previously associated with the TPP. She is among 190 people under investigation for their ties to China.

Ma, who insists she is innocent, allegedly traveled to China several times until April last year, shortly before she joined the TPP as the spokesperson for its Taoyuan city branch, according to prosecutors. When she tried to get a nomination on the TPP party list, her bid was vetoed over those suspicious about her China connections. She subsequently ran as an unaffiliated candidate.

Trying to distance himself from the scandal around Ma, TPP presidential candidate Ko dismissed her as a “minor character” — despite having previously backed her bid. But the DPP, the main Beijing-skeptic party in Taiwan, questioned that position.

Chen Shih-kai, the spokesperson for Lai, the DPP presidential candidate, cheekily hinted in comments to Taiwanese media that she may not be the only — or most significant — figure on China’s payroll.

“If even a minor character pocketed a million [Taiwanese] dollars’ worth of cryptocurrencies as a reward for China’s electoral interference, how much is a main character worth?”

Mark Scott contributed to the reporting.