Steven Lee 🇹🇼🇯🇵🇺🇸 8️⃣9️⃣6️⃣4️⃣

Taiwan’s crackdown on Chinese election interference is intensifying ahead of the island’s local elections. 🇹🇼 🇨🇳 What’s striking about Taiwan’s situation is not that China is trying to interfere — that’s been an open secret for decades but the sheer variety and granularity of the methods being deployed simultaneously. You’ve got a retired general organizing dinner parties to steer votes, a Chinese born citizen cultivating relationships across three political parties over six years to get Beijing friendly names onto candidate lists, fake employment documents to smuggle political operatives onto the island, subsidized travel packages to buy voter loyalty and illegal betting markets designed to manipulate public sentiment