Again, I think this disinformation campaign you feel in Canada is perhaps only one part of the Chinese effort to expand its influence abroad. The way China does its control abroad is by extending its judicial powers into a third country. That is very concerning to us. As a matter of fact, in Taiwan we are facing a similar kind of challenge. The disinformation campaign in Taiwan, as I said just now, is part of our life because this is the way China has tried to infiltrate our society.
Even today, as we have seen what has come out of the 20th party congress, China, in the minds of its political leaders, thinks that taking away Taiwan without fighting with bullets is the cheapest way to do it. The way for that to become a reality is to use all kinds of cyber-attacks, grey-zone tactics, hybrid threats and all kinds of possible approaches, including disinformation campaigns.
Fortunately, this is a process of socialization. There is social education in Taiwan to tell our people to be better concerned with the news. When it comes up, you probably need to find out if it is not true. How are we able to do that? It is because there is a government policy to set up so-called fact check centres.
If you are suspicious of certain news on social media and consider that it may be malign and suspicious, you can just throw the news into that fact check centre. It is only an IP address. You check and then it will come back to you immediately to tell you which part of the news report or which part of the story is untrue. It can come back very quickly because chances are that many people will have the same suspicion. When the same news is thrown into this fact check centre, it learns to get the facts by itself. We learned to do that. This is something we can share with other countries.
All in all, I think what China is doing is against the norms and rules of the international community. No matter if it is a police station in a third country or a disinformation campaign of any kind, I think it only goes against good governance.
I hope we can work together.