‘Aren't you worried you are being brainwashed?' The junket that left Richard's friends on edge

The Age

a day ago

Sitting in a cafe in southern Taiwan, tourism graduate Richard Huang makes a frank admission. Some of his friends have questioned whether he is a tool of the Chinese Communist Party, helping to spread Beijing's worldview through his social media.
On his Instagram account, Huang spruiks the Beijing-subsidised trips he has taken to places like Xinjiang, a region in China's north-west, and offers to help set up his followers on similar exchange programs targeted at Taiwanese youth.
'My friends have asked me: 'Hey, aren't you worried you are being brainwashed?'' says Huang, a pseudonym that he requested to speak openly about his experience.
'My response is: as long as you are resilient in your own mind, you won't be compromised by the influence coming from these trips.'
As part of an eight-day tour to Xinjiang, Huang and about 30 other Taiwanese students and graduates were put up in 4-star hotels and treated to nightly banquets. By day, their itinerary included visits to museums and cultural activities, such as musical performances by Uyghur groups, an ethnic Muslim minority in Xinjiang. The activities were peppered with speeches from Chinese officials about Taiwan and China being 'one big family'.
At one event, the group sang Tomorrow Will be Better, a Taiwanese pop song from the 1980s that has since been appropriated by Chinese state media to promote a message of unification between the democratic self-governing island and the mainland. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory, even though the CCP has never controlled the island.
The propaganda, Huang says, is the price participants pay for a cheap trip. He paid 20,000 Taiwanese dollars ($1043), about a 50 per cent discount, he says, with the rest subsidised by the Chinese government.
But there was another subtle quid pro quo. During the tour, Chinese officials suggested the participants share their experience on social media and tell their friends that Xinjiang was not the terrible place portrayed by Taiwanese media.
When he arrived back in Taiwan, Huang did just that.
'The magnificent scenes covered by a blanket of snow, the heaps of food I had, and the diversity of ethnic cultures and traditions I experienced – the list never ends, and the beauty of Xinjiang is beyond what photos and words can describe,' Huang posted on Instagram. He implored his friends to go and see for themselves.
Huang made no mention of the reports, including those by the United Nations, of the brutal repression and human rights violations of the Uyghur population by Chinese authorities, claims which the Chinese government denies. Instead, he observed that the different ethnic groups got along with 'great friendliness and tolerance'.
United Front campaign
State-sponsored travel programs are hardly a new tool in Beijing's soft-power efforts to shape opinions in Taiwan in line with its foremost goal – to bring the island under the control of the Chinese government.
But under President Lai Ching-te, the Taiwanese government has become increasingly concerned that Beijing is intensifying its propaganda, with study tours, tourism, cultural exchanges and social media influencers all spreading pro-Beijing messages to Taiwan's youth.
These activities are widely suspected by Taiwanese authorities and Chinese analysts to be part of the operations of the United Front Work Department – the CCP's core influence arm that uses diaspora communities to promote Beijing's agenda overseas.
China's Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
Dr Nathan Attrill, a China specialist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, has tracked United Front activity relating to Taiwan. He identified 67 events in 2024 that sought to cultivate Taiwanese Youth and influencers, more than double the next most targeted group of businesses and entrepreneurs.
'The main themes of these sorts of events are always to emphasise a shared culture, or a shared heritage between the peoples of China and Taiwan, thereby establishing some sort of justification for why China claims to have sovereignty over Taiwan,' Attrill says.
Beijing doesn't try hard to hide the United Front's involvement in these tours. The exchanges are often given effusive coverage in Chinese state media, which routinely notes the attendance of United Front officials or their associated organisations at the events.
Trips to Xinjiang, a top destination for such cultural tours, serve the dual purpose of presenting a tightly orchestrated, sanitised image of the region while promoting the Chinese government's unification agenda, says Raymond Sung, vice president of the Prospect Foundation, a government-backed institute in Taipei.
'I do not support the idea of being fully controlled by China ... The only thing that I want to do is to foster cultural exchanges between the two sides.'
Richard Huang
'By being a participant, you're actually sponsoring or being part of that [Chinese government propaganda],' Sung says.
These kinds of exchanges, experts say, are also designed to cleave at the deep political polarisation in Taiwan. Lai's pro-independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party is reviled by Beijing as a separatist force, and bitterly opposed by Taiwan's main opposition party, the Kuomintang, which favours closer ties with the mainland.
Beijing's Taiwan Affairs Office has accused Lai's government of inciting anti-China sentiment by 'exaggerating the so-called united front threat' and 'using all means to intimidate and suppress groups and individuals on the island who support and participate in cross-strait exchanges'.
For now, Beijing's charm offensive to win the hearts and minds of Taiwan's younger generations doesn't appear to be paying off.
Polling consistently shows that a clear majority of people in Taiwan identify themselves as being solely Taiwanese. This rose to as high as 83 per cent for 18-34 year-olds, compared with 15 per cent who identified as being Taiwanese-Chinese and 1 per cent who considered themselves to be solely Chinese, according to a Pew Research survey in 2024.
Tensions between propaganda and free speech
Nonetheless, the Lai government this year has pursued a crackdown on China's united front and espionage efforts, including tighter regulation of cross-strait exchanges and new disclosure requirements for all public servants travelling to China on such trips.
In February, Taiwan banned academic exchanges with three Chinese universities, citing concerns over political influence, and in March, authorities expelled three Chinese influencers for promoting 'unification by force' narratives on their social media accounts. The authorities have since revealed they are investigating 20 Taiwanese celebrities for amplifying CCP messaging.
Building on the themes of this campaign, Lai embarked this week on a 10-stop speech tour across Taiwan under the banner of 'uniting the country' in the face of China's pressure. In his first speech on Sunday, he declared 'of course Taiwan is a country' and called for its future to be decided by its 23 million citizens, infuriating Chinese authorities, which slammed his speech as 'deliberately inciting provocations'.
The expulsion of the Chinese influencers has fed into a broiling debate about free speech, and the curbs Taiwan is willing to put on its own democracy to counter the tactics of its authoritarian neighbour.
Chinese-born influencer Liu Zhenya, who goes by 'Yaya in Taiwan', fell foul of Taiwanese authorities for video comments she made to her 400,000 followers on Douyin (Chinese TikTok), which included praising China's military drills around the island in May 2024.
She expressed hope that by morning, 'the island will already be covered with red flags', a reference to China's flag. Taiwanese authorities deemed she had crossed a red line in advocating 'the elimination of our country's sovereignty'.
'There are limits to freedom of speech, and the limits are the country's survival,' Taiwan's Premier Cho Jung-tai said at the time.
While Yaya's expulsion was celebrated in Taiwan's pro-independence circles, it was met with concerns about overreach in others. A group of 75 scholars co-signed a statement saying that democracy and the rule of law were 'facing unprecedented damage and threats' under the DPP's crackdown.
Separately, academics Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu queried whether Yaya's videos, whilst repulsive in their view, were sufficient to constitute a national security threat and noted that any evidence of her CCP links had not been made public. Her deportation, they wrote on their blog, had 'only served to divide an already incredibly polarised society more, at a time when unity is more important than ever in the face of Chinese aggression'.
' Building a positive image of China'
Huang is not an influencer. Nor, he says, is he a member of a political party, though he doesn't support Lai's DPP. His Instagram account has just 2200 followers, and he hasn't parroted Beijing's unification narrative.
'I do not support the idea of being fully controlled by China where we lose all of our freedoms,' he says. 'The majority of Taiwan will not accept this'.
But he has become a facilitator, helping would-be participants navigate the online back-channels to those who organise the cultural tours, a role he says he receives no payment for, or any other in-kind benefit. There is nothing illegal in doing this, though he faces potential backlash from the online pro-independence crowd.
Huang says he is not naive to the fact that the key reason Beijing funds such trips is to promote its unification agenda, and concedes his glowing testimonials feed its propaganda machine.
'The only thing that I want to do is to foster cultural exchanges between the two sides,' he says.
'If you're asking if that helps build a positive China image, then yes, that certainly is the case.'