“Hey, I heard there’s a free travel group to Hainan for Taiwanese people aged 18 to 40. If you’re a first-time traveler, it’s even better,” Jeff, a Taiwanese exchange student in China, told me.
“Oh, and it’s 100 percent free,” he added.
Curious, I joined their WeChat group after being referred by an insider, beginning my undercover investigation into this peculiar initiative.
A Cloaked Journey
Our journey started with a five-hour bus ride from Macau to Leizhou, an obscure city in southern Guangdong. According to Metroverse, an urban economy tracker by Harvard University, Leizhou ranks 264th in GDP per capita among 348 Asian cities. This destination – hardly a tourist hotspot – raised my suspicions.
Upon arrival, we were greeted by Cao Kangwu, Leizhou’s deputy mayor and a member of its municipal committee, along with other Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. They led us to an extravagant roundtable banquet for 30 people – unnecessary for a group composed mainly of students. This reception hinted at something more strategic than a simple tour group.
The banquet in Leizhou. Photo by Ian Huang.
A Propaganda Tour in Disguise
While participants signed up to visit Hainan, expecting beaches and tropical landscapes, the actual itinerary was shrouded in secrecy. Each evening,we received details for the following day’s schedule, which differed drastically from expectations. Instead of leisure time on Sanya’s beaches, the group was subjected to propagandistic programming.
During the transit to other cities, we stopped for a visit to Zhanjiang Naval Base, the headquarters of China’s South Sea Fleet. As a cornerstone of China’s maritime power, the base is home to some of the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s most advanced warships, including the Shandong Type 002 carrier, Type 075 landing helicopter docks, and Type 055 destroyers.
“These ships are the most advanced warships that we have, it’s better than Japan, and the U.S. And they can resolve any conflicts in a very short period of time,” our tour guide said, flaunting the navy’s capabilities and subtly signaling the CCP’s resolve against any notion of Taiwan’s independence.
At the Chenbin Memorial Hall, a lecture caught my attention. It asserted that Taiwan’s Indigenous communities originated in Fujian Province, giving them Chinese ancestry. This fallacy sprouted in the late 19th century but was first systematically proposed by Chinese academia about 25 years ago. While this claim aligns with CCP narratives, it contradicts widely-accepted research tracing Austronesian languages back to Formosan roots in Taiwan over 5,000 years ago. Linguistic evidence suggests Austronesian communities migrated from Taiwan to the Philippines, Indonesia, and beyond to the Pacific Islands about 4,000 years ago.
This historical distortion was amplified by an Indigenous Taiwanese participant in an interview with Chinese media. Subsequent investigation revealed she was a Taiwanese entrepreneur running a cross-strait cultural tourism base in China, further embedding her in the CCP’s propaganda efforts.
The True Cost of “Free” Trips
Three days into the trip, the itinerary was updated to include a journalist’s participation. This unexpected development added to the suspicion surrounding the group’s real purpose.
“I’ve joined similar travel groups before, but this is the first time a journalist is tagging along,” said a senior participant.
Our travel expenses were subsidized by the Leizhou city council office for Taiwan affairs (市台办), with participants covering only their round-trip flight tickets to China. However, this “free” trip came with an implicit cost: the participants unwittingly became propaganda tools. The group’s images and testimonials praising China were showcased in state-run media, crafting an image of Taiwanese young adults enamored with China.
Shortly after the trip, Leizhou’s state-funded media published an article titled “Continuing the Legacy and Gathering Taiwan Youth in Leizhou” (赓续一脉·相聚雷州). The subtitle emphasized enhancing “cultural exchanges and national identity” between “the two shores connected by blood,” thus framing the trip in a way that affirms China’s claim to Taiwan.
Through subtle manipulations, the CCP turns unsuspecting participants in these supposed tourist trips into ambassadors for its narrative. These travel groups, though varied in size and theme, all serve one purpose: to propagate China’s vision of cross-strait unity. By having the tour guides or CCP officials showcasing urbanization and military power, they promote an image of a modern and unified China.
Without realizing the risks, these Taiwanese tourists become pawns in a larger geopolitical game. The CCP’s infiltration into the Taiwanese understanding operates incrementally, one tour group at a time, eroding the boundaries that separate Taiwan from China.
China’s Election Interference Through Tourism
In 2023, news reports by PTS and CNA revealed that the CCP used local collaborators, such as the Pan-Blue Association, to invite Taiwanese village heads to travel to China at subsidized or low costs. These trips were accompanied by instructions to support specific political candidates.
While Reuters in December 2023 estimated the number of such invitations at a few hundred, the actual number is believed to be much higher.
A village chief in Taipei City mentioned in an interview that the travel expenses were cheaper than the market price, and many people wanted to sign up for such trips. The travel groups were scheduled up to a month later. He noted that China was selective in its invitations, excluding those with pro-Green (pro-DPP) stances to choose participants who were from the Blue (Kuomintang, or KMT) camp or leaned Blue politically.
With the decline of Taiwanese identifying as Chinese to 2.4 percent, per NCCU surveys, China has had to step up its “election promotion through tourism packaging.” Taiwanese participants were brought to China to receive “official internal propaganda,” and further embrace the concept that Chinese are living well under China’s government. Village heads used “private groups” to obscure the involvement of the CCP’s United Front Work Department, which covertly funded these projects. The invitations extended beyond village heads to influential local figures, such as chairpersons of the building community management committee, a Taiwanese community committee similar to the homeowner association.
Impacts of Chinese Influence in Taiwan
Additionally, as part of the investigative reports regarding espionage threats posed by Taiwanese citizens illegally holding both PRC and ROC (Taiwan) citizenship, Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior discovered that five village heads held Chinese citizenship. The ministry has sent letters to their local offices to address the matter. According to officials, all five of these individuals were from northern Taiwan. If these village heads do not renounce their Chinese citizenship, they will be dismissed in accordance with the law. Under Taiwanese law, Taiwanese citizens holding household registrations in the PRC or using PRC passports face severe consequences, including the revocation of their Taiwanese household registration, Taiwanese ID, and passport.
The CCP is undermining Taiwanese democracy in multiple ways, and travel groups are just one way to achieve this goal. Another avenue is TikTok, the social media platform owned by Chinese parent company ByteDance.
A recent poll survey conducted by IORG Taiwan showed that 34.8 percent of Taiwanese people use TikTok. The users, who are distributed across all age groups, have noticeably higher favorability toward China. They are also more certain about China’s positive influence on Taiwan’s economic development and more inclined to believe that “Taiwan’s economy is failing,” favorite talking points of Beijing.
Amid growing tensions between China and Taiwan and domestic debates over China in Taiwan, Taiwanese law enforcement agencies are acting swiftly to prevent their nationals from becoming participants in these schemes.
But the CCP’s propaganda efforts are in effect as well, and will continue to occur quietly.