United Work, Divided Audiences: How China's Info Ops Polarize Taiwanese Voters

• In Event: Propaganda and Influence Campaign Operations

Abstract

What are the effects of Chinese information operations (info ops) on foreign policy preferences? Based on archival work on internal strategic documents issued by the Information Office of the Chinese State Council, we establish that the Chinese government intends to use info ops to improve its image abroad. However, we argue that Chinese efforts to persuade foreign audiences in its favor often backfire and are unlikely to work as intended by the Chinese government.

Drawing on insights from behavioral economics and social psychology, we argue that instead of persuading audiences, Chinese info ops polarize them, exacerbating pre-existing social cleavages and thus polarizing the target audiences through a combination of confirmation bias and reactance.

Using the case of Taiwan, a hard case with strong pre-existing priors about the Mainland, we quantify the proportion of pro-China content across both pro-China and other local media outlets using a content analysis based on a proprietary dataset negotiated from Facebook Inc. We then test the effects of these pro-China contents on public opinion towards China using an original survey experiment on representative samples of Taiwanese voters to test our theory.

Authors

• Zenobia Chan, Princeton University

• Noel Foster, Princeton University