Beijing and Taiwan traded accusations of “cognitive warfare” on Wednesday after a Taiwanese rapper exposed how the mainland’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using Taiwanese internet celebrities to influence public opinion.

Chen Po-yuan, a 25-year-old Taiwanese rapper who studied in China in his formative years and became a poster boy of CCP propaganda in 2022, told a Taiwanese YouTuber known as Pa Chiung about how he was brainwashed in China, in a video published on Dec. 6.

The video, advertised as the first part of a documentary series titled “China’s United Front Exposed,” has been viewed about 2.7 million times.

The documentary shows Chen making phone calls to two Taiwanese individuals in China, a state-controlled Chinese newspaper, and a local branch of the CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD), purporting to pitch his ideas for propaganda videos about how Taiwan’s military is authoritarian and how he can introduce other Taiwanese internet celebrities to the UFWD.

According to trailers for part 2 of the documentary, which is scheduled to be published later this month, Chen and others traveled to China in November on the UFWD’s invitation and recorded how CCP officials get Taiwanese content creators to make videos about the prosperity of mainland China.

“Those who don’t understand or care about politics ... are the easiest target of the united front,” the rapper said. “When you are invited there, you are gradually walking into their trap.”

A day after the first part of the documentary was published, Chen published another video showing that his account on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, had been locked. The account had nearly 1.68 million followers at the time. Chen and Pa Chiung also issued separate statements saying they would never commit suicide.

Taiwan’s government department that handles China affairs, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) warned on Dec. 8 that it’s illegal to spread disinformation or influence in elections at the behest of foreign adversaries or carry out unauthorized collaborations with the CCP and its political and military branches.

On Dec. 11, Beijing denied having bribed Taiwanese internet celebrities, and accused Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party of launching a “cognitive warfare” effort.

In response, MAC Deputy Minister and spokesman Liang Wen-chieh said Beijing’s denial is futile.

Liang said the CCP has always used entertainers in both the traditional media and on the internet. It’s “an important part of the CCP’s cognitive war on Taiwan,” he said.

UFWD University

Chen’s story in China began when he was 13 and started martial arts training at the world-famous Shaolin Temple.

“They initially treated us well,” he recalled in the documentary, but that was until he made a joke.

“I said once: China is Taiwan’s biggest island,“ he said. ”After that, some of my senior peers would rough me up when I returned to my dorm. That lasted for more than a year.”

During those years, Chen watched Chinese war movies that tell the CCP’s version of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Korean War, and grew “a strong sense of nationalism.”

According to Chen, he later realized that the monks at the temple, including the abbot, “were appointed by the CCP.”

Chen had a break from the CCP’s “education of patriotism” when he attended high school in the United States, but it resumed in 2018 when he returned to China to study law at Huaqiao University, without realizing that the university was under the direct control of the UFWD—the CCP’s arm responsible for getting everyone in and out of China in line.

“Only after I started, I realized I was in a concentration camp,” he said.

The name of the university, Huaqiao, means overseas Chinese. According to Chen, there were about 100 Taiwanese students in his year, as well as ethnic Chinese from Malaysia and Indonesia, and students from Africa.

The students were required to study the thoughts of Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

In history classes, they were taught about China’s humiliation at the hands of foreign forces and how the Chinese people in the 1940s supposedly loved the CCP over the Kuomintang, the party that ruled China before losing to the CCP and evacuating to Taiwan.

“Lecturers told us that ... it was up to us to improve cross-strait relations. After the unification [of China and Taiwan], we would become officials. That should be our ambition,” he said.

Rise and Fall

Huaqiao University is located in China’s Fujian Province, which is across the strait from Taiwan and has a dialect and traditions similar to those on the island.

Having fallen in love with the place, Chen wrote songs about how people on the two sides of the strait have the same roots.

In 2022, the senior-year student came under the CCP’s radar after his songs that encouraged people to follow rules during the COVID-19 pandemic went viral.

Local officials and media bequeathed him the title of a “patriotic Taiwanese youth.”

In that year, he became a poster boy of the cross-strait youth development forum, and he saw nothing wrong with supporting the CCP’s unification cause at the time.

Chen’s signature song, “Chinese Bosses,” later went viral in both China and Taiwan, but he didn’t receive any royalty payments, and his stardom in China soon became notoriety following a dispute with his business partner, the son of a local official.

According to Chen, the partner used Chen’s fame to build up a company with him before dumping him and taking the whole team away. After Chen tried to expose what the partners did on social media, the latter retaliated by launching a video campaign to label Chen as a Taiwanese separatist. The tactic led to “crazed” pile-ons by internet trolls, he said.

Chen said he initially attempted to resolve the issue through China’s legal system, only to be told by the court that the defendant was nowhere to be found, despite the fact that he had been posting videos on TikTok as usual.

“I became deeply aware that I wasn’t living in a democracy,” he said.

“I could continue to shill for the CCP ... but I don’t want other Taiwanese to go through the same.”

Chen: ‘We Will Become the Next Xinjiang’

Earlier this year, Chen returned to Taiwan for his mandatory military service.

“Some of my brothers in arms would say: If the CCP attacks, we can just wave the Chinese flag; everyone will be fine,” he said.

“But [they] haven’t considered what we will become next. I think if the CCP takes Taiwan, we won’t even be deemed worthy of being [like] Hong Kong. We will become the next Xinjiang.”

In the documentary, Chen called the director’s assistant of the Strait Herald, a state-run newspaper based in Fujian Province, telling her that he was planning to “expose” how authoritarian Taiwan’s military was.

The assistant promptly agreed to arrange interviews of Chen and friends whom he had made during his military service and to talk about finding work opportunities for them down the road.

In another call, a local UFWD official offered to pay “extra subsidies for ferry or plane tickets” if Chen could invite influential internet celebrities.

In an interview with Taiwan SET News, Pa Chiung said in the city of Xiamen alone, there are more than 1,000 influencers working with the local UFWD, including internet celebrities, coaches, and others.

Yeau-Tarn Lee, a professor at National Chengchi University in Taiwan whose research focuses on political thought, democratic theory, and human rights, applauded Chen and Pa Chiung for being “both clever and brave.”

“They have proved that the CCP has lots of UFWD officials working on influencing Taiwan, down to the county level,” he said.

Lee said the CCP is using unrestricted warfare to target Taiwan, but on the other hand, counterattacks such as Chen and Pa Chiung’s documentary, combined with tools to break through the CCP’s Internet Firewall, could deliver “a fatal blow to the communist regime.”

He said the documentary likely will have a deterrent effect on others who might otherwise accept the CCP’s invitation.