After a certain event ended, it was supposed to be time for a full debrief. Everyone sat together to talk about what went well over the past few days and what needed adjusting — a pretty standard process.
But the room suddenly filled with emotion. Someone started making accusatory, emotional claims, trying to pull the room to their side. The mood shifted, from a debrief into something else entirely.
I don’t know if the people who started it realized what they were doing. Maybe they didn’t.
But I saw one thing clearly: this group had zero resistance to this kind of manipulation.
No one called a stop. No one said, “wait, this isn’t what we’re here for.” The emotion flowed in, and most people, confused, just went along with it. The damage happened, regardless of whether the person who set it off was doing it consciously or not.
This stuck with me for a long time.
I only got into civil defense work last year — it hasn’t even been a year yet. But in that time, after talking with many people who’ve been in this space for a long time, one observation has become clearer and clearer:
Taiwan’s civil defense community has genuinely grown a lot in technical skill. First aid, communications, tactics, supplies, home hardening — every area has people seriously working on it, with one course after another.
But there’s one thing that gets discussed less, and may not even be dealt with at all: understanding the true nature of the enemy.
Civil defense preparation, beyond questions like “how does a war get fought” and “where would the missiles land,” also has some more fundamental questions — what is the Communist Party? How does it operate? What are its goals? What methods does it use?
We’re in a hurry to find ways to defeat the enemy, or defend our homes.
But we’ve forgotten to properly understand our enemy first.
It’s honestly a bit embarrassing to say — during the Chiang era, people’s understanding of the Communist Party’s true nature was far deeper than it is today.
After talking with a few senior people and colleagues, we decided to hold a talk on exactly this.
On July 4th, we invited veteran media professional Lee Chih-te to speak at the Cathay Financial Holdings Cultural Foundation in Taipei, on “The Invisible Network: The National Security Dilemma Under CCP Infiltration of Taiwan.”
Teacher Lee’s very first proposition reset the framework of the whole discussion:
【The nature of the Communist Party is that of an intelligence apparatus.】
It’s not a “party” in the sense understood in the democratic world. “The Party comes before everything” isn’t a slogan — it’s literal. Everything you have in China — your career, your assets, your freedom, your family — exists because the Party allows it. And that permission comes at a price: when the Party needs you, you must be used.
So any interaction with China carries a political purpose. No exceptions. That organization that invites you to visit, that new friend who’s suddenly unusually warm toward you, that partner offering resources — within the CCP’s system, these are all nodes that can be mobilized.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s built into the system’s design.
The fact that it hasn’t happened to you yet just means your turn to be used hasn’t come — it can’t be used as evidence that “it’s not like that.”
Another thing that stuck with me: the CCP doesn’t shy away from talking about united front work.
The United Front Work Department is a formal institution, with its own budget and cadres. “United front” is, in the CCP’s own language, an openly acknowledged working method — meaning making friends with a purpose. Teacher Lee said that united front work isn’t even intelligence work — it’s political socializing.
The problem is, people in democratic societies are used to treating friendship as something pure, something without an agenda. So when someone approaches you using united-front logic to build a relationship, you feel none of it. What you see is warmth, resources, opportunity. What you don’t feel is that this relationship is ultimately meant to have you used one day.
There was a concept in the talk that reminded me of that absurd scene I described earlier.
One of the Communist Party’s goals is to get everyone suspicious of each other. Mutual suspicion, mutual reporting — the erosion of trust itself benefits Communist rule, because a society that distrusts itself has no capacity to organize.
This logic isn’t only applied inside China. It gets exported.
You don’t need to deliberately spread rumors, you don’t need to manufacture conflict — you just need to get people into an emotional state, get them to start distrusting the people around them, and the job is more than half done.
That’s roughly what happened in that scene I described. The people who started it may not have done any real work at all — they just spoke while riding on emotion. But a group with no defenses got swept away within a matter of minutes.
Teacher Lee put it very precisely: the Communist Party wants us living in constant suspicion of each other. But excessive suspicion is itself falling into their trap. So we need vigilance, but we can’t live in suspicion. There’s no standard formula for that balance, but you have to know the problem exists before you can start practicing it.
In the past, psychological warfare work was placed within the military — the Political Warfare Bureau, the political warfare system — a design born of Cold War logic.
But the Communist Party’s psychological warfare was never aimed only at soldiers or politicians. It’s universal — aimed at businesspeople, academics, media, religious groups, social movements, even the algorithm on your social media feed. It doesn’t need you to know it exists in order to operate.
Taiwan’s civil defense preparers have been practicing: what to do if bullets come, what to do if bombs come, what to do if power and water are cut. All of this matters.
But long before the bullets and missiles arrive, the battlefield of mental/psychological defense has already opened.
We’ve been running naked on this battlefield for a long time. Short-form video, emotional mobilization, carefully packaged “fairness and justice,” getting your community to distrust itself from within — these weapons have been operating for a long time already, whether or not you’re aware of it.
This topic gets studied and discussed in academic circles and in certain political-work circles. But in the eyes of the general public, in the mainstream media, it’s almost entirely absent.
It’s not that it can’t be discussed — it’s that no one is discussing it. As if this were something that doesn’t exist, that doesn’t need to be discussed, understood, or dealt with.
“Can’t be discussed” is suppression. “No one is discussing it” is absence. And absence is harder to perceive, because you don’t know what’s missing.
Near the end of the talk, a political worker in the audience said something that’s stayed with me — he said that taking the Communist Party too lightly was something his generation failed to do, and that failure is part of why Taiwan is where it is today.
Before all the skills and tactics, there’s one more basic thing that needs to happen first: building disease awareness.
You have to first know that you’re exposed to risk before you’ll want to protect yourself. You have to first acknowledge that this battlefield exists before you can start preparing for it.
A first-aid kit, a radio, 72 hours of supplies — you may already be preparing these.
But the bulletproof vest for mental/psychological defense — have we even started preparing that?