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The Rashomon Strait: The Generative-AI Cognitive War Between China and Taiwan

Posted: September 27th, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Disinformation, Geopolitics | Tags: , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Rashomon Strait: The Generative-AI Cognitive War Between China and Taiwan

Let’s start with the figure that runs every headline: in 2025, Taiwan’s National Security Bureau detected 2.3 million pieces of disinformation coming from China —7% more than the year before— and over 45,000 fake accounts, up 61%. Video churned out on a production line. Voices cloned from recordings that Taiwanese citizens handed over without knowing it, answering fake job ads. Welcome to cognitive warfare with generative artificial intelligence! Industrial, cheap and, above all, personalized.

Because it is in that last adjective that the real novelty lies. In August 2025 the internal files of GoLaxy leaked —a Chinese company that had built something called, irony aside, a Smart Propaganda System. What does it do? It doesn’t fire the same message at millions of people: it reads social-media sentiment in real time, sorts more than a thousand Taiwanese public figures into “hardliners,” “moderates” and “swing voters,” and serves each group —each individual— the hoax that best fits their fears. Not propaganda by loudspeaker. Propaganda by sniper.

None of this came out of nowhere. Anyone who followed the story will remember the January 2024 presidential election: AI-forged audio accusing the ruling-party candidate of having once been an informant, or a counterfeit Terry Gou endorsing his rival for the KMT nomination (Hou Yu-ih) —a case laid out in the Microsoft Digital Defense Report. Or the synthetic avatars of the Weta365 app, tied to the Spamouflage network, spreading “the secret history of Tsai Ing-wen,” something documented by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). Two years on, that looks like the prototype. This is already the assembly line.

And what does Beijing make of all this? On 14 January 2026, two days after the Taiwanese report, the spokeswoman for the Taiwan Affairs Office, Zhu Fenglian, didn’t beat around the bush: the report “distorts the facts and smears the mainland,” and the one waging cognitive warfare —the habitual offender, she said— is in fact Taiwan’s own Democratic Progressive Party. The disinformation? The report’s. The bot armies? Taipei’s, aimed at the mainland. China’s embassy in France had already told the Institut de recherche stratégique de l’École militaire (IRSEM) the very same thing when it exposed Beijing’s influence networks: “Cold War mentality,” “defamation,” and the Chinese government “doesn’t need to hire anyone.” All spontaneous, of course.

This has a name, and a cultured one —like everyone reading this post: the Rashomon effect, after Kurosawa’s film in which a single crime is told in four incompatible versions and every one of them rings true. In the Taiwan Strait each side points to the other as the great manipulator. And the fascinating part isn’t deciding who is lying —that, precisely, is the trap— but that the very quarrel over who is spreading disinformation has become the battlefield. The noise is the weapon. Pure cognitive warfare.

That said, time to put on our analyst’s hat: after 2.3 million lies, cloned voices and algorithmic snipers, how many people actually changed their minds? The answer, awkward for alarmists and cynics alike, is: we don’t know, and the little we do know points to less than it seems. Surveys by DoubleThink Lab —Taiwanese, and hardly suspected of going soft on Beijing— find correlation, not causation: pro-China hoaxes land better among those already leaning toward the opposition, and slide off everyone else. The machine hardens the convinced and rarely converts the skeptic. Facing it, a Taiwanese civil society that fact-checks, debunks and laughs (what wonderful news: humor as firewall) with an effectiveness that would put half of Europe to shame.

Here’s the light, if these lines bring any: the capacity to produce disinformation with generative AI is real, proven, and growing at double digits a year. Its effect on what people believe and do is, for now, the great unknown. Strong upstream, weak downstream. Mistaking the first for the second —taking for granted that manufacturing lies equals winning minds— is the error that separates analysis from panic. Taiwan is today our best test bed.

That China —and plenty of others— spreads disinformation with generative AI: little doubt about it. That this suffices to bend a democracy practiced by a people with critical thinking, who know their neighbor all too well: no proof. Between those two terms —AI-made disinformation and critical thinking— much of this century’s geopolitics will be decided.

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