The former PM's paid appearances since September include speeches in America, India and Portugal.

In 2018, a typhoon stranded thousands of people at Kansai International Airport, near Osaka, Japan. Among them were some tourists from Taiwan. Normally, this story might not have had much political meaning. But a few hours into the incident, an obscure Taiwanese news website began reporting on what it said was the failure of Taiwanese diplomats to rescue their citizens. A handful of bloggers began posting on social media, too, excitedly praising Chinese officials who had sent buses to help their citizens escape quickly. Some of the Taiwanese tourists supposedly had pretended to be Chinese in order to get on board. Chatter about the incident spread. Photographs and videos, allegedly from the airport, began to circulate.

The story rapidly migrated into the mainstream Taiwanese media. Journalists attacked the government: Why had Chinese diplomats moved so quickly and effectively? Why were the Taiwanese so incompetent? News organizations in Taiwan described the incident as a national embarrassment, especially for a country whose leaders proclaim they have no need for support from China. Headlines declared, “To Get on the Bus, One Has to Pretend to Be Chinese,” and “Taiwanese Follow China Bus.” At its peak, the angry coverage and social-media attacks became so overwhelming that a Taiwanese diplomat, apparently unable to bear the deluge of commentary and the shame of failure, died by suicide.

Subsequent investigations turned up some strange facts. Many of the people who had been posting so prominently and with such enthusiasm about the incident were not real; their photographs were composite images. The obscure website that first promoted the story turned out to be affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party. The videos were fake. Strangest of all, the Japanese government confirmed that there had been no Chinese buses, and thus no special Taiwanese failure at all. But this semblance of failure had been pounced upon by journalists and news anchors, especially by those who wanted to use it to attack the ruling party. This, clearly, was what Chinese propagandists had intended. The anonymity of social media, the proliferation of “news” sites with unclear origins, and, above all, the hyper-partisan nature of Taiwanese politics had been manipulated in order to push one of the Chinese regime’s favorite narratives: Taiwanese democracy is weak. Chinese autocracy is strong. In an emergency, Taiwanese people want to be Chinese.

[From the December 2022 issue: Taiwan prepares to be invaded]

The incident was notable not because it was entirely new or unexpected but because it was another battle in a long-term campaign that arguably dates back to the founding of modern Taiwan. In 1949, General Chiang Kai-shek moved his Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT), to the island and established the Republic of China there. Ever since, the People’s Republic of China has seen Taiwan as its ideological enemy, an irritating reminder that not all Chinese wish to be united under the leadership of the Communist Party.

Sometimes Chinese pressure on Taiwan has been military, involving the issuing of threats or the launching of missiles. But in recent years, China has combined those threats and missiles with other forms of pressure, escalating what the Taiwanese call “cognitive warfare”: not just propaganda but an attempt to create a mindset of surrender. This combined military, economic, political, and information attack should by now be familiar, because we have just watched it play out in Eastern Europe. Before 2014, Russia had hoped to conquer Ukraine without firing a shot, simply by convincing Ukrainians that their state was too corrupt and incompetent to survive. Now it is Beijing that seeks conquest without a full-scale military operation, in this case by convincing the Taiwanese that their democracy is fatally flawed, that their allies will desert them, that there is no such thing as a “Taiwanese” identity.  

Taiwanese government officials and civic leaders are well aware that Ukraine is a precedent in a variety of ways. During a recent trip to Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, I was told again and again that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a harbinger, a warning. Although Taiwan and Ukraine have no geographic, cultural, or historical links, the two countries are now connected by the power of analogy. Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told me that the Russian invasion of Ukraine makes people in Taiwan and around the world think, “Wow, an authoritarian is initiating a war against a peace-loving country; could there be another one? And when they look around, they see Taiwan.”

But there is another similarity. So powerful were the Russian narratives about Ukraine that many in Europe and America believed them. Russia’s depiction of Ukraine as a divided nation of uncertain loyalties convinced many, prior to February, that Ukrainians would not fight back. Chinese propaganda narratives about Taiwan are also powerful, and Chinese influence on the island is both very real and very divisive. Most people on the island speak Mandarin, the dominant language in the People’s Republic, and many still have ties of family, business, and cultural nostalgia to the mainland, however much they reject the Communist Party. But just as Western observers failed to understand how seriously the Ukrainians were preparing—psychologically as well as militarily—to defend themselves, we haven’t been watching as Taiwan has begun to change too.     

Although the Taiwanese are regularly said to be too complacent, too closely connected to the People’s Republic, not all Taiwanese even have any personal links to the mainland. Many descend from families that arrived on the island long before 1949, and speak languages other than Mandarin. More to the point, large numbers of Taiwanese, whatever their background, feel no more nostalgia for mainland China than Ukrainians feel for the Soviet Union. The KMT’s main political opponent, the Democratic Progressive Party, is now the usual political home for those who don’t identify as anything except Taiwanese. But whether they are KMT or DPP supporters (the Taiwanese say “blue” or “green”), whether they participate in angry online debates or energetic rallies, the overwhelming majority now oppose the old “one country, two systems” proposal for reunification. Especially since the repression of the Hong Kong democracy demonstrations, millions of the island’s inhabitants understand that the Chinese war on their society is not something that might happen in the future but is something that is already well under way.  

[Read: The lessons Taiwan is learning from Ukraine]

Like the Ukrainians, the Taiwanese now find themselves on the front line of the conflict between democracy and autocracy. They, too, are being forced to invent strategies of resistance. What happens there will eventually happen elsewhere: China’s leaders are already seeking to expand their influence around the world, including inside democracies. The tactics that the Taiwanese are developing to fight Chinese cognitive warfare, economic pressure, and political manipulation will eventually be needed in other countries too.

The strange story of the nonexistent buses at Kansai airport did have one unanticipated consequence: It inspired the Taiwanese activists Ttcat and Puma Shen to co-found Doublethink Lab, a nonprofit research group. Ttcat (the name is an alias) is a high-school dropout who played a lot of video games, eventually got accepted at a university to study computer science, dropped out again, and then drifted into the world of environmental campaigning. That résumé was excellent preparation for what he does now: track and identify Chinese information operations, and design programs to educate the public about them. It also means that he and Shen, a lawyer and criminologist, can work on behalf of Taiwan while keeping their distance from the Taiwanese government. No one can accuse an activist with a background in video games of climbing some kind of political career ladder.  

Ttcat told me that the airport story forced him to think harder about how to counter that kind of non-attack attack. The episode wasn’t merely a lie, after all. It was a very well-planned attempt to insert a story of Taiwanese weakness into the Taiwanese political debate. After it happened, he and Shen put together a team that now works in exactly the kind of space you would imagine: a few dark, scruffy rooms, filled with very young, hyper-online people. They showed me a presentation, based partly on their recent work on Chinese propaganda about Ukraine. Among other revelations: Weirdly, quite a few Chinese stories are built around a random Ukrainian tourist who turned up in Hong Kong during the mass political demonstrations there in 2019. The man’s photograph appears over and over again in Chinese and Taiwanese media, with special attention paid to his tattoo, a far-right symbol. He is alternately described as a neo-Nazi or as a provocateur, sent by someone—the CIA?—to aid the Hong Kong protesters. The idea is to evoke fears of disorder, chaos, and extremism, and to connect them to Hong Kong as well as to Ukraine. Chinese state actors have also pushed conspiracy theories about nonexistent biolabs in Ukraine—the same stories used by Russia and by the international far right to explain and justify the Russian invasion that began in February.   

Doublethink isn’t the only team identifying and analyzing propaganda campaigns against Taiwan: Another monitoring organization, the Information Operations Research Group—also made up, once again, of young people with a background in online activism—has put together a report on the Chinese media and Chinese influencers who sought to sway conversation on the island during the coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, the Chinese first pushed the idea that the U.S. was preventing Taiwan from getting vaccines, then that the Taiwanese were falling behind the rest of the world in vaccines, then that Taiwanese residents were surreptitiously getting their vaccines from China. These narratives now look quite thin and unconvincing in light of the disastrous Chinese lockdowns of 2022, but some of them had traction in Taiwan at the time.

Rather than merely passing their analyses of Chinese tactics to the government, both organizations also work on countering them. Doublethink produces videos that seek to help viewers understand where the information they are reading is coming from so that in future they can do the detective work themselves. IORG runs workshops—more than 180 so far—to help Taiwanese middle- and high-school teachers create programs on disinformation in their classrooms. One of IORG’s co-directors, Chihhao Yu, told me that the point is not just to help students find tidbits of false information but to teach them to understand broader narratives: how pro-Chinese media and social media string together information—which can be either true or false—to make people doubt whether their country has allies, whether it has the ability to stay separate from China, whether it has a future at all. Yu himself has no doubts about Taiwan’s future. His website describes him like this: “Taiwanese. Hacking things. Build a new nation.”

Unusually, the most famous member of this amorphous world of online activists is now part of the government. Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first digital minister, doesn’t just promote the world of digital activism; she helped create it. A child prodigy who was programming in Silicon Valley at the age of 19, she participated in the Sunflower Revolution of 2014—a youth movement organized around opposition to a trade deal with China—and describes herself both as a “conservative anarchist” as well as “post-gender.” (She has said she is unbothered by which pronouns anyone uses.) On the day she and I met, Tang was wearing a T-shirt bearing the Ukrainian trident, and she told me she has been in touch with Ukraine’s own innovative digital ministry. She reminded me that her commitment to openness is absolute: Every interview she gives, including the one I did with her, eventually appears online.

Tang’s philosophy is one of asymmetric warfare: Taiwan, she believes, cannot play by the same rules as China. The centralized, heavy-handed, thuggish tactics of the Chinese Communist Party can only be repulsed by something completely different: decentralized grassroots groups that use open-source software and remain as transparent as possible. In accordance with that philosophy, the number of actual employees in Tang’s ministry is very small. Instead, a lot of the work countering Chinese narratives devolves to groups like Doublethink and IORG. In Taiwan, she told me, the social sector—co-ops, nongovernmental organizations, social entrepreneurs—enjoys greater public trust than the political parties or the private sector. This dynamic has a history: Civic activists pushed to end KMT’s one-party rule in the 1980s and curtail the island’s economic links to China in 2014, and they still have a lot of clout. Tang noted that one of the country’s most prominent political-discussion forums, a bulletin-board system called PTT, is run by students at National Taiwan University, using “all free software, open source, collective governance, and so on.” She explained, “No political party will say, ‘Oh, let’s shut down PTT.’ If they say that, they don’t get votes.”

[Read: No more ‘strategic ambiguity’ on Taiwan]

Because people remember that activists helped create Taiwan’s modern democracy, she thinks that they now trust them to monitor the tricky, through-the-looking-glass world of Chinese disinformation, or at least more than they would trust the government with that task. Instead of turning to government officials, for example, Taiwanese who are in doubt about something they have heard or read can turn to Cofacts, an open-source website that allows users to contribute their own fact checks to a general debate. The site also deploys some tricks from video games—such as rewards and leveling-up challenges—to keep people engaged. Billion Lee, one of the group’s founders, has written that official influences are kept out of the service on purpose: “When governments get too involved in fighting disinformation, it can look like an infringement on free speech.”

By some accounts, Tang still doesn’t quite have enough influence inside the ruling party to promote all of these ideas—unsurprisingly, a lot of politicians resist the level of transparency that she favors—but she can still point to real achievements. During the pandemic, the digital ministry encouraged a kind of joke competition between people who got the Moderna vaccine and those who got the Pfizer vaccine as a way of promoting vaccination more generally; Tang calls this and other attempts to make conspiracy theories into jokes “humor over rumor,” noting that Taiwan never developed a strong anti-vax movement. Under Tang’s leadership, the government has also experimented with the use of Polis, an online discussion platform, to conduct better public debates. Entry into national debates is limited to Taiwanese; users’ online identity is linked back to their membership in the national health-care system. While some of the conversations conducted using Polis can seem pretty trivial—a national debate over the use of e-scooters, for example—the goals could not be more existential. The idea is that if everyone is talking in a reasonable way, according to transparent rules of online debate, then conspiracy theories don’t spread so quickly.

Tang’s vision is supremely rational: Better conversations, better democracy, and more transparency will counter even the most subtle Chinese information campaign. But not all of China’s methods are meant to go unnoticed. When Beijing dispatched warships, airplanes, and missiles to fly around and across the island after Nancy Pelosi’s visit, the point was not just to create insecurity but to provoke terror and alarm.

How to counter this fear? The answer can’t just be to berate the fearful, or to accuse them of cowardice. Fear is a physical sensation, and it is best countered with physical activity, or at least some form of action. In Taipei, I saw what that might look like: three dozen office workers sitting on the floor of a conference room on a rainy, weekday afternoon, learning how to stop heavy bleeding.

Outside, the rush hour was just beginning; inside, managers, assistant managers, secretaries, and even the CEO, dressed in a somber blue suit, were laughing and talking as they wrapped bandages on silicone arms and legs and learned through trial and error that if a tourniquet is correctly applied, it really hurts. Normally, the employees of INA Energy, the company sponsoring the exercise, don’t think about blood or tourniquets; their expertise is in renewable power and energy storage. But “we want to empower our team to have this kind of knowledge,” one of the managers told me, because Taiwan has earthquakes and has typhoons—and, he said, because Taiwan might be the target of a Chinese military attack.

The emergency-response trainers, the silicone limbs, and the bandages were all donated by the Forward Alliance, another civic organization. Its founder, Enoch Wu, has thought a lot about the psychology of resistance, and in particular about the need for civil defense. The Forward Alliance provides training in emergency medicine and evacuation procedures, mostly at churches and schools, all over the island, several days a week. Part of the purpose is pragmatic: If a typhoon, an earthquake, or military attack really were to occur, the island would immediately require people who know about evacuation and emergency medicine. Wu told me that the outbreak of the war in Ukraine convinced many of his compatriots that they must prepare for exactly that possibility: It “really impressed upon average citizens that things can happen, at no fault of your own, at no instigation.” Since February, demand for emergency-response training has “kicked into overdrive,” he said, and not only at his organization. A Taiwanese businessman in September donated more than $20 million to another civil-defense charity, the Kuma Academy—co-founded by Puma Shen, of Doublethink—which plans to offer not only emergency-response instruction but eventually training in the use of weapons. The demand is already strong: The first courses were snapped up just as soon as they went online (“like concert tickets,” Shen told me).

[Read: Taiwan faces its Ukraine moment]

But the point of these exercises isn’t just to teach people how to shoot a gun or bandage a wound. They are also meant to nurture feelings of community and connection, giving people confidence in advance that, in an emergency, they can count on their fellow citizens. These kinds of preparatory experiences have an especially important impact in Taiwan, a nation whose politics are deeply polarized, with members of the blue and green camps suspecting one another of irresponsibility or reason, not unlike the red-blue competition in the United States. Wu wants his classes not just to provide particular skills but to help create this intangible feeling of trust. “It’s tough to find activities that make you feel like we’re in this together, especially in an urban environment,” he said. The awareness of a threat can make people scared and isolated. With a bit of organization and some silicone limbs, the threat can pull people together, even people whose politics are very different—or that’s the theory.

In practice, of course, both the Taiwanese activists organizing civil defense and those who are trying to counter Chinese narratives are making a large bet. They are wagering that democracy and transparency can beat autocracy and secrecy, that trust can overcome polarization, that society can organize itself, from the ground up, to overcome fear. They are doing so in a country that is linked to its worst enemy in complicated ways—language, shared history, relatives, investments—and has some understandable anxiety about the reliability of faraway allies.

But their fight against China’s cognitive warfare is not just shadowboxing with bots on the internet. The Russians invaded Ukraine in part because they believed, wrongly, that the Ukrainians would not fight back. If the Chinese assume that the Taiwanese will fight back, then they might think twice. In that sense, there’s a deep connection between the work of the broader world of Taiwanese social activists—those who track Chinese disinformation online as well as those who defend judicial independence, campaign for the rights of Hong Kong citizens and ethnic minorities, promote government transparency—and the work of the military, which has its binoculars trained on the Taiwan Strait. By shoring up democracy, by smoothing polarization, by bringing more people into an active engagement with public life, all of them hope to convince China that an invasion is too costly and risky. Taiwan’s future depends on whether they are right.

Since the horrific murders at Sandy Hook Elementary a decade ago, America has seen hundreds more mass shootings, a sharp rise in gun deaths generally, and an alarming turn toward gun-glorifying political extremism. Yet we still depend on hundreds of laws that keep guns out of crowded public places, stop teenagers from buying handguns, and prohibit criminals from arming themselves with assault rifles. Now, because of a recent Supreme Court ruling, many of these remaining regulations are in danger of being dismantled. As bad as America’s gun-violence problem is, it could be about to get much worse.

Less than two years after the appointment of President Donald Trump’s third pick for the U.S. Supreme Court created a 6–3 conservative supermajority, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion in the case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen. The Court could have issued a narrow decision and directed New York to be more lenient in issuing concealed-carry permits. But as in the Dobbs v. Jackson decision on abortion, which came a day after Bruen this year, the conservative majority seized an opportunity not to adjust precedent incrementally, but to destroy it completely.

For public safety and gun policy, the Bruen opinion is proving nothing short of seismic. Even as the nation struggles with yet another series of mass shootings, courts across the country are rushing to deal with a spate of lawsuits and motions that will create regulatory chaos over firearms. Many of these cases are tailored to produce appeals that may ultimately go up to a Supreme Court predisposed to the broadest possible interpretations of Second Amendment rights.

In the Bruen opinion, Thomas made clear that, henceforth, the Court’s conservative majority would judge all firearms regulations by a new originalist standard: If there is no historical proof of a gun law linked to 1791 or 1868—the years when the Second and Fourteenth Amendments, respectively, were ratified—then any modern law restricting firearms is liable to be ruled unconstitutional. Never mind that any teenager with a modern AR-15 rifle can fire several times every second, whereas a well-trained 18th-century soldier could fire a musket, at best, three or four times a minute.

[Aaron Tang: What if the Court saw other rights as generously as gun rights?]

An effect of the Thomas opinion is to press judges in lower courts into serving as historians and archival researchers. To decide new gun cases, they must go searching for precedents among incomplete or nonexistent records, some of which are centuries old and difficult to decipher. The results are likely to shock Americans who rely on long-established public-safety laws to protect children in schools and citizens who gather in churches or attend sports events and the like. Instead of making it more difficult for a troubled 18-year-old to become a deadly mass shooter, this Court has made it much easier—all in the cause of empowering an unrepresentative, radical pro-gun minority of Americans whose vocal demands about their right to bear arms have found sympathetic ears on the Supreme Court.

Several cases already give us a glimpse of the future under Bruen. In West Virginia, a judge recently ruled unconstitutional the federal law that mandates serial numbers on guns, because he can find no evidence of a statute requiring firearms to carry a serial number dating to 1791. If that judge’s decision is upheld, police detectives will find it almost impossible to solve gun crimes, because serial-number records are the basis for most such investigations.

In Texas, a judge just struck down the prohibition of gun ownership by domestic abusers. His reasoning derives from the regrettable truth that spousal abuse was not a criminal offense in the 1700s. This decision is set to undo laws across the nation that have prohibited more than 300,000 gun purchases by abusers—and at a time when recent data show a steep rise in the number of women, including Black women at a disproportionate rate, killed by a male gun owner in their lives.  

In New York, in October, a judge ruled that guns must be allowed in places of worship, because he couldn’t find any old laws that prohibited armed parishioners. Laws that regulate magazine capacity in several states are also currently facing challenges, which could mean that no state or municipality could regulate the sale of 30-round, or even 100-round, magazines for any sort of gun, including the AR-15s preferred by mass shooters who desire to inflict as much carnage as they can without having to pause to reload (a moment that makes them vulnerable to citizens fighting back to subdue them).

[Read: Have the justices gone gun-shy?]

Another Texas law prohibiting teenagers from carrying handguns was recently struck down because young men alive at the time of our founding faced no such regulation. Similar cases are making their way through other courts, which, if they stand, could not only permit 18-year-olds to buy handguns (the current national law mandates a minimum age of 21), but also imperil hope of imposing a national age restriction on the sale of AR-15 rifles. Meanwhile, in several states other suits are threatening to overturn laws that regulate the sale of those same assault rifles.

Other likely Bruen-induced outcomes include lawsuits to end all background checks, based on the absurd argument that running background checks on gun sales violates the Constitution because no nationwide computerized database of criminal records existed at the country’s founding. That such a lawsuit would not only threaten efforts to close the gun-show loophole but also aim to eliminate the entire background-check system—the same one that has stopped millions of dangerous criminals from purchasing guns—reveals just how far the Bruen decision is moving the needle.

For most Americans, this survey of the post-Bruen lawfare should sound shocking and dangerous. But it’s a dream come true for extremists who place gun rights at the forefront of their culture-warring. They see an opportunity to grasp a wider victory from the way Bruen alters the foundation of a long-accepted balance between individual rights and society’s need to ensure collective safety. This same reordering of values and priorities lies at the heart of efforts to dismantle government influence more generally, including over environmental protections and public-health mandates.

These new attacks are so extreme that even laws supported by the gun industry are coming under threat. Until not so long ago, an overwhelming majority of leaders in the firearms industry, in which I spent more than 25 years as a sales executive, accepted the necessity of regulations like the ones that flowed from the 1939 Supreme Court case U.S. v. Miller, which upheld the 1934 National Firearms Act. That statute severely restricted the sale of sawed-off shotguns, silencers, and fully automatic weapons such as the “Tommy guns” used by criminal organizations like Al Capone’s.

Miller thus clarified the balance between individual freedoms and collective safety as a sound constitutional test for all gun laws. This finding led to other bedrock laws such as the federal background-check system, or NICS, which was instituted in 1998. This statute protected citizens by making it harder for criminals to obtain firearms, while also providing reasonable liability protection for responsible gun manufacturers. Up until the late 2000s, most people I knew in the industry approved of laws enabled by the Miller standard that helped prohibit “bad guys” from buying guns.

Unfortunately, for three decades, the industry was also partnering with the National Rifle Association—at a time when the organization was radicalizing a political base that became hell-bent on destroying those laws. The first big victory for this coalition came in 2008 with the Supreme Court’s D.C. v. Heller decision, which reinterpreted the Second Amendment to establish a broader individual right to own a gun for self-defense.

Heller was just the start. While the NRA helped rally opposition to newly elected President Barack Obama, fringe actors and conspiracy-theory-mongers were empowered to make guns a totemic issue for the right. As the NRA’s power grew, judges who hoped for advancement—as far as nomination to the Supreme Court—got the message, and started issuing more radical decisions on gun rights as a way to keep their names at the top of lists of potential nominees.

Brett Kavanaugh, then a federal judge on the D.C. Circuit, illustrated this trend when he wrote a dissent arguing that courts should cease to rely on constitutional tests for gun laws that balanced public safety with Second Amendment rights—the foundation of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Miller. After President Trump announced his pick of Kavanaugh, the NRA’s leader, Wayne LaPierre, was quick to call on members to urge senators to confirm him. The NRA played an equally prominent role in the nomination processes of Trump’s other two justices, spending millions in partnership with the Federalist Society to promote Neil Gorsuch and rallying confirmation votes for Amy Coney Barrett.

The NRA’s political effort helped create the current Supreme Court majority that elevates the rights of gun owners above almost all others. For now, the results are manifesting in the lower courts. How this conservative-dominated high-court bench will ultimately rule on each Bruen-inspired challenge is not certain, but one thing is: Those cases now racing up through the circuits will quickly force the justices to decide whether they were serious about undoing the balance of Miller.

This is no quibble or nicety. The justices will be forced to decide whether we are to be a country that must allow armed citizens in every grocery store, church, or park. They will be forced to decide whether we must expand the right of open carry to every state in the nation, including its largest metropolises, with all the potential for mayhem that portends. They will be forced to decide whether we must abandon laws that prohibit abusers from buying guns and killing their spouses or that prevent troubled teenagers from arming themselves with AR-15s. Given the gravity of it all, perhaps the NRA is right about this much—more than any other part of the Constitution, it is the Second Amendment that determines whether we are to govern ourselves or not.

For far too long, the United States has treated Africa as an afterthought, much to Washington's peril. US leaders have allowed rivals like China and Russia to deepen their ties -- both economic and political -- while America twiddles its thumbs on the sidelines.