By Yimou Lee
TAIPEI (Reuters) -Nearly 40,000 Taiwanese joined industry events in China such as conferences and trade fairs supported by the Chinese government in 2024, a study showed on Tuesday, as Beijing ramps up a charm offensive toward the island alongside military pressure.
China, which views democratically governed Taiwan as its own despite Taipei’s objections, has long taken a carrot and stick approach to Taiwan, threatening it with the prospect of military action while reaching out to those it believes are amenable to Beijing’s point of view.
Taiwan security officials are wary of what they see as Beijing’s influence campaigns to sway Taiwan public opinion after Taipei and Beijing gradually resumed travel links halted by the COVID-19 pandemic, but the scale of such programmes have not previously been systematically reported.
About 39,374 Taiwanese last year joined more than 400 business events supported or organised by government units across China, according to the study by Taiwan Information Environment Research Center (IORG), a Taiwan-based non-government organisation.
IORG’s research analysed more than 7,300 articles posted by a news portal run by China’s top Taiwan policy maker, the Taiwan Affairs Office. These articles offered event details, including the scale, location and agenda and were examined by AI-assisted tools and verified by IORG researchers.
The number of Taiwanese attending state-supported business events in China represented a 3% increase from 2023, IORG said, adding the agriculture, tourism and biotechnology and medical industries were among the top sectors.
"These are common industries in which the Chinese Communist Party exerts political pressure on Taiwan through economic means," the IORG report said.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The ruling Communist Party’s fourth-ranked leader, Wang Huning, told an internal meeting on Taiwan in February that Beijing was working to expand people-to-people exchanges in a bid to "deepen cross-strait integration and development," state news agency Xinhua reported at the time.
The 2024 events surveyed by IORG included a June job fair in southeast China’s Fujian province targeting more than 1,500 Taiwanese university graduates.
"Reward and punishment always go hand-in-hand in the Chinese influence campaigns on Taiwan," IORG co-director Yu Chihhao told Reuters. "Military drills and intimidation are punishment; cross-strait business cooperations are reward."
China staged two days of war games near Taiwan this month.