Taiwanese rapper Chen Boyuan, who goes by the stage name MinnanWolf PYC, has described taking money from China’s United Front operatives to broadcast their message to his fans through his lyrics, and how he became a staunch supporter of Beijing after being “brainwashed” while studying in China.
Chen set Taiwan’s social media ablaze last week with his revelations that United Front officials working for Beijing had sent him news stories for him to turn into song lyrics to alienate his fans from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party and its focus on keeping Taiwan democratic in the face of China’s territorial ambitions.
The United Front is a shadowy organization that seeks to promote China’s political interests through an extensive network of organizations and individuals around the world, experts say.
Taiwan split from mainland China amid civil war in 1949 and has never been ruled by Beijing.
“The police would give me money for my United Front work, and would also wine and dine me,” Chen told RFA Mandarin’s talk show “Asia Wants to Talk.”
“During those meals and tea-drinking sessions, they would secretly give me money and ask me to sign [agreements],” he said. “One time I got 10,000 yuan (US$1,370), and another time I took 30,000 yuan (US$4,100).”
‘Brainwashed’
Chen told RFA he grew up in a family that strongly supported the eventual “unification” of Taiwan with China, and who sent him to learn kung fu at the Communist Party-run Shaolin Temple from the age of 13.
They later enrolled him as an undergraduate at China’s Huaqiao University, which is run by the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, according to its official website.
Alongside “overseas Chinese” from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, South Africa, Malaysia and other countries, Chen was “brainwashed” over a long period of time under China’s “patriotic education” program, he told RFA.
After graduating, he aspired to do infiltration and United Front work as well as spying for the Chinese Communist Party, he said.
“I used to believe that an authoritarian system was better suited to governing human beings,” he said. “Back then, the Chinese economy was very strong, and the skyscrapers were going up so fast, while in Taiwan, it took them 10 years to build a subway.”
RELATED STORIES
EXPLAINED: What is China’s United Front and how does it operate?
A tale of two National Days: Artists pick sides across Taiwan Strait
Taiwan ‘determined’ to protect its democratic way of life
One of Chen’s biggest hits with Chinese fans was his rap “Fujian Ship,” extolling China’s military capabilities.
He said he couldn’t understand why Taiwanese and Chinese from the southeastern province, who share a similar dialect, couldn’t just get along.
“I had found some hope that I could unify Taiwan [with that song],” Chen told RFA. “I would create songs, like a young man holding up [Chairman Mao’s] red book.”
Legal dispute
Then the pandemic hit, and China was plunged into long cycles of citywide lockdowns, mass COVID-19 tests and compulsory quarantine that lasted three years and tanked the country’s economic growth.
Chen had another hit in China -- about social distancing in lines for daily tests -- that he claims changed the way people waited for tests.
But then he got into a legal dispute with his Chinese business partner, who he sued for siphoning off assets, and he started to realize that justice was a rare commodity under an authoritarian system like China’s.
He went back home to do his military service, and lost the lawsuit, likely because his partner’s parent worked for the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the party’s powerful enforcement arm.
He was also slammed as a supporter of Taiwan independence, a “crime” China has vowed to punish Taiwanese for, even if trials are held in absentia.
At first, he kept putting out pro-Beijing propaganda, publishing a video of himself in full Republic of China uniform saluting “all Chinese compatriots.” His commanding officer asked him to take it down.
“He said, ‘You’re a soldier now, and you can’t just casually post videos like that,‘” Chen recalled. “Sometimes I want to vomit when I look at those earlier videos; I feel so ashamed.”
“I used to think that the mainland was also democratic because we learned about its laws ... and the constitution,” he said. “But I eventually came to realize that it was really all about the leaders and their ideas and practices, and that there was no rule of law in China at all.”
‘I changed a lot’
Gradually, Chen started to wonder why China and Taiwan couldn’t be unified under a democratic system, rather than under the Chinese Communist Party.
“I still care about China, which is why I say it’s gotten it wrong,” he said. “I changed a lot after I came back for military service.”
“I don’t hate mainland Chinese, but I do hate the mainland government and the Communist Party,” he said. “Only when it’s overthrown ... can there be world peace.”
“The Republic of China has not been destroyed yet,” he said, in a reference to the 1911 government founded by Sun Yat-sen after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, which fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing a civil war to Mao Zedong’s communists on the mainland.
“Why should they surrender? They should be more anti-communist,” he said, calling on the island’s government to set up a department to counter United Front operations in Taiwan.
“This grand narrative of unification makes people forget whether they want to live in a democracy or under authoritarian rule,” he said.
For Chen, that question is now a no-brainer.
“The Chinese Communist Party is answerable to the highest levels of leadership, while the Taiwanese government is answerable to the people at the lowest level,” he said.
“The right to vote is a human right that everyone would like to have.”
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.