A Taiwanese scholar has warned that artificial intelligence could hand Beijing control over how the Chinese language is interpreted worldwide. Speaking at a seminar on resistance in Taipei on Saturday, Hung Tzu-wei, a research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, said China is deliberately trying to monopolize global Chinese-language interpretive authority by supplying vast quantities of simplified-Chinese data. He argued this amounts to a form of cognitive warfare that produces a new kind of “epistemic injustice.”
Hung said Taiwan’s government should scrap its policy of privileging Mandarin, which he said has no legal basis according to a Control Yuan report, and that replacing “Huayu” with Taiwanese-language writing is the future trend. He noted that Taiwan initially did not speak Mandarin and that martial-law-era ethnic framing produced flawed language revitalization policy. Although Taiwan has its own language models, he argued that datasets nobody uses have no future. He pointed to Ukraine, where the share of Ukrainian speakers rose after the Russian invasion.
Hung also distinguished between China’s short-term interference, which typically targets elections and draws a stronger government response, and long-term cultural infiltration, which could shape children’s future ideologies.
Other speakers addressed the ethics of resistance. Philosopher Wu Feng-wei, citing Kant, argued that citizens of an invaded country have a duty to resist, provided there are shared principles of justice, an immediate external threat, and a population that shares in the community’s benefits. Historian Chen Chun-kai stressed vigilance against online troll armies and disinformation.
Hung added that a recent Academia Sinica survey found that people who value democracy are not necessarily willing to defend Taiwan, whereas those with stronger Taiwanese identity are more willing to resist China.
Source: Central News Agency (Taiwan), September 19, 2026
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/aipl/202609190230.aspx