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Taiwan’s TikTok Ban: Defensive Measure or Overreaction to Chinese Influence?

Eugene Park Views  

Participants are dancing at the “Kemusan” dance competition held in the night market in Taipei, Taiwan, on January 25th. [Photo=CCTV News ]

The “Kemusan” dance competition, held in the famous Ningxia night market in Taipei, Taiwan, on January 25th, was successfully carried out despite controversy. For the escalating cross-strait tensions between China and Taiwan, Taipei’s decision to hold a dance competition with Kemusan, a dance that originated in mainland China, was criticized. Still, it showed how popular Kemusan is among the Taiwanese.

Recently, the 30-episode drama “Blossoms Shanghai,” directed by Wong Kar Wai and broadcast in China, swept Taiwan. The drama, which depicts the development of Shanghai in the 1990s, evokes memories of Hong Kong in the 1980s with the insertion of 57 popular songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 80s and 90s, such as Zhao Chuan’s “I’m a Little Bird,” Jacky Cheung’s “Steel One’s Heart,” and Jiang Yu Heng’s “Looking back again,” stirring nostalgia among Taiwanese viewers. Nowadays, it’s trendy among Taiwanese people to visit Shanghai.

This shows that Chinese culture is gaining popularity in Taiwan. In particular, Chinese social media, such as TikTok and Xiaohongshu, which are popular among young people in Taiwan, have been identified as channels for spreading Chinese culture. Some Taiwanese politicians are even wary of TikTok, considering it a weapon of “Cognitive Warfare” aimed at capturing the hearts of Taiwanese people.

왕자웨이 감독의 드라마 번화
Poster of Wong Kar Wai’s drama “Blossoms Shanghai”

Becoming “One” Through the Kemusan Dance

“I didn’t expect “Wutong” to come to Taiwan so quickly.”

This is a joke recently made by a Taiwanese netizen. “Wutong” does not refer to China’s “forced unification” but rather to unification through dance, also known as “Wutong.” This refers to the phenomenon of the dance “Kemusan,” which is currently hugely popular in China, sweeping Taiwan.

The Kemusan dance originated in the Guangxi Autonomous Region in China. Originally, “Kemusan” is a term used in China to refer to the third road driving test after the first written and second functional tests for a driver’s license. It is widely believed that the dance became famous after a resident of the Guangxi Autonomous Region posted a video of himself dancing to celebrate passing their road test on Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok).

The highlight of the dance is the comical movements, such as continuously shaking your legs to the left and right, twisting your wrists quickly, and moving your arms freely to the addictive melody of the famous Chinese song “Naruto Dance” melody. The dance movements are easy to follow, prompting many netizens to parody it. The number of views for Kemusan-related videos on Chinese short-form platforms has exceeded 50 billion.

Kemusan has spread not only across mainland China but also around the world. If you search the hashtag “Kemusan” in English on TikTok, you will find numerous videos of foreigners dancing to Kemusan. The Russian Royal Ballet troupe, world Latin dance champion Christina, and even the CEO of the semiconductor company Nvidia have joined the Kemusan dance craze. In our country, members of the e-sports team “T1,” including star player “Faker,” also danced to Kemusan.

Particularly in Taiwan, Kemusan started to become famous from September to October last year. The local big data analysis site, DailyView, ranked “Kemusan” third in its “Top 10 Social Media Issues of 2023.” TikTok played a significant role in supporting the popularity of Kemusan.

TikTok, a Channel for Spreading Chinese Soft Power

틱톡 사진로이터연합뉴스
TikTok [Photo=Reuters]

Launched in 2016, TikTok is a global short-form platform for sharing videos of 15 seconds or less. It is a popular app downloaded by 3 billion people worldwide, with the Chinese internet company ByteDance being the parent company of TikTok. In China, a Chinese version of the service is provided under the name “Douyin” instead of TikTok.

The Hong Kong weekly magazine Yazhou Zhoukan recently reported that TikTok and Xiaohongshu have replaced Facebook and Instagram and are now the most preferred mobile social media apps among young people in Taiwan.

According to the Taiwan Information Environment Research Center (IORG), a Taiwanese private think tank, 18.2% of Taiwanese people use TikTok, with an average usage time of 4.4 days per week. The proportion of users in their 20s was the highest at 28.6%, according to another market research firm, Kepios. 5.33 million Taiwanese adults over 18 use TikTok. This means that one-fourth of Taiwan’s adult population are TikTok users.

Last month, Bloomberg reported that despite the tension between the two sides, Chinese pop music is gaining popularity in Taiwan, thanks to the influence of Chinese social media platforms such as TikTok and Xiaohongshu. The song “I Shall Wait” by Chen Heng, a Chinese singer, released last February, is still in the top 10 on the Taiwan music chart Spotify. It also says that other songs from Chinese singers, such as “Birds and Cicadas (2020)” by Ren Ran and “Said Before (2021)” by Xiao A Qi, have been on the top 100 Taiwanese music chart for several years after their release, thanks to the power of TikTok.

Tsai Ching Su, a professor at Chung Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan, analyzed in an interview with Bloomberg that “it is unclear whether China’s cultural capacity can offset Taiwanese people’s concerns about military invasion to some extent, but its influence is certainly noticeable” and that “China’s soft power, including cultural entertainment products, has actually influenced Taiwanese people and significantly reduced anti-China sentiment.”

After the victory of anti-China Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Lai Ching Te in Taiwan’s 16th presidential election on January 13th, which was called a “US-China proxy war,” and the Democratic Progressive Party’s win over its 12th consecutive term in power, it has led to talk of using social media like Douyin to capture the hearts and minds of Taiwan’s youth.

Chung Yongnian, a professor at the Shenzhen Campus of Chinese University of Hong Kong, who is considered a Chinese government adviser, emphasized in a post on WeChat on January 14th, the day after the Taiwan election, that “China needs to make more efforts to capture the hearts of young Taiwanese people while promoting peaceful reunification with Taiwan” and that “China should focus on changing the identity of young Taiwanese people by actively using Chinese social media such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin.”

Taiwan on Alert for TikTok, a “Chinese Weapon of Cognitive Warfare”

This is also why the DPP has recently become increasingly wary of TikTok. The Tsai Ing-wen administration, which suffered a crushing defeat in the 2022 local elections in Taiwan, issued a “TikTok ban” within the administrative agency, claiming that TikTok is being used as a means of cognitive warfare by China. Although it won the 16th presidential election, it has also criticized that the failure to win the hearts of young voters was due to TikTok.

Chen Chien-jen, the Premier of Taiwan, warned on the 19th that TikTok is becoming a platform for cognitive warfare from China and should be highly cautious. As soon as the presidential election ended, the Taiwanese government immediately established a “Cognitive Warfare Research Center” and declared that it would prevent external forces from misleading Taiwanese people or spreading fake news related to politics, livelihood, economy, and cross-strait relations through social media like TikTok, thereby causing divisions in public sentiment or influencing elections.

On the other hand, China criticizes the Taiwanese government’s hypersensitive reaction, saying that they view the popularity of Kemusan and Flourish as having symbolic meaning in cross-strait cultural exchanges.

The Taiwan Affairs Office, in charge of affairs with Taiwan in China, criticized Taiwan on January 31st over Kemusan, saying, “Recently, we have seen a song and a dance spread widely across both societies through social media. It’s ridiculous that the Taiwanese government is worried about ‘Wutong (Dance Unification).'” They added, “The forces for Taiwan independence are associating even dancing to Kemusan with unification. This is not just anti-China but is anti-intellectual behavior.”

Regarding the drama Blossoms Shanghai gaining popularity in Taiwan, the office emphasized, “Because compatriots on both sides share the same language and culture, they empathize with the story, which is the power of culture. The common cultural roots and emotional resonance of the people on both sides will never change, no matter how much time passes or what obstacles there are.”

Eugene Park
content@www.kangnamtimes.com

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