Puma Shen: He Studied China's Cognitive Warfare; Then China Put Him on a Satellite Map

One afternoon in the 2010s, a law doctoral student in his early thirties followed a prison warden into the Taipei Juvenile Detention House. The floor had just been mopped; the streaks of water had not yet dried. The warden stepped across them, and the visiting group followed. Shen stopped and walked around them. Two boys who were mopping the floor looked up, bowed to him, and said softly, "Thank you."¹

When he got home that day, he wrote a question in his notes: "Why is there such a big difference in the way we treat people in different places?"¹ That question would later take him from criminal law to criminology, from academia to civil defense, from studying China's cognitive warfare to being placed under investigation by Chinese public security authorities, warned by CCTV that "you could be next," and having the coordinates of his Taipei home published through commercial satellite imagery by a Chinese Weibo account.

His name is Puma Shen. Born in Taipei in 1982, he is an associate professor and director of the Graduate School of Criminology at National Taipei University.² He studies the CCP's information warfare against Taiwan, cognitive operations, and transnational repression. He studied these things for seven years. In the eighth year, they came for him.

30-second overview: Puma Shen (born 1982), associate professor and director of the Graduate School of Criminology at National Taipei University. In 2021, he co-founded Kuma Academy with strategic studies scholar Ho Cheng-hui. Robert Tsao donated NT$600 million to support it, with the goal of training three million "Kuma Warriors" in three years.³ In February 2024, Shen was elected a Democratic Progressive Party legislator-at-large.⁴ Beginning in October 2024, China sanctioned him six times within a year. On October 28, 2025, he became the first elected Taiwanese politician placed under investigation by China for "splittism,"⁵ and on November 9 CCTV aired a seven-and-a-half-minute "exposure" feature warning, "You could be next."⁶ On New Year's Day 2026, a Chinese Weibo account used commercial satellite imagery to publish the coordinates of his home and workplace in Taipei.⁷ He continued to fly to The Hague, Germany, and France; in 2026, he spent Valentine's Day on a flight to France.⁸

"Do Not Interrupt or Talk Back When the Teacher Is Speaking"

In Puma Shen's elementary-school communication book, a teacher once wrote: "Do not interrupt or talk back when the teacher is speaking. Po-yang is not bad by nature, but he occasionally loses control and acts as if no one else matters." His mother replied underneath: "His attitude is indeed terrible, as if no one else matters." In junior high school, he once gave a teacher the middle finger.¹ When Mirror Media interviewed him at thirty-seven, he still had a frizzy mane of hair and wore T-shirts and shorts. His favorite fictional character was Yang Guo: "Complete rebellion. That's what I like most."¹

He went through Fuxing Kindergarten, Fuxing Elementary School, and Fuxing Junior High School, graduated from Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School, and entered the Department of Law at National Taiwan University.⁹ In secondary school, he already noticed class differences: "Fuxing classmates discussed newly opened Japanese restaurants; Jianguo classmates ate pork-rib lunchboxes. When they ate brown sugar shaved ice, it was plain shaved ice with only syrup added."¹ In university, he began working in the test-prep industry under the stage name "Puma," because it was easier to remember.¹⁰ That name would follow him for more than twenty years, from the cram-school world to academia, think tanks, and the Legislative Yuan. All of his official social-media accounts now use @pumashen.¹¹

Two scenes turned him from "a legal professional teaching criminal law" toward criminology.

The first was a senior schoolmate's hypermarket case. The senior's client was a large hypermarket operator suing a fruit farmer. "The fruit farmer was frightened and agreed to settle, but the amount was very high; basically, one family was ruined." The senior told Shen: "That is what the law provides. Who told him to break the law?"¹ Shen wrote: "If you study law long enough, you really may become the kind of person you originally did not want to become."¹

The second scene was the mopping incident at the juvenile detention house. The boys bowed to him, and he could not stop thinking: the same adolescents were people being chased outside, but people receiving sympathy here. The scale by which one looks at a person determines what one does to them.

Curator's Note
A scholar who would later study state violence began with an academic intuition about "how people are treated," rooted in the bows of two boys mopping a floor. More than a decade later, after the CCP opened a case against him and CCTV turned him into the subject of a pseudo-documentary, he still did not write himself as a victim. That sense of proportion may well have begun that day at the juvenile detention house.

Puma and Two Decisions to Leave the United States

Puma Shen's educational chronology is as simple as an airline-ticket stub. LL.B. from National Taiwan University (2004), LL.M. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School (2007), LL.M. in criminal law from NTU (2008), and PhD in criminology, law and society from the University of California, Irvine (2017). His dissertation advisers were two major scholars of white-collar crime, Henry Pontell and Elliott Currie.¹²

During his five years in Irvine, he lived in a city ranked "number one in public safety in the United States": "The streets all look the same, confusing thieves; you do not need to lock the door."¹ When he graduated in 2017, he received tenure-track offers from American universities, including North Carolina State University.¹³ His five oral-exam committee members urged him to return to Taiwan: "You care so much about Taiwan; why not go back?"¹

His own explanation for choosing to return was brief: "The air is bad, but I grew up polluted anyway; I have eaten all the plasticizers too. It is my home."¹

He returned to Taipei in 2017 and joined the Graduate School of Criminology at National Taipei University as an assistant professor. In August 2023, he became director of the institute.² The university page lists his research fields as criminal law, sociology of law, criminal policy, and white-collar crime.² His doctoral training was not in a pure law school. UC Irvine trained him in the School of Social Ecology, spanning criminology, urban planning, public policy, and environmental psychology.¹⁴ That training later shaped the angle from which he studied the CCP's cognitive warfare: not through statutes, but through "how people are influenced within environments."

Two years later, he began turning that lens in another direction.

"Rather Than Attack Taiwan, Deceive Taiwan"

In 2018, Puma Shen began systematically collecting evidence of the CCP's information warfare against Taiwan. He broke down the CCP's United Front work against Taiwan into five lines: the Ministry of State Security, the United Front Work Department, the Taiwan Affairs Office, the People's Liberation Army, and the Communist Youth League.¹⁵ Each line had its own budget, tools, and rhythm. This analytic framework later became a standard vocabulary through which Taiwanese civil society understood cognitive warfare.

In 2019, he and civil-society researchers founded Doublethink Lab in Taiwan, with Shen serving as chair.¹⁶ On April 25, 2022, they released the China Index, a "China influence index" covering more than eighty countries and ninety-nine indicators across nine domains: media, academia, economy, society and culture, military, law enforcement, technology, politics, and foreign policy.¹⁷ The index remains one of the most frequently cited databases on the CCP's overseas influence among international political and media circles. Shen later used that dataset as a basis for testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) in 2023.¹⁸

In July 2024, Shen and Doublethink Lab researcher Wu Ming-hsuan jointly published _Rather Than Attack Taiwan, Deceive Taiwan: A Q&A on China's Cognitive Warfare Against Taiwan_ with Locus Publishing. The title itself is the argument. For the CCP, the use of force is too costly; deceiving Taiwanese people into not voting, or into voting the wrong way, is much cheaper.¹⁹ The book was later repeatedly cited in political coverage by CNA, United Daily News, and Liberty Times. The phrase "rather than attack Taiwan, deceive Taiwan" became shorthand for describing the CCP's strategy toward Taiwan.

But writing a book does not cause Chinese public security to open a case. What turned him into an "enemy" was something else.

Three Million Kuma Warriors

At the end of 2021, Puma Shen and Taiwan Strategic Simulation Society researcher Ho Cheng-hui co-founded Kuma Academy.²⁰ The academy's goal is "all-out national defense education": to teach every Taiwanese person willing to learn the skills that had previously belonged mainly to soldiers or professional rescuers, including civil defense, cybersecurity, fraud prevention, AED/CPR, bleeding control and bandaging, and emergency shelter response.²¹

On September 1, 2022, former United Microelectronics Corporation chair Robert Tsao, who had just exited the China market because of his defense of Taiwan's sovereignty, held a press conference announcing that he would donate NT$600 million to Kuma Academy as part of a larger NT$3 billion plan to resist communism and defend Taiwan.²² Shen said at the press conference: "We hope every household will have a 'Kuma Warrior' with the relevant knowledge to protect family members in moments of crisis."²³ Kuma Academy's target was set: to train three million "Kuma Warriors" within three years.²⁴

What does three million mean? Taiwan's population is about 23 million. After excluding children, the elderly, and people with limited mobility, three million is roughly one-fifth of the adult population. Tsao's NT$600 million donation was to be disbursed in stages. The money was designed as an auditable project, not a handsome press-conference number.²⁵

In September 2022, Kuma Academy's first basic camp quickly filled after registration opened.²⁶ The curriculum included firefighting, search and rescue, first aid, sheltering, information and communications security, information verification, public-order maintenance, plus AED/CPR, injury assessment, and bleeding control and bandaging.²⁷ Its outdoor drill "Operation Formosan Blue Magpie" is held regularly, simulating the wartime evacuation and rescue of noncombatants.²⁸

It is worth noting that Shen himself is not the legal representative of Kuma Academy. In a 2024 post on X, he wrote: "I would love nothing more than to be the person in charge [of Kuma Academy], but the problem is that laws and internal DPP rules mean my family members and I cannot be the responsible person."²⁹ His role as deputy executive director of a DPP think tank, and later as a legislator, required him to maintain legal distance from the nongovernmental organization he founded.

Curator's Note
A civil defense system designed through a criminological framework: one out of every seven adults knows how to save themselves, identify disinformation, and stop bleeding when water and power are cut. Shen's research describes how the adversary comes; Kuma Academy's courses train people in how to endure after being attacked. The same person pushing both projects is a symmetry almost unusually calm.

The Sixth Time in One Year

On November 15, 2023, the DPP announced its 2024 party-list legislator slate. Puma Shen ranked second, behind children's rights advocate Lin Yueh-chin.³⁰ He was elected on January 13, 2024, and took office as a member of the 11th Legislative Yuan on February 1.⁴ He led the DPP caucus in pushing ten national-security law amendments: the Act Governing Relations between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area, the Hong Kong and Macao Relations Act, the Nationality Act, the National Security Act, the Communication Security and Surveillance Act, the Anti-Infiltration Act, the Cyber Security Management Act, the Criminal Code, the Criminal Code of the Armed Forces, and the National Intelligence Services Act.³¹ Beginning in 2025, he served as a convener of the Legislative Yuan's Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee.³²

But on October 14 that year, Taiwan Affairs Office spokesperson Chen Binhua announced that Shen, Robert Tsao, and Kuma Academy itself had been placed on the list of "diehard Taiwan independence separatists," barring them and their family members from entering China, Hong Kong, and Macau.³³ It was the first time Shen was named.

From that day forward, the ladder of escalation rose step by step. In a Facebook post on October 28, 2025, Shen summed up the whole process in one sentence: "This is the sixth time in one year."³⁴

Those six steps took only thirteen months. The legal basis for the Chongqing public-security notice was the PRC Criminal Law plus the Opinions on Lawfully Punishing Diehard Taiwan Independence Separatists for Crimes of Splitting the State and Inciting the Splitting of the State, issued by the CCP in June 2024 and commonly known as the "22 Guidelines for Punishing Independence."³⁸ The police notice also listed the reporting email [email protected] and phone number 023-65697660, inviting anyone to provide "leads."³⁹

On the day the case was opened, Shen responded on Facebook:

"This is the sixth time in one year. This time public security has directly opened an investigation; the next step will probably be a wanted notice and trial in absentia. It does not matter. After all, 'Taiwanese people are not afraid'."³⁴

"Solving the person who raises the problem, solving the person who defends Taiwan: how very Communist Party."³⁴

When his father's company was sanctioned in June 2025, he used the same tone: "I am deeply honored to have been sanctioned three times in one year."⁴⁰

CCTV's Threat of "Global Arrest"

Twelve days after the investigation was opened, on the evening of November 9, 2025, CCTV News aired an "exposure of Puma Shen" segment lasting about seven and a half minutes, described by many Taiwanese media outlets as eight minutes. CCTV claimed Shen used Kuma Academy to spread claims that "China is about to use force to unify Taiwan" and to train "violent Taiwan independence separatists." The narrator ended in a warning tone: "Stop now, or you could be next."⁴¹³⁷

At a press conference that day, Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council defined the segment as "transnational repression": its purpose was not to arrest someone, but to force Taiwanese society into self-censorship before speaking.⁴² Shen also posted on Facebook that night:

"Could you please stop doing what I predict you will do every time? Have some creativity."⁴³

"China moved even faster, trying to prevent me from going abroad by using a wanted notice. CCTV devoted major airtime to a seven-and-a-half-minute pseudo-documentary about me, threatening a global wanted notice."³⁷

"Whether or not I am wanted, Nobody cares. Taiwanese people really do not care about the CCP."³⁷

He also released a short video aimed at screenshots of CCTV: "Taiwan and China are one country on each side. Do not fantasize about fabricating charges to extend your hands into Taiwan."⁴⁴

International responses gathered within two days. Maya Wang, Human Rights Watch's associate Asia director, said in an October 31 statement that the Chongqing public-security case was the transnational application of abusive Chinese law.⁴⁵ Several international human rights organizations voiced support. The U.S. Department of State expressed public concern.⁴⁶ Luke de Pulford, co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), publicly posted in support.⁴⁷

The Legislative Yuan itself also acted. On November 19, 2025, the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, the committee Shen himself convened, passed a condemnation motion proposed by Wang Ting-yu and others. Wang said in his remarks: "Even if opinions differ, people still have the right to the protection of the state and the constitution. The People's Republic of China has no right to carry out this kind of political action against anyone on such groundless pretexts."⁴⁸

China had not yet placed Shen on a formal Hong Kong National Security Law bounty list. During the same period, the highest bounty, RMB 250,000, was placed on YouTuber Pa Chiung and "Minnan Wolf."⁴⁹ But the combination of a "splittism" investigation and CCTV's threat of a "global wanted notice" had already pushed Shen close to that position.

The Screw Outside His Door

As the CCP escalated, Puma Shen's private life was also being escalated.

In late August 2025, he disclosed for the first time on host Cheng Hung-yi's program People of the Times that he was followed "all the time." The most direct incident happened outside his home: the "screw" on a motorcycle was actually a pinhole camera, with the battery hidden beneath the seat and the exterior disguised as a screw. Shen photographed the license plate and reported it to police. Unexpectedly, less than an hour later, the motorcycle had disappeared; the license-plate trail remains a dead end.⁵⁰

The threatening letter was even harder to digest. It included a photo of Shen and his wife, Tseng Hsin-hui, with the character "death" written on Tseng's clothing, and threatened to slit their daughter's throat.⁵⁰ Shen said on the program: "This is vile, but this is what the Communist Party does. We were mentally prepared." His wife's response was anxiety, insomnia, worsening health, and social phobia.⁵⁰

Curator's Note
Shen's daughter is not his biological child. He and his wife Tseng Hsin-hui adopted her through the Garden of Hope Foundation, in a process that took two years. In 2021, Shen welcomed a thirteen-month-old baby girl; the couple used the idea of a "tummy mother" to explain the birth mother's role to the child.⁵¹
The child he chose to receive into his family later became the marked coordinate in a threatening letter sent to his home by the CCP.

The Hague, Satellites, Valentine's Day

But he did not hide. After November, he instead began traveling abroad intensively.

On November 12, 2025, he attended a German Bundestag hearing on "The Threat of Disinformation from Authoritarian States to Democracy and Human Rights," testifying as both an expert witness and legislator. After the hearing, he said in an interview: "Taiwan should not fear China's threats. Everyone must be fearless and stand together with the world's democratic and free camp."⁵²

Nine days later, on November 21, he arrived in The Hague with DPP legislator Fan Yun to attend the 209th executive committee meeting of Liberal International (LI) and the Hague session of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), taking a photo at the entrance to the International Criminal Court (ICC).⁵³ His caption was four Chinese characters: "Not afraid." The next day, speaking on LI's "Defending Democracy in an Era of Political Manipulation" panel, he attached an academic label to China's threats:

"China really wants to stop me from continuing these international engagements, so it has kept trying to make it impossible for me to travel through sanctions. What these moves prove, precisely, is that China is a paper tiger: most of this is symbolic propaganda for domestic audiences, and Taiwan should not be afraid."⁵⁴

Pointing to the ICC building behind him: "This is where dictators are tried for war crimes or genocide."⁵⁴

On New Year's Day 2026, the CCP escalated again.

A Chinese Weibo account with a large following, "Guyan Muchan," posted that it would track down Shen,⁵⁵ claiming to have personally commissioned high-resolution commercial satellite imagery from "Jilin-1" and publishing satellite images of Shen's Taipei home near Daan Forest Park and workplace on Section 1, Jinan Road, near the legislature.⁷ The Chinese state-media account "Today's Strait" reposted it.⁷ Two days later, Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a condemnation statement with unusually strong language:

"After Chinese official media threatened the global arrest of our legislator Puma Shen, they have recently gone even further by using the despicable methods of digital authoritarian doxxing to threaten the safety of our nationals... This not only violates the protections in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that 'no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home,' but is also a comprehensive persecution of personal privacy that has lost the baseline of civilization and is deeply contemptible."⁵⁶

The National Police Agency announced the same day that it would fully protect Shen's safety.⁵⁷ The Ministry of Digital Affairs asked Meta and Google to handle the content; within days, the relevant posts, videos, and images were removed.⁵⁸

Shen responded on Facebook on January 3:

"What China marked was my coordinates; what it revealed was its collective inferiority complex toward democratic Taiwan."⁵⁵

"As for those who were recently mocking dashcams, Puma Shen will not say you are collaborators, because your level is still far from that. But academically, there is a specific term for this: 'useful idiots'."⁵⁵

Two weeks later, on January 24, he published a long Facebook post dividing the CCP's 2026 "locking down Taiwan" strategy into three axes: physical disarmament (the pan-blue and pan-white parties cutting foreign affairs and defense budgets), cognitive change in the mind (skepticism toward the United States affecting about 5 percent of key voters), and monopolization of electoral resources (party assets and media-related bills). He ended the post by writing: "My greatest function is probably still being a 'target'."⁵⁹

"Target" would then recur throughout his own narrative. It is a label he gave himself.

On February 7, he flew to France for an eight-day diplomatic mission. The key context for France: it is home to the headquarters of INTERPOL, and France has an extradition treaty with China. In theory, this was precisely the kind of country where he faced the highest risk under a threatened wanted notice, yet he went as planned. The mission covered exchanges on Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense's new All-Out Defense Handbook, responses to cognitive warfare, social media and cyber warfare, and national resilience. France had issued its own civilian risk-response handbook with a similar orientation in 2025, and Shen said the French units combating disinformation had drawn on Taiwan's design.⁸

He spent Valentine's Day, February 14, on the plane. After returning to Taiwan, he wrote on Facebook: "Despite bearing the pressure of a global wanted threat from Beijing, I still completed my eight-day diplomatic mission as planned. Yet in the end, I spent Valentine's Day on the plane. There is another event coming next. I will continue to stand on the front line with my country."⁶⁰

From Target to Candidate

In early April 2026, the DPP's election strategy committee held a meeting. Political coverage by United Daily News reported that people familiar with the matter said the party planned to nominate Puma Shen to run for mayor of Taipei.⁶¹ By mid-to-late April, the arrangement was nearly settled. Former interior minister Hsu Kuo-yung publicly endorsed him.⁶² A TVBS poll from December 2025 showed incumbent Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an at about 64 percent support and Shen at about 22 percent.⁶³ He was far behind, but electoral odds are outside the scope of this article.

On April 25, he cut off the frizzy hair he had worn for more than a decade and appeared on the same stage as Chiang Wan-an for the first time at the Songshan Cihui Temple Mother Goddess Cultural Festival.⁶⁴ Yang Guo cut his hair short.

From the bow of a boy mopping the floor to CCTV's pseudo-documentary, from research papers at a desk to coordinates on a satellite map, from "I cannot be the person in charge of Kuma Academy" to "perhaps I have to run for mayor of Taipei," Puma Shen's position has changed several times. He uses the same sentence to annotate each change: "I am a target." The sentence is self-mockery, but also a calm academic observation. In the CCP's narrative toward Taiwan, he is indeed the one meant to be aimed at. A scholar takes the label used by the object of his research, places it on himself, and keeps working; not many people can do that.

Where Did the Bowing Boy Go?

Return to that afternoon of mopping. The moment Puma Shen stopped, he walked around the water marks. The boy bowed to him. More than a decade later, Shen sat at the other end of a Chongqing Municipal Public Security Bureau police notice; the character "death" was marked on his wife's clothing; the satellite coordinates near his home were publicly named by a Chinese Weibo account.

In June 2025, when his father's company was sanctioned by the CCP, he wrote four very short characters on Facebook: "Deeply honored."⁴⁰

The question from that day at the juvenile detention house is still with him: "Why is there such a big difference in the way we treat people in different places?" He studied this question for twenty years. In the end, the things he studied came for him and marked him as prey. But he had studied them long enough to know that prey does not first have to become a victim; it can first become the one asking questions. So from The Hague to the German Bundestag and then to France, at every stop he used the same grammar to say the same thing: you may treat me this way, and I will continue doing my work.

In late April 2026, he cut his hair and prepared to fight another election. But on the CCP's satellite map, the target coordinates remained in place.

Further Reading:

• Cognitive Warfare — The full framework of the CCP's information warfare against Taiwan; Puma Shen is one of its principal researchers
• Pa Chiung — A Taiwanese YouTuber likewise targeted by the CCP, with a maximum RMB 250,000 bounty announced by China in November 2025
• Lai Ching-te — Also listed among "diehard Taiwan independence separatists"; publicly supported Puma Shen in November 2025
• Taiwan's Defense and Military Modernization — The complementary relationship between Kuma Academy's civil defense education and all-out national defense

References