Puma Shen: He Studied China’s Cognitive Warfare. Then China Marked 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. He stopped and walked around them. Two boys who were mopping the floor looked up, bowed to him, and softly said, “Thank you.”¹

When he returned home that day, he wrote a question in his notes: “Why is there such a great difference in the way we treat people in different places?”¹ That question later took 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, warned by CCTV that “you could be next,” and having a Chinese Weibo account use commercial satellite imagery to publish the coordinates of his home in Taipei.

His name is Puma Shen. In Chinese, Shen Po-yang; his cram-school stage name was Puma. 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 Chinese Communist Party’s information warfare, cognitive operations, and transnational repression against Taiwan. He spent seven years studying these things. In the eighth year, they came back for him.

30-second overview: Puma Shen (born 1982) is an 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 in support, 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 in one year. On October 28, 2025, he became the first elected Taiwanese politician placed under investigation by China for “splitting the state,”⁵ and on November 9 CCTV paired the case with a seven-and-a-half-minute “exposé” 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 kept flying to The Hague, Germany, and France; in 2026, he spent Valentine’s Day on a plane to France.⁸ In May, the DPP formally drafted him to run for Taipei mayor against the incumbent Chiang Wan-an.⁹

“Do Not Interrupt or Talk Back When the Teacher Is Speaking”

In Shen’s elementary-school communication notebook, a teacher once wrote: “Do not interrupt or talk back when the teacher is speaking. Po-yang is not bad by nature, but he sometimes loses control and has no regard for others.” His mother replied underneath: “He really does have a bad attitude and no regard for others.” In junior high school, he once gave a teacher the middle finger.¹ The year he was interviewed by Mirror Media at age thirty-seven, he still wore a mass of curly hair, T-shirts, and shorts. His favorite fictional character was Yang Guo: “Total rebellion. That is what I like most.”¹

He attended Fuxing Kindergarten, Fuxing Elementary School, and Fuxing Junior High School before graduating from Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School and entering the Department of Law at National Taiwan University.¹⁰ In secondary school, he had already noticed class difference: “Fuxing classmates discussed newly opened Japanese restaurants. Jianguo classmates ate pork-rib bento boxes. They ate brown-sugar shaved ice, or just plain shaved ice with sugar water.”¹ In college, he began working in the cram-school industry under the stage name “Puma” because it was easier to remember.¹¹ That name followed him for twenty years, from cram schools to academia, think tanks, and the Legislative Yuan. All his official social-media accounts now use @pumashen.¹²

Two scenes moved him from being “a legal professional teaching criminal law” toward criminology.

The first was a case involving a senior schoolmate and a hypermarket chain. The senior schoolmate’s client was a major hypermarket operator, which sued a fruit farmer. “The farmer was frightened and agreed to settle, but the sum was very high; basically, a family was destroyed.” The senior schoolmate told Shen: “That is what the law provides. Who told him to break the law?”¹ Shen wrote: “If you study law for long enough, you really may become the person you originally did not want to be.”¹

The second was that moment of mopping at the juvenile detention house. The boys bowed to him, and he could not stop thinking: the same teenagers were people being chased outside, but people being pitied in here. The scale by which a person is judged determines what we do to them.

📝 Curator’s Note
A scholar who later studied state violence began his academic intuition about “how people are treated” with the bows of two boys mopping a floor. More than a decade later, when the CCP placed him under investigation and CCTV made him the subject of a pseudo-documentary, he still did not write himself as a victim. That sense of proportion may well have begun on that day at the juvenile detention house.

Puma and the Choice to Leave the United States Twice

Shen’s educational timeline is as simple as an airline stub. LL.B. from National Taiwan University Law (2004), LL.M. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School (2007), LL.M. in criminal law from National Taiwan University (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.¹³

For his five years in Irvine, he lived in what he described as “the safest city in the United States”: “The streets all look the same, so thieves get confused, and you do not need to lock your door.”¹ When he graduated in 2017, he received tenure-track offers from U.S. universities, including North Carolina State University.¹⁴ His five dissertation-committee professors 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 plasticizers too. It is my own 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 its director.² The university page lists his research fields as criminal law, sociology of law, criminal justice policy, and white-collar crime.² His doctoral training was not in a conventional law school; UC Irvine trained him in its School of Social Ecology, across criminology, urban planning, public policy, and environmental psychology.¹⁵ That training later shaped how he studied CCP cognitive warfare: not through statutes, but through how people are affected within their environments.

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

“Fighting Taiwan Is Less Effective Than Fooling Taiwan”

In January 2021, Shen lectured on information warfare and identifying disinformation at the Chiayi County Human Resources Development Center. This was the everyday field of his research on CCP cognitive warfare. Photo: Chiayi County Human Resources Development Center. Attribution via Wikimedia Commons.

In 2018, Shen began systematically collecting evidence of CCP information warfare against Taiwan. He broke the CCP’s united-front operations 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.¹⁶ Each line has its own budget, tools, and tempo. This analytical framework later became the standard vocabulary through which Taiwanese civil society understood cognitive warfare.

In 2019, he co-founded Doublethink Lab with civil-society researchers and served as its chair.¹⁷ On April 25, 2022, they launched the China Index, a “China influence index” covering more than eighty countries, nine domains (media, academia, economy, society and culture, military, law enforcement, technology, politics, and foreign affairs), and ninety-nine indicators.¹⁸ The index remains one of the databases on the CCP’s external influence most frequently cited by international political and media circles. Shen later used this data as the basis for testimony before the U.S. Congress-mandated U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) in 2023.¹⁹

In July 2024, Shen and Doublethink Lab researcher Wu Ming-hsuan co-authored _Fighting Taiwan Is Less Effective Than Fooling Taiwan: Q&A on China’s Cognitive Warfare Against Taiwan_, published by Locus Publishing. The title itself was the argument. For the CCP, using force is too expensive; deceiving Taiwanese into not voting or voting the wrong way is much cheaper.²⁰ The book was later cited repeatedly in the political pages of CNA, United Daily News, and Liberty Times. The phrase “fighting Taiwan is less effective than fooling Taiwan” became shorthand for describing the CCP’s strategy toward Taiwan.

Fighting Taiwan Is Less Effective Than Fooling Taiwan, co-authored by Shen, Wu Ming-hsuan, and Doublethink Lab, was published by Locus Publishing in 2024. The cover copy states the core point: the cost of invading Taiwan is extremely high, while cognitive warfare is the “highest cost-performance weapon.” Image: Locus Publishing (fair use editorial commentary).

But writing a book was not what made Chinese public security open a case. What turned him into an “enemy” was something else.

Three Million Kuma Warriors

In February 2023, Shen spoke at a Kuma Academy lecture, with the academy’s flag behind him. Those who teach civil defense matter more to the CCP than those who write papers. Photo: S099001. CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

At the end of 2021, Shen and Taiwan Center for Security Studies researcher Ho Cheng-hui co-founded Kuma Academy.²¹ The academy’s goal is “all-out national defense education”: to teach civil defense, cybersecurity, fraud prevention, AED/CPR, bleeding control, first-aid bandaging, and emergency shelter response, skills that were originally limited to soldiers or professional rescuers, to every Taiwanese willing to learn.²²

On September 1, 2022, Robert Tsao, the former chairman of United Microelectronics Corporation who had just left the China market after defending 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 donation plan to resist communism and protect Taiwan.²³ Shen said at the press conference: “I hope every household will have one ‘Kuma warrior’ with relevant knowledge, able to protect family members in a moment of crisis.”²⁴ Kuma Academy’s goal was set: to train three million “Kuma warriors” within three years.²⁵

What does three million mean? Taiwan’s population is about 23 million. After subtracting children, older adults, and people with limited mobility, three million is about one-fifth of the adult population. Tsao’s NT$600 million donation was to be disbursed in stages, by quarter, and reviewed according to the plan; the money was designed as an accountable project, not a pretty press-conference number.²⁶

In September 2022, Kuma Academy’s first basic camp quickly filled after registration opened.²⁷ Courses included firefighting, search and rescue, medical aid, evacuation, information and communications security, information identification, public-order maintenance, AED/CPR, injury assessment, and bleeding-control bandaging.²⁸ Its outdoor exercise “Operation Formosan Blue Magpie” is held regularly, simulating evacuation and rescue for noncombatants in wartime.²⁹

It is worth noting that Shen himself is not Kuma Academy’s legal representative. In a 2024 post on X, he wrote: “I would love to be the person in charge of [Kuma Academy], but the problem is that under regulations and the DPP’s internal rules, neither my family nor I can be the responsible person.”³⁰ His roles as deputy executive director of the DPP think tank and later as a legislator required him to maintain legal distance from the NGO he founded.

📝 Curator’s Note
A civil-defense system designed through a criminological frame: one in every seven adults knowing how to save themselves, detect disinformation, and stop bleeding when water and electricity are cut. Shen’s research describes how the enemy comes; Kuma Academy’s courses train people in how to hold out after being attacked. The same person pushed both projects. The symmetry is almost unnervingly calm.

The Sixth Time in One Year

Shen’s official portrait as a member of the 11th Legislative Yuan in 2024. As he moved from researcher to legislator, the cost of punishment rose from “naming a scholar” to “naming an elected legislator.” Photo: Legislative Yuan. Attribution via Wikimedia Commons.

On November 15, 2023, the DPP announced its 2024 legislator-at-large list. Shen was ranked second, behind only child-rights advocate Lin Yueh-chin.³¹ 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 Laws and Regulations Regarding Hong Kong and Macao Affairs, 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.³² Beginning in 2025, he served as a convener of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee.³³

But on October 14 of 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,” with Shen and his family barred from entering China, Hong Kong, and Macao.³⁴ It was the first time Shen had been named.

From that day on, the escalation climbed step by step. In his Facebook post on October 28, 2025, Shen summed up the entire sequence in one sentence: “This is the sixth time in one year.”³⁵

Source: Taiwan Affairs Office, Liberty Times, CNA, Xinhua, CCTV

Those six steps took only thirteen months. The legal basis in the Chongqing public-security notice was the CCP’s Criminal Law plus the Opinions on Lawfully Punishing “Taiwan Independence” Diehards for the Crimes of Splitting the State and Inciting Splitting of the State, issued in June 2024 and commonly called the “22 Guidelines to Punish Independence.”³⁶ The police notice also listed a tip email, [email protected], and phone number, 023-65697660, inviting anyone to provide “leads.”³⁷

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. Whatever. In any case, Taiwanese are not afraid.”³⁵

“Solving the person who raises the problem, solving the person who defends Taiwan: that really is very Communist Party.”³⁵

In June 2025, his father Shen Tu-cheng’s Sicuens company was sanctioned by the CCP,³⁸ and a month later the importer registration of the family business Sicuens was revoked by customs.³⁹ Shen wrote in the same tone: “A great honor: sanctioned three times in one year.”⁴⁰

CCTV’s Threat of “Global Arrest”

Twelve days after the case was opened, on the evening of November 9, 2025, CCTV’s news channel aired a roughly seven-and-a-half-minute segment, described by several Taiwanese outlets as eight minutes long, titled “Exposing Puma Shen.” CCTV claimed that through Kuma Academy, Shen spread the idea that “China is about to use force to unify Taiwan” and trained “violent Taiwan independence elements.” The narration ended with a warning: “Stop now, or you could be next.”⁴¹⁴²

At a press conference that day, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council defined the content as “transnational repression”: the purpose was not to arrest someone, but to force Taiwanese society to self-censor before speaking.⁴³ Shen also posted on Facebook that night:

“Could you please stop doing exactly what I predict you are going to do every time? Have some creativity.”⁴⁴

“China has acted even faster, wanting to use a wanted notice to keep me from going abroad. CCTV devoted a major segment to a seven-and-a-half-minute pseudo-documentary about me, threatening a global wanted notice.”⁴²

“Whether I have been put on a wanted list or not, nobody cares. Taiwanese really do not pay attention to the CCP.”⁴²

He also posted a short video with a CCTV screenshot in frame: “Taiwan and China are one country on each side. Do not fantasize about using trumped-up charges to reach your hands into Taiwan.”⁴⁵

International responses gathered within two days. On October 31, Human Rights Watch Asia deputy director Maya Wang said in a statement that the Chongqing case was an abusive Chinese law applied across borders.⁴⁶ Several international human-rights organizations voiced support. The U.S. Department of State publicly expressed concern.⁴⁷ Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) co-founder Luke de Pulford posted in public support of Shen.⁴⁸

The Legislative Yuan itself also moved. On November 19, 2025, the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee of the Legislative Yuan, 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, everyone still has the right to be protected by the state and the constitution. The People’s Republic of China has no authority to use such baseless reasons to conduct this kind of political operation against anyone.”⁴⁹

China had not yet put Shen on a formal Hong Kong National Security Law bounty list; in the same period, the people with the highest bounty, RMB 250,000, were YouTuber “Pa Chiung” and “Minnan Wolf.”⁵⁰ But the combination of a “splitting the state” investigation and CCTV’s “global wanted” threat had already pushed Shen into a nearby position.

The Screw at the Door

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

In late August 2025, he said publicly 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 at his front door: the “screw” on a motorcycle was in fact a pinhole camera, with its battery hidden under the seat and its exterior disguised as a screw. Shen photographed the license plate and called the police, only to find that within less than an hour, the motorcycle had disappeared. The license-plate trail remains a dead end.⁵¹

Harder to absorb was the threatening letter. 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.⁵¹ Shen said on the program: “This is malicious, but this is what the Communist Party does. We were mentally prepared for it.” Tseng’s reaction was anxiety, insomnia, worsening health, and social fear.⁵¹

📝 Curator’s Note
Shen’s daughter was not born to him. He and his wife Tseng Hsin-hui adopted her through the Garden of Hope Foundation after a two-year process; in 2021, Shen welcomed a thirteen-month-old baby girl into the family. The couple used the concept of a “belly mother” to explain the birth mother’s role to the child.⁵²
The child he chose to hold later became the crossed-out coordinate in the threatening letter the CCP sent to his home.

The Hague, Satellites, and 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 titled “Threats to Democracy and Human Rights from Disinformation by Authoritarian States,” testifying as both an expert witness and a legislator. After the hearing, he said in an interview: “Taiwan should not fear the China threat. Everyone must be fearless and stand together with the world’s democratic and free camp.”⁵³

CNA video news: In November 2025, Shen traveled to a German Bundestag hearing and, as an expert witness, explained the foreign disinformation attacks Taiwan faces.

Nine days later, on November 21, he arrived in The Hague, Netherlands, to attend the 209th Executive Committee meeting of Liberal International (LI) and the Hague session of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) together with DPP legislator Fan Yun. They took a photo in front of the International Criminal Court (ICC).⁵⁴ His caption was four Chinese characters: “Not afraid.” The next day, speaking on LI’s panel “Defending Democracy in an Era of Political Manipulation,” he gave China’s threat an academic label:

“China really wants to stop me from continuing these international engagements, so it has kept trying to use sanctions to prevent me from going abroad. What these actions prove is precisely that China is a paper tiger: most of it is symbolic propaganda for domestic audiences. Taiwan should not be afraid.”⁵⁵

(Pointing to the ICC building behind him) “This is where dictators are tried for war crimes or genocide.”⁵⁵

CNA video news: In November 2025, Shen traveled to The Hague to attend IPAC and Liberal International meetings, using parliamentary diplomacy to connect with the international democratic camp.

On New Year’s Day 2026, the CCP escalated.

A Chinese Weibo account with a large following, “Guyan Muchan,” posted that it would track down Shen,⁵⁶ claiming that it had paid to order high-resolution imagery from the commercial “Jilin-1” satellite and publishing satellite images of Shen’s home in Taipei, near Daan Forest Park, and his workplace on Section 1, Jinan Road, near the legislature.⁷ Chinese state media outlet Today’s Strait reposted it.⁷ Two days later, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a condemnation with language unusually sharp for such statements:

“After Chinese state media threatened to arrest our country’s legislator Puma Shen worldwide, it has recently gone a step further by using the vile method of doxxing, a form of digital authoritarianism, 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, or home’; it is also a comprehensive persecution of personal privacy that has lost the bottom line of civilization and is deeply contemptible.”⁵⁷

The National Police Agency announced the same day that it would fully protect Shen’s safety.⁵⁸ The Ministry of Digital Affairs asked Meta and Google to handle the content; within days, the relevant posts, videos, and images had been taken down.⁵⁹

Shen responded on Facebook on January 3:

“What China marked was my coordinates; what it displayed was their collective inferiority complex toward democratic Taiwan.”⁵⁶

“As for those who were still mouthing off about dashcams a few days ago, Puma Shen will not call you collaborators, because you are still far beneath that level. But academically, there is a technical term for this: ‘useful idiots.’”⁵⁶

Two weeks later, on January 24, he posted a long Facebook essay breaking down the CCP’s 2026 “lock Taiwan” strategy into three axes: physical disarmament (the KMT and TPP cutting foreign-affairs and defense budgets), cognitive change in the mental sphere (skepticism toward the United States influencing about 5 percent of key voters), and monopoly over election resources (party-assets and media-related bills). At the end, he wrote: “My greatest function is probably still to be a ‘target’.”⁶⁰

“Target” then appeared repeatedly in his own narrative. It was a label he gave himself.

On February 7, he flew to France for an eight-day diplomatic mission. The French context mattered: INTERPOL is headquartered there, and France has an extradition treaty with China. In theory, it was exactly the sort of country where the risk would be highest for someone under a wanted-notice threat. He still went as planned. The mission involved exchanges on Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense’s new All-Out Defense Handbook, responses to cognitive warfare, social media and cyberwarfare, and national resilience. France had also issued a national risk-response handbook with a similar function in 2025, and Shen said French agencies fighting disinformation could draw on Taiwan’s designs.⁸

He spent Valentine’s Day, February 14, on the plane. After returning to Taiwan, he wrote on Facebook: “Despite the pressure of being threatened with a global wanted notice by Beijing, I still completed the eight-day diplomatic mission as planned. In the end, however, I spent Valentine’s Day on a plane. There is another event coming next. I will continue standing on the front line with my country.”⁶¹

From Target to Candidate

In early April 2026, the DPP’s election strategy committee held a meeting. The political section of _United Daily News_ reported that informed sources said the party planned to nominate Shen to run for Taipei mayor.⁶² By mid-to-late April, it was nearly settled. Former interior minister Hsu Kuo-yung publicly endorsed him.⁶³ A TVBS poll from December 2025 showed incumbent Taipei mayor Chiang Wan-an with about 64 percent support and Shen with about 22 percent.⁶⁴ The gap was large, but this article is not responsible for analyzing the election.

On April 25, Shen cut off the curly 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 Ciyou Temple Mother Goddess Cultural Festival.⁶⁵ Yang Guo had cut his hair short.

On May 13, 2026, rumor became official. The DPP Central Executive Committee approved the nomination, and President Lai Ching-te, who was concurrently party chair, personally announced that Shen would be drafted to run for Taipei mayor. Lai placed the campaign sash on him, held his hand, and joined him in shouting “dong suan,” the Taiwanese election chant for “be elected.” Lai said Shen had “the height of international vision, the breadth of cross-domain governance, and the warmth of care for residents,” and was “the only choice for Taipei mayor.”⁹⁶⁶ Shen accepted the sash: “I have decided to run for Taipei mayor. Please let me become your mayor.”⁶⁶ Election day was set for November 28, and his opponent was the incumbent, Chiang Wan-an, who was seeking reelection.⁶⁷

On April 19, 2025, Shen attended the “Reject United Front, Protect Taiwan” rally. The person whose coordinates were marked chose to keep standing on public stages. Photo: KOKUYO. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The race remained lopsided. A TVBS Poll Center survey released on May 27 put Chiang at 58 percent and Shen at 30 percent, a gap of 28 percentage points. Even among young voters aged twenty to twenty-nine, Shen’s 37 percent trailed Chiang’s 60 percent.⁶⁸ International media described the contest as a long-shot challenge.

Source: TVBS Poll Center, 2026-05-27

From the bow of boys mopping a floor to CCTV’s pseudo-documentary, from research at a desk to coordinates on a satellite map, from “not allowed to be the person in charge of Kuma Academy” to “officially running for Taipei mayor,” Shen’s position has changed several times. He annotates each shift with the same sentence: “I am a target.” The line is both self-mockery and a cool academic observation. In the CCP’s narrative about Taiwan, he really is the one to be aimed at. A scholar took the label produced by the object of his research, stuck it on himself, and kept working. Not many people can do that.

Where the Bowing Boys Are Now

Return to that afternoon of mopping. Shen stopped and walked around the streaks of water. The boys bowed to him. More than a decade later, he sat on the other end of a Chongqing public-security notice; the character “death” was written on his wife’s clothing; satellite coordinates near his home were publicly named by a Chinese Weibo account.

In June 2025, he wrote one very short line. On the day his father’s company was sanctioned by the CCP, he responded on Facebook with four Chinese characters: “A great honor.”⁴⁰

The question from that day at the juvenile detention house is still with him: “Why is there such a great difference in the way we treat people in different places?” He studied that question for twenty years. In the end, what he studied came for him and marked him as prey. But he had studied it long enough to know that prey does not first have to become a victim. It can first become the person asking the question. 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 can treat me this way, and I will keep doing my work.

In May 2026, he put on a campaign sash and entered another election. But on the CCP’s satellite map, the target coordinates were still in the same place.

Further Reading:

• Kuma Academy — The civil-society civil-defense education organization co-founded by Puma Shen and Ho Cheng-hui, a school that “hopes one day Taiwan will no longer need it”
• Cognitive Warfare — The full framework of the CCP’s information warfare against Taiwan, for which Shen is one of the principal researchers
• Pa Chiung — A Taiwanese YouTuber also targeted by the CCP, placed under a Chinese bounty of up to RMB 250,000 in November 2025
• Lai Ching-te — Also listed among “diehard Taiwan independence separatists,” and publicly voiced support for Shen in November 2025
• Taiwan’s Defense and Military Modernization — How Kuma Academy’s civil-defense education complements all-out national defense
• Invisible Nation — A documentary ending with Taiwanese attending a civil-defense class; Kuma Academy is the real-world version of that final class

Image Sources

This article uses six CC-licensed / publicly licensed / fair-use editorial images, all cached under public/article-images/people/ to avoid hotlinking source servers; it also embeds two official CNA videos.

• Puma Shen 2024 election image (hero) — Photo: Tseng Cheng-hsun / Flickr, CC BY 2.0
• Puma Shen official legislator portrait — Photo: Legislative Yuan, Attribution required
• Puma Shen speaking at Kuma Academy lecture — Photo: S099001 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
• Puma Shen lecturing on information warfare in Chiayi — Photo: Chiayi County Human Resources Development Center, Attribution required
• Puma Shen attending the “Reject United Front, Protect Taiwan” rally — Photo: KOKUYO / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
• _Fighting Taiwan Is Less Effective Than Fooling Taiwan_ book cover — Image: Locus Publishing, fair use editorial commentary

Embedded videos: Puma Shen travels to the German Bundestag to explain disinformation attacks on Taiwan, Puma Shen travels to the Netherlands for an international conference, both from CNA’s official video channel.

References