United Front Tour Groups: Cognitive Contest in Soft Rain — From Discount Tours to Influencer Traffic

30-second overview:
Former CCP United Front Work Department head You Quan once summed up the new-era Taiwan strategy as "soft rain that moistens silently" — narrowing the psychological distance between people on both sides, rather than direct confrontation. From taking village heads to see the flag-raising at Tiananmen in the 1990s, to million-follower creators livestreaming from Shenyang's September 18 History Museum in 2025, the packaging of united front tour groups has changed, but the core logic hasn't: making Taiwanese society's feeling that "China isn't really that scary" linger one second longer. This article unpacks the system, incentives, and indirect effects.

On June 12, 2024, Taiwanese YouTuber Potter King (波特王) dropped an information bomb on social media: based on intelligence he received, the CCP's Cross-Strait Youth Association was planning to invite 10 Taiwanese influencer groups to China to film, with airfare and hotel covered, under the name "Cross-Strait Youth Cultural Month"¹. At that point, neither Chung Ming-hsuan's nor Holger Chen's (Kuanchang) trips to China had happened — but Potter King wrote one line: "Treat this post as a prophecy."

A year later, that prophecy came true. Just on a scale larger than anyone imagined.

Origins: The Tiananmen Flag Raising and the Logic of "First-Timers"

United front work isn't a digital-age invention. Since the 1990s, Taiwan has had a particular tourism mode: participants only need to pay for airfare; food, lodging, and transportation are all "turnkey hospitality" provided by the Chinese side. The common target audience for these activities is local village heads, retired servicemen, or student clubs; itineraries often include "red landmarks" like Tiananmen Square and the CCP Party History Hall, paired with seminars and official talks².

Taiwanese media figure Chen Tzu-chien (Retina, 視網膜) has publicly spoken of his own experience attending a cross-strait exchange camp in college: every night at 7 PM the group collectively watched Xinwen Lianbo; one piece of news on Xi Jinping could run for fifteen minutes, leaving Taiwanese students thinking "the more we watched, the funnier it got" — a black-comedy memory that later became the starting point of his founding Eyeball Central Television Network³.

The turning point happened at the strategic level. Former CCP United Front Work Department head You Quan proposed the "soft rain that moistens silently" direction, emphasizing narrowing the lifestyle and psychological distance between people on both sides, rather than directly conveying political messages⁴. 2023 was designated by the Taiwan Affairs Office as the "Year of Major Cross-Strait Exchange," with the number of united front tour groups exploding, and targets shifting toward Taiwanese youth who had never set foot on Chinese soil — officially called "first-timers" (首來族), with the goal of further turning them into "regulars" (常來族)².

The Straits Exchange Foundation analysis noted that such low-priced tour fees often run more than half below market rate, with turnkey hospitality being a customary tactic². The Taiwanese saying "there is no free lunch" gets its most concrete interpretation in this scenario.

Institutional Network: Three-Tier Architecture, Who Foots the Bill

The CCP's united front work has a tightly organized structure, forming a transmission mechanism from central to local to in-Taiwan nodes:

Decision tier: The Central United Front Work Department sets strategic direction and narrative themes;
Execution tier: Provincial and municipal Taiwan Affairs Offices, the Cross-Strait Youth Association, the China Overseas Friendship Association, and other agencies handle resource deployment and specific reception;
In-Taiwan nodes: The Unification Alliance Party, hometown associations, clan associations, specific temples, and student clubs — using names like "youth exchange," "religious visits," "hometown gatherings" as recruitment channels, blurring the political purpose⁵.

The operation of this architecture sometimes runs afoul of the law. Pingtung Unification Alliance Party branch head Chang Ts'un-feng and general secretary Huang Jung-te, in 2023, were entrusted by Taiwan Affairs Office officials to recruit citizens for turnkey-hospitality trips to Hainan and Shanxi, violating the Anti-Infiltration Act and the Election and Recall Act; in 2025 the Kaohsiung High Court second instance still sentenced each to 4 years and 6 months imprisonment, with the case finalized⁶.

Turning Point: The Influencer's Lens Is Ten Times More Effective Than the Village Head Tour

Between 2024 and 2025, the united front operation completed its most important evolution: from "bringing people over" to "letting creators send the footage back."

After Potter King's exposure, Holger Chen (Kuanchang)'s trip to China became the biggest ignition point of this wave. In 2025, he repeatedly traveled to Shanghai, Hangzhou, Macau, and Shenzhen, emphasizing "self-paid," "people-to-people exchange," and "peace ambassador" identities, livestreaming throughout on social media, accumulating tens of millions of views. In October the same year, he further traveled to Beijing, Dandong, and Shenyang. On October 31 he visited the September 18 History Museum, and in November watched the flag-raising at Tiananmen Square⁷.

The "local guides" accompanying him had their backgrounds dissected in The Reporter's investigation. Wang Xiao has over 2.51 million followers on Bilibili and was previously a senior editor at Guancha.cn before 2021; Yang Sheng was, until 2025, chief reporter for Global Times's English edition, covering Chinese politics and diplomacy; Li Xiang holds the title of "Beijing Chaoyang District New Federation Standing Director," and is also deputy secretary-general of the Beijing Internet Famous Persons Association — an organization promoted by the Beijing United Front Work Department⁷.

They appeared in the creator's lens as "friends," helping with itinerary arrangements and content planning.

📝 Curator's note:
Companions appearing under the name "friend" often have backgrounds at the intersection of state media, united front organizations, and content platforms. The creator may genuinely think this is just "industry collaboration" — and that's exactly the most precise operation of "soft rain that moistens silently": getting the carriers of influence to themselves believe it happened voluntarily.

The Reporter's in-depth investigation further revealed that the "Taipei Influencer Festival" and the link with The Wonders of the Mainland (《大陸尋奇》) constitute a hidden propaganda chain, transforming Chinese city images into everyday consumer content via commercial packaging⁴.

Incentive Structure: Taiwan's Ad Market vs. China-Side Compensation

Beneath the "depoliticized" shell is clear economic logic. The average sponsorship rate for Taiwanese creators is usually far below the "high-priced commissions" the China side can offer — from full high-spec hospitality (business class, luxury hotels), daily consulting fees, to collaboration fees for specific content, plus traffic dividends from Douyin and Xiaohongshu, forming a complete incentive matrix⁸.

For creators chasing traffic monetization, "the China trip" represents both substantial income and market expansion opportunity. This blurs the boundary between "being bought" and "autonomous commercial behavior" — and the blurring itself is one of the conditions for the mechanism's effective operation.

Indirect Effect: Making Taiwan Break Its Own Ranks

The CCP's united front strategy has a deeper goal: exhausting Taiwanese society's energy on internal squabbles — "loving China" is only the surface. The real strategic gain lies in "dividing without battle"⁹.

After Holger Chen's China trip, fierce debate erupted on social media: his past anti-China statements were dredged up for comparison, his fan base split, parties launched attacks, and media followed up to amplify. Taiwanese spent enormous attention on the question "was Holger Chen bought?" — instead of jointly responding to institutional infiltration mechanisms.

This kind of internal exhaustion is exactly the indirect effect of "dividing without battle"⁹.

On April 19, 2025, the "Reject United Front, Defend Taiwan" rally erupted at Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei. Organizers announced over 55,000 on-site participants demanding opposition to CCP infiltration and support for democratic freedom. Bajiong (八炯) was one of the main organizers; recall booths appeared on site, against a backdrop of accumulating social discontent over influencer China trips and discount exchanges¹⁰.

📝 Curator's note:
The emergence of the anti-united-front rally shows that Taiwan's civil society alertness mechanism is indeed working — but the same rally also became material for another wave of online debate over "is this DPP mobilization or a spontaneous gathering." Even "anti-united-front" itself can become a lever for social fracture.

Digital Upgrade: Precision Targeting in 2026

As of 2026, the National Security Bureau's "2025 CCP Cognitive Warfare Analysis Report" reveals five major Taiwan-targeted operations: analyzing social dynamics through data, building diverse channels for deploying disputed messages, exploiting abnormal accounts to infiltrate public opinion, using AI-generated realistic audio and video, and conducting cyber attacks to steal Taiwanese accounts; throughout the year they intercepted over 45,000 sets of abnormal accounts and 2.31 million disputed messages¹¹.

Among these, AI-synthesized audio and video has reached a new scale: the China side commissioned specific companies to develop intelligent voice systems, luring citizens to record on Taiwanese websites for use in synthesizing fake voices; meanwhile, through "same-city tags" and "recommendation feed" algorithms, young Taiwanese users are repeatedly exposed to "China is very safe, very developed" narratives in "travel guide" and "food and entertainment" contexts¹¹.

Current State: Where the Defense Line Grows

Facing increasingly hard-to-identify cognitive operations, Taiwan's response is also evolving in step.

Polling data show complex social attitudes: in 2024–2025 surveys, 56.3% of respondents support amending the law to regulate influencers cooperating with united front activities, but among the 20–24 age group only 37.9% support such legislation — the younger generation's trade-off between "exchange freedom" and "national security" still sits on an open spectrum¹².

"Media literacy courses" have entered some high school and university campuses, using "AI-generated travel video identification" and "model city vs. comprehensive reality" as teaching materials. In Taiwanese creator communities, spontaneous "counter-narrative" content has also emerged: making "same city, two lenses" comparison videos, using the same content format to neutralize specific narratives¹³.

The CCP's united front effectiveness has no single answer in the public-opinion arenas of either side. Holger Chen's "praise" videos are sometimes criticized by Chinese netizens as "overacting" or "useless" — propaganda doesn't necessarily reach its intended destination; it simply keeps uncertainty in play⁷.

And uncertainty, perhaps, is the ultimate product of this cognitive contest.

Further reading

• Cognitive Warfare — The systematic framework of cognitive operations and Taiwan's response mechanisms, from academic analysis to civic education practice.
• Falun Gong in Taiwan — From the Yangmingshan flower clock to Taipei 101, the same cross-strait mirror — how religious freedom became the touchstone of Taiwan's democratic values.
• Potter King — Taiwan's first creator to publicly expose details of an influencer united-front invitation; the full story of the exposé incident.
• Bajiong — From united-front documentary to Ketagalan rally organizer, Taiwan's civil society's counter-attempts to cognitive warfare.
• The Toxic Potato Cognitive Operation — A 2022 piece of disinformation about Taiwanese potatoes, as a typical case study for observing cross-strait information warfare.

References