Taiwanese scholars warn that Beijing is using floods of simplified-Chinese data to dominate how AI understands the Chinese language, a bad sign for Taiwan's cultural independence and a fresh front in China's influence campaign.

• Academia Sinica researcher Hung Tzu-wei says Beijing has a plan to control the global interpretation of Chinese by feeding huge amounts of simplified-Chinese material into AI systems.
• The result is a new kind of "knowledge injustice": Taiwan's own language models exist, but a database nobody uses has no future.
• China's influence campaign against Taiwan has two tracks: short-term meddling around elections, which Taipei handles fairly well, and slow cultural infiltration that shapes how children think over the long run.
• Hung urges the government to scrap Taiwan's Mandarin-first language policy, which a Control Yuan report found has no legal basis, and predicts written Taiwanese will replace standard Chinese over time, much as Ukrainian use rose after Russia's invasion.
• A recent Academia Sinica survey found that supporting democracy alone doesn't make people willing to defend Taiwan; a strong Taiwanese identity does.

Outlook: Expect growing pressure in Taiwan to boost local-language content and AI training data as a defense against Beijing's information influence, alongside the existing focus on countering election-season disinformation.