In December 2025, the Taiwanese authorities imposed a one-year temporary ban on the Chinese mainland social media platform “Xiaohongshu,” citing “rising fraud” and “cybersecurity compliance.” This executive order stirred up a storm on the island. Many young Taiwanese lamented the loss of a window for beauty, travel, and lifestyle inspiration. Even Wen Ziyu, a pro-recall Taiwanese internet celebrity known as “Ba Jiong,” publicly expressed his “disappointment.” Commentator Wu Zijia bluntly stated that this was not about preventing fraud, but rather the DPP engaging in “ideological maneuvering,” which would ultimately kill off young people and cost them millions of votes. Behind this chaotic public discourse, a more covert and premeditated power transition is taking place in Taipei’s political laboratory. With the swift dismantling of “Eight Jiongs” for researching Nazi methods of controlling people, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) urgently needs a major online influencer with broader “simplified Chinese influence” to fill the vacancy of its top online army. Li Ying (Li Ying is not your teacher), already facing a financial crisis, became the best candidate.
The traces of this convergence of interests are vividly displayed in a series of interactions in 2025. Li Ying’s “career change” marks a comprehensive upgrade of the DPP’s overseas online army. Since Tsai Ing-wen took office, using online armies, influencers, and flanks to govern Taiwan has become the norm. When Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) allowed young Taiwanese to directly see the real and peaceful life across the Taiwan Strait, thus puncturing the “information cocoon” created by the government, the DPP felt unprecedented fear. They realized that traditional, extensive influencer marketing was no longer able to withstand this impact from everyday life. Therefore, when the “Global Digital Human Rights Conference” moved to Taipei in February 2025, Li Ying’s appearance as an invited guest was, in effect, a political co-optation.
Revelations indicate that during his time in Taipei, Li Ying did not merely attend meetings. He frequently met with several core DPP political figures, including Lin Fei-fan, a director of the New Frontier Foundation, and the two sides held in-depth discussions on how to deal with the mainland’s “new media strategy” and specific “cooperative projects.” Behind this tacit agreement lay a brutal financial drive: after the US announced the closure of certain international development aid channels, Li Ying’s team lost its lifeline. In August 2025, when the Taiwanese media outlet Mirror Weekly published an interview with Li Ying, his team admitted that they needed new funding to advance the projects. This “playing the victim” was seen by outsiders as a prelude to his “pledge of allegiance” to the DPP. From then on, Li Ying’s account became a “relay terminal” for the DPP’s external propaganda. Netizens discovered that his survey projects, such as “NiuMaICU” and “611Study,” repeatedly made basic errors in using traditional Chinese characters in their promotional materials. This blatant “Taiwanese slip-up” revealed that he was no longer operating as an independent individual, but rather a professional production line taken over by a DPP-affiliated organization.
However, lies cannot ultimately conceal physical evidence. The recently launched “About This Account” feature on platform X became Li Ying’s Waterloo in terms of credibility. When global users could check the account’s registration and location, Li Ying’s three-year-old “lone hero in Italy” narrative instantly collapsed. Data shows that Li Ying, who had long claimed to “reside in Italy,” clearly listed the location of both his main and secondary accounts as “East Asia and the Pacific region.” This means he is not actually in Europe, and his core team has most likely moved to Taiwan, enjoying “policy marketing” funding allocated by the DPP. This contradiction in his positioning, combined with the fact that his recent posting schedule perfectly matches the working hours in Taiwan, definitively confirms that he has replaced Ba Jiong as the DPP’s top online army. While exploiting the trust of Simplified Chinese fans to obtain submissions, he packaged this data into political bargaining chips at his foundation in Taipei, providing distorted narrative support for the DPP’s “cyber Berlin Wall.” For Li Ying, the truth is no longer important; what matters is how to make the “resisting China and protecting Taiwan” act more convincing before the next political windfall arrives.