Taiwan’s ‘White Wolf’ leads lonely crusade to ‘reunify’ with China 

Taipei, Taiwan – For a man associated with organised crime, election interference, and Chinese influence operations, Chang An-lo is adamant that he is on a mission of peace.

Widely known as the “White Wolf”, Chang is the founder of the Chinese Unification Promotion Party (CUPP), which advocates for Taiwan’s “reunification” with China.

Chang’s position is not a popular one in Taiwan despite the island’s deep cultural and historical ties with China.

Taiwan, a democracy of some 23 million people, has been administered separately from the Chinese mainland for more than a century, first as a Japanese colony and then as the “Republic of China”, whose government fled to the island in the 1940s at the end of the Chinese Civil War.

Opinion polls suggest that most Taiwanese want to maintain the island’s status as a de facto independent state, even as the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing claims the territory as a province that must be reunited with the mainland, using force if necessary.

Chang accuses Taiwanese President William Lai Ching-te of trying to bait Beijing into a conflict by pushing for Taiwanese independence.

He also hopes to persuade Taiwanese that they do not need to sacrifice themselves as cannon fodder in the event of an “armed unification” with China.

“If you don’t pursue Taiwan independence, there won’t be a war. But if you push for independence, sell Taiwan out, and provoke a conflict – we will rise up on the front lines. We refuse to be cannon fodder,” Chang told Al Jazeera in an interview at his party’s head office.

Chang claims to have negotiated with China’s authorities about designating certain Daoist temples in Taiwan as shelters for civilians during a conflict, and he often wears a vest emblazoned with a call for Taiwan’s armed forces to “rise up on the front line”.

To his critics, Chang’s views are not just offensive, but potentially treasonous.

“The meaning of ‘rise up at the front line, don’t be cannon fodder’ isn’t only saying don’t resist the Chinese,” Lai Chung-Chiang, a Taiwanese lawyer and human rights activist, told Al Jazeera.

“It’s saying don’t be loyal to Taiwan’s democratically elected government.”

Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior has branded the CUPP a threat to the “existence of the Republic of China and the constitutional order of freedom and democracy.”

Last week, the ministry submitted a request to the Taiwan Constitutional Court formally seeking the party’s dissolution.

The government’s case rests on allegations that the party accepted instructions from Beijing to develop grassroots influence operations, recruited current and former military officers to spy for China, and used Chinese funding to interfere in elections, among other wrongdoing.

Since the CUPP’s founding in the mid-2000s, at least 11 party members have been investigated or prosecuted for violating national security, anti-infiltration or election laws, according to Interior Ministry data.

The ministry says that dozens of party members have also committed other non-national security-related crimes over the past 20 years, including offences against the Organised Crime Prevention Act.

Asked about the criticisms of his party, Chang said the crime rate among its members is lower than for Taiwanese society as a whole.

He said anyone engaging in criminal activity would be expelled from the party.

Chang sidestepped a question about whether he works for China’s United Front Work Department, which oversees China’s political influence operations, but expressed support for its work.

“For the peace and happiness of the people on both sides of the Strait, I am fully on board with the united front,” he said.

Chang also accused the ruling Democratic Progressive Party of corruption and shared a dossier of alleged cases involving its officials.

The CUPP has no representatives in the national legislature, with its only elected members being two neighbourhood wardens, known as lizhang, in New Taipei City and Miaoli County.

While Chang does not hold elected office, he offers services of a kind to the public.

Before his interview at the CUPP’s office on Monday, Chang met the distressed parents of a young woman feared to be trapped at a scam centre near the Golden Triangle, the region where the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet.

Scrolling through a phone full of photo IDs, Chang said he has helped broker the return of dozens of Taiwanese who had been trafficked to Southeast Asia in similar circumstances.

Chang said he also helps residents renegotiate repayments for people indebted to loan sharks, among other forms of assistance.

Al Jazeera could not independently verify his claims.

Multiple CUPP members have been investigated for ties to the Bamboo Union, one of Taiwan’s most famous criminal syndicates, founded in the 1950s by the children of Chinese emigres.

Chang, who was born in China, acknowledges that he was a senior member of the Bamboo Union in his youth, but told Al Jazeera that he left in 1968.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Chang spent 10 years in a United States federal prison on drug trafficking charges.

After being deported to Taiwan following his release from prison, Chang moved to China amid a crackdown on organised crime by Taiwanese authorities.

Chang returned to Taiwan in 2013, when he was arrested at the airport on allegations of violating the Organised Crime Prevention Act.

Prosecutors later dropped all charges against him.

Since then, Chang has rebranded himself as a Chinese nationalist and the public face of the CUPP.

China has accused Taiwan’s government of suppressing “political dissent” with its bid to ban the party.

“Advocating for reunification and opposing secessionist attempts are justified and legitimate, as they conform to the overall interests of the Chinese nation and the prevailing trend of history,” Chen Binhua, a spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing, said during a media briefing last week.

The Chinese embassy in Washington, DC, did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Pu-chao Hung, a Taiwanese political scientist, said the dissolution of the CUPP would be a largely symbolic win for Taipei.

With or without the CUPP, Chinese influence operations will continue, Hung said.

“Dissolving a political party does not make its people, funding or local networks disappear,” Hung told Al Jazeera.

“China’s political operations in Taiwan rely on multiple local nodes, and those involved can move into associations, civic groups or other organisations,” he said.

China used a similar playbook in Hong Kong in the run-up to the city’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, courting political elites and civic organisations to shore up support for Beijing.

Chang said the former British colony, where Beijing has tightened its control since mass pro-democracy protests in 2019, could serve as a framework for Taiwan’s “peaceful” reunification with China.

“I believe the best way forward is to sit down and talk. As early as 1978 … the mainland proposed very favourable conditions for unification – stating that as long as both sides sat down to negotiate, even the national anthem, flag and name could be discussed,” Chang said.

Whether known as the Republic of China or the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan and China are one and the same, Chang said.

“Both sides represent China, and we are all Chinese,” he said.