Taiwan seeks to dissolve pro-unification party led by organized crime figure

Taiwan's government has moved to shut down a political party whose leader claims he is working for peace, even as authorities accuse him of operating as a conduit for Beijing's influence. The man at the center of the dispute is Chang An-lo, known throughout the island as the "White Wolf," founder of the China Unification Promotion Party. Last week, Taiwan's Ministry of the Interior formally asked the Constitutional Court to dissolve the organization, alleging it has accepted direct instructions from Beijing to build grassroots political power, recruited current and former military officers to spy for China, and funneled Chinese money into electoral interference.

Chang's vision for Taiwan stands in sharp opposition to what most of the island's 23 million people actually want. Taiwan has existed as a separate political entity for more than a century—first under Japanese colonial rule, then as the Republic of China after the Nationalist government fled the mainland during the civil war in the 1940s. Today, opinion surveys consistently show that Taiwanese prefer to maintain their de facto independence rather than reunify with the People's Republic of China, which claims the island as a renegade province and has refused to rule out military force to bring it under Beijing's control. Yet Chang insists his mission is peaceful. He accuses President William Lai Ching-te of recklessly provoking conflict by pushing for formal independence, and he argues that if Taiwan simply abandoned its independence movement, war could be avoided. "If you don't pursue Taiwan independence, there won't be a war," he told Al Jazeera during an interview at his party's headquarters. "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."

To his critics, this rhetoric crosses a dangerous line. Lai Chung-Chiang, a Taiwanese lawyer and human rights activist, argues that Chang's slogan about refusing to be cannon fodder is not merely a plea for peace—it is a call to abandon loyalty to Taiwan's democratically elected government. The Interior Ministry has characterized the party itself as a threat to the constitutional order and the existence of the Republic of China. Since the party's founding in the mid-2000s, at least eleven members have been investigated or prosecuted for violations of national security, anti-infiltration, or election laws. Dozens more have faced charges under the Organized Crime Prevention Act and other statutes over the past two decades.

Chang's own history complicates his current persona as a nationalist peace advocate. He was born in China and spent his youth as a senior member of the Bamboo Union, one of Taiwan's most notorious criminal syndicates, before claiming to leave in 1968. In the 1980s and 1990s, he served a decade in a United States federal prison on drug trafficking charges. After his release and deportation to Taiwan, he moved to China to escape a crackdown on organized crime. He returned to Taiwan in 2013, was arrested at the airport on charges related to the Organized Crime Prevention Act, but had those charges dropped by prosecutors. Since then, he has reinvented himself as the public face of the unification movement. When asked about the crime rate among his party members, Chang responded that it is actually lower than the rate for Taiwanese society as a whole, and that anyone engaging in criminal activity would be expelled. He sidestepped a direct question about whether he works for China's United Front Work Department, which oversees Beijing's political influence operations, but expressed his full support for its mission.

Beyond his political activities, Chang has cultivated a public image as a problem-solver for ordinary Taiwanese. Before his interview with Al Jazeera, he met with distressed parents whose daughter was feared trapped at a scam operation in the Golden Triangle region where Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand meet. Chang said he maintains a phone full of identification documents and has helped broker the return of dozens of Taiwanese trafficked to Southeast Asia. He also assists residents in renegotiating debts with loan sharks. Al Jazeera could not independently verify these claims. The party itself holds virtually no formal political power—it has no representatives in the national legislature and only two elected members serving as neighborhood wardens in New Taipei City and Miaoli County.

China has characterized Taiwan's move to dissolve the party as suppression of legitimate political speech. A spokesperson for Beijing's Taiwan Affairs Office stated that advocating for reunification and opposing what it calls secessionist attempts are justified and conform to the interests of the Chinese nation. Taiwan's government, by contrast, views the party as a vehicle for foreign interference in its democratic processes.

Yet experts caution that dissolving the party may accomplish little in practical terms. Pu-chao Hung, a Taiwanese political scientist, noted that the move would be largely symbolic. The people, funding, and local networks associated with the party would not disappear. Instead, those involved could simply migrate into civic associations, community groups, or other organizations outside the formal political structure. China employed a similar strategy in Hong Kong in the years before the territory's return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, cultivating relationships with political elites and civic organizations to build support for Beijing's interests. Since the 2019 pro-democracy protests, China has tightened its control over Hong Kong significantly, and Chang has suggested that Hong Kong's experience could serve as a model for Taiwan's "peaceful" reunification with China. The constitutional court's decision on whether to dissolve the party remains pending, but the broader question of how to counter Chinese influence operations in Taiwan will persist regardless of the outcome.