The War in My Room

Photos from authors private archive

There are different wars being fought inside my apartment. That's not a metaphor – or rather, it is, but only barely.

It started, as these things often do, with small intrusions. A Xiaomi router, Chinese-made, flagged in news reports as a conduit for hackers.ᴬ A robotic vacuum cleaner, also Chinese-made, accused of listening.ᴮ Then the apps: WeChat, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Amap. Each one a quiet data pipeline running from the intimate details of daily life – location, spending habits, voice, camera – into servers somewhere on the mainland.ᶜ·ᴰ·ᴱ The cumulative effect is something like a shadow self: a digital replica assembled from a thousand small surrenders, filed away in a Chinese government database.

I'm a Taiwanese journalist based in Taipei, which means that the stakes of these intrusions are not abstract. I can't just shrug and pay with my phone. When I needed new earphones recently, I stood at a shop counter for an embarrassingly long time, turning over box after box, trying to confirm that every component – hardware and software – had no connection to China. The store clerk watched me with barely concealed impatience. Why does it matter? he asked.

I showed him. I opened the Anti-Secession Law,¹ the State Security Law,² the National Intelligence Law,³ the Cybersecurity Law,⁴ and the newly passed Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress.⁵ I walked him through what they actually say: that his conversations on Douyin can be turned over to the Chinese government on request; that every Chinese company and every Chinese citizen is legally required to prioritize national security, to cooperate with state investigations, to provide intelligence – from our living rooms, our phones, our cars – on demand. Because we are Taiwanese.⁶ Because we want to determine our own future. Under these laws, that makes us a threat.

He went quiet.

The friends I've interviewed in Hong Kong describe the same sensation of a war crossing their threshold – and they can pinpoint the date: 2020, when Beijing imposed the National Security Law on Hong Kong,⁷ nullifying the promise of fifty years of autonomy it had made at the handover. 

After that, things that had occupied the shelves and walls of ordinary apartments became dangerous objects: books about Taiwan, books about democracy, protest posters, human rights badges, the small material culture of a civic movement. People packed them into boxes. They couldn't bring themselves to throw them away, so they mailed them to friends in Taiwan, or they left – dragging suitcases through airports, trading one life for the uncertain freedom of the diaspora. Since 2020, hundreds of thousands of Hongkongers have scattered across the world.

From Xinjiang, officially the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, in the northwest of China, the accounts are different in kind, though not entirely in logic. The government arrived first in the form of alarm units, installed in every home under the banner of counterterrorism. But the alarms also had intercoms. Each neighbourhood came with assigned state security personnel, and through those intercoms they issued instructions, listened, gave orders. The speaker was also the ear.

Then came the ‘relatives’ – Han Chinese assigned to live inside Uyghur homes. Some were government employees, some teachers, some of undisclosed affiliation, but they all shared a new official title: family member. They moved in, monitored the household, and reported back. The government filmed this program and turned the footage into propaganda, a portrait of the state as a benevolent patriarch. The people I interviewed – one source in particular – were contacted by police shortly after we spoke. I haven't heard from them since.

A young Chinese man who left after the White Paper Movement told me that even in his apartment in Europe, the reach had followed him. Chinese authorities had reportedly hired local criminals to spray-paint his door and keep him under surveillance – all because he had posted online about what he'd seen with his own eyes.

This is, in the end, what the infrastructure is designed to ensure: that there is only one version of events. One account of Taiwan, of Xinjiang, of Hong Kong, of China itself. When the people closest to us – family, old friends – have absorbed that version so completely that they repeat it back as fact, we don't just lose an argument. We lose them.

I began reporting on Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In Crimea and other occupied territories, I heard Ukrainians describe re-education sessions, filtration camps, the systematic pressure to become someone else. It was disorienting how familiar it all sounded – how much it rhymed with what I'd been hearing from the other side of the world.

But the scale of violence in Ukraine was something else: the relentlessness of it, the cruelty, the deliberate erasure. Against that, I kept asking myself a question I couldn't stop turning over: How do people survive it? How do you go home at the end of the day – if home still exists – and find a reason to keep going?

In March 2026, through the support of INDEX, I spent a month in Ukraine looking for an answer. I traveled between Kharkiv, Kyiv, Lviv, and Mykolaiv, talking to soldiers, writers, NGO workers, doctors, and librarians. What I found, slowly, was this: the apartment, the house, the room – the very site of the war's first violations – is also the site of the first resistance. And the most durable form of resistance begins with knowing who you are.

The soldiers I met were, almost without exception, closely following Taiwan's defense procurement. Their interest was not academic. Taiwan's pro-Beijing parties currently hold a legislative majority, and for two consecutive years they have blocked the government's annual budget and its special defense appropriation – cutting funding for drones, unmanned surface vessels, AI operating systems, submarines. They have severed, piece by piece, the programs Taiwan needs to protect itself.

Part of the problem, I think, is that many Taiwanese voters genuinely do not believe the threat is real. They've persuaded themselves that if they don't provoke, they won't be invaded. That if they stay quiet, the present will hold.

Ukraine used to believe something like that, too.

What we need, perhaps even more than weapons, is clarity – about who we are, about what we are defending, about what the adversary actually wants. Every conversation, honestly had. Every room, known and secured. That has been my reason for going to Ukraine, again and again, over the past four years: to understand how people fight for a life when someone else has decided it shouldn't exist. I hope to keep going back – to sit in the rooms where that fight is happening, to be present for it – until the day comes when no one, anywhere, has to think of their own home as a front line.

Notes

¹ Anti-Secession Law (反分裂國家法) Passed by the Tenth National People's Congress on March 14, 2005, and effective the same day. The law consists of ten articles and was drafted specifically in response to Taiwan. Its most consequential provision, Article 8, authorizes the use of ‘non-peaceful means and other necessary measures’ if Taiwan declares independence, if a ‘major incident’ occurs that would lead to Taiwan's separation, or if ‘the possibility of peaceful reunification’ is exhausted. The law applies to all Chinese nationals and entities.

² State Security Law (國家安全法, 2015) Passed on July 1, 2015, and distinct from the Hong Kong-specific National Security Law imposed in 2020. This is mainland China's overarching national security framework. Its 84 articles define national security expansively – encompassing political, military, economic, cultural, cyber, and outer-space domains – and establish obligations for all citizens, organizations, and institutions to assist in protecting it. Chapter 6 in particular sets out the duties of citizens and corporations to support state security work. The law's conception of security explicitly extends beyond China's geographic borders.

³ National Intelligence Law (國家情報法, 2017) Passed on June 27, 2017. Article 7 is the provision most often cited in international security discussions: ‘All organizations and citizens shall support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with law, and shall protect national intelligence work secrets they are aware of.’ Article 14 authorizes intelligence agencies to demand such cooperation from any individual or organization. Legal analysts and Western governments have consistently cited this law as the statutory basis for Beijing's ability to compel Chinese companies – including technology firms operating globally – to share data and provide access on request, regardless of where that data was collected or stored.   

⁴ Cybersecurity Law (網路安全法) Passed on November 7, 2016, and in force since June 1, 2017. The law requires network operators to assist public security organs with criminal investigations, to store Chinese user data on servers located within mainland China (data localization), and to submit to government security reviews. It applies broadly to domestic and foreign companies operating networks in China. A 2025 amendment expanded its scope and enforcement mechanisms.

⁵ Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress (民族團結進步促進法) Passed by the Fourteenth National People's Congress on March 12, 2026, and effective July 1, 2026. The law is framed around the consolidation of a unified ‘Chinese national community’ (中華民族共同體). Article 63 establishes extraterritorial reach: organizations and individuals outside the People's Republic who are found to have ‘undermined ethnic unity or created ethnic divisions’ are subject to legal liability under Chinese law. The definition of such conduct is broad and determined unilaterally by Beijing.

⁶ On Taiwan's status Taiwan has never been governed by the People's Republic of China. It operates as a fully-functioning state with its own elected government, independent judiciary, separate currency and fiscal system, and a military answerable to its civilian leadership. By most international measures of democratic governance, press freedom, and civil liberties, Taiwan ranks among the leading countries in Asia. Its official name under its constitution is the Republic of China (ROC) – a government founded in 1911, which lost the Chinese Civil War to the Communists and relocated to Taiwan in 1949. The ROC government has remained in continuous operation on Taiwan since, and the island has since undergone a full democratic transition, holding its first direct presidential election in 1996. Taiwan is today in every practical sense a self-governing democracy, distinct in law, politics, and society from the mainland.

The People's Republic of China has never held sovereignty over Taiwan and did not exist when the ROC government arrived on the island. Beijing's claim that Taiwan is a renegade province of the PRC awaiting reunification is a political assertion, not a description of historical or legal fact. It is a claim that the people of Taiwan – and their democratically-elected representatives – have not accepted.

⁷ Background: Hong Kong, the National Security Law, and the exodus that followed Hong Kong was a British colony until 1997, returned to China under a framework called ‘one country, two systems’ – a fifty-year constitutional guarantee, enshrined in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, of a separate legal system, civil liberties, and political autonomy. Beijing nullified that guarantee in practice on June 30, 2020, imposing the National Security Law without any vote by Hong Kong's own legislature, in direct response to the mass protest movement that had shaken the city since 2019. What began as opposition to a proposed extradition bill had grown into a citywide democratic uprising; Beijing's answer was more than ten thousand arrests, followed by a law criminalizing secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces – with sentences up to life imprisonment and jurisdiction extending to anyone, anywhere in the world. Within months, independent newspapers were shuttered, opposition figures arrested, and civic organizations dissolved. A supplementary security law, Article 23, passed in March 2024.

The emigration that followed was without precedent in Hong Kong's postwar history. Net outflows surged to 85,000 in 2020 and 75,000 in 2021 – the steepest population declines ever recorded – with a further 113,200 residents departing between mid-2021 and mid-2022. More than half of those surveyed cited political factors as their primary reason for leaving. By the time the first wave stabilized, over 163,000 Hongkongers had arrived in the United Kingdom alone under a bespoke visa scheme opened in January 2021; hundreds of thousands more resettled in Canada, Australia, and Taiwan. The diaspora created by the NSL numbers, in total, in the hundreds of thousands.

Sources

ᴬ 

• Forbes:  ‘Exclusive: Warning Over Chinese Mobile Giant Xiaomi Recording Millions Of People’s ‘Private’ Web And Phone Use’ April,  2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2020/04/30/exclusive-warning-over-chinese-mobile-giant-xiaomi-recording-millions-of-peoples-private-web-and-phone-use/#3799f16c1b2a

• The Hacker News: ‘Xiaomi Android Devices Hit by Multiple Flaws Across Apps and System Components,’ May 7, 2024. https://thehackernews.com/2024/05/xiaomi-android-devices-hit-by-multiple.html

ᴮ 

• TechCrunch: ‘Ecovacs home robots can be hacked to spy on their owners, researchers say,’ Aug. 9, 2024. https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/09/ecovacs-home-robots-can-be-hacked-to-spy-on-their-owners-researchers-say/

• ABC News (Australia): ‘We hacked a robot vacuum, and could watch live through its camera,’ Oct. 4, 2024. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-04/robot-vacuum-hacked-photos-camera-audio/104414020

С

• Citizen Lab: ‘We Chat, They Watch,’ May 7, 2020. https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/we-chat-they-watch/

• Radio Free Asia: ‘WeChat warns users their likes, comments and histories are being sent to China,’ Sept. 8, 2022. https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/wechat-09082022183307.html

ᴰ 

• BuzzFeed News: ‘Leaked Audio From 80 Internal TikTok Meetings Shows That US User Data Has Been Repeatedly Accessed From China,’ June 17, 2022. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-tapes-us-user-data-china-bytedance-access

• CNBC: ‘TikTok CEO says China-based ByteDance employees still have access to some U.S. data,’ March 23, 2023. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/23/tiktok-ceo-china-based-bytedance-employees-can-still-access-some-us-data.html

ᴱ 

• Focus Taiwan (CNA): ‘Official warns of Chinese navigation app 'AMap' security risks,’ April 23, 2026. https://focustaiwan.tw/politics/202604230012

• Taipei Times: ‘AMap transmits personal data to China, NSB says,’ May 8, 2026. https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2026/05/08/2003856970