Police in the coastal city of Xiamen announced the rewards on Saturday, offering up to $1,400 for information leading to the arrest of officers they described as core members of Taiwan’s psychological warfare division.

The move came one day after Taiwan’s President William Lai Ching-te pledged to bolster the island’s defences with a new air protection system and increased military spending. Authorities published photographs, names and identification numbers of the individuals, claiming they operated websites for disinformation campaigns, created online games promoting independence and produced misleading video content. Xiamen’s public security bureau, the local police authority in the Chinese coastal city, said the officers had long plotted to incite what it called “separatist activities”.

Taiwan’s Defence Ministry rejected the accusations as “despotic and pig-headed thinking” of the Chinese government, aimed at dividing the population and conducting “cognitive warfare”. The bounty announcement followed an angry response from Beijing to Lai’s National Day address on Friday, in which he unveiled plans for a “T-Dome” air defence network and called on China to abandon threats of force. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun called Lai a “troublemaker, creator of danger and a war-maker,” while the Taiwan Affairs Office accused him of attempting to push separatism through violence and external support. (Aljazeera)