President 
Lai Ching-te used the weekend to pair a fresh defence-resilience pledge with a session taking input from high-school students on countering Chinese disinformation. The dual-track outing places defence build-up and grassroots civic mobilisation on the same Sunday agenda, the Taipei Times reported on its front page and Taiwan section.
The first track is Lai's vow to bolster Taiwan's defence and broader societal resilience, framed in front-page coverage as a continuation of the administration's emphasis on whole-of-society readiness rather than narrow military spending. The vow lands in the context of ongoing US arms-package discussions and the kind of regional pressure that the Pentagon's recent Shangri-La address has surfaced, with Taipei's defence-resilience framing now used as the public reference posture by the Lai cabinet in cross-strait messaging.
The second track is a session with high-school students focused on identifying and counteracting Chinese disinformation campaigns aimed at Taiwan, the Taipei Times reported on its Taiwan page. The format — incumbent president taking advice from teenagers — is itself the signal: it markets Taiwan's information-warfare front as a generational rather than an institutional fight, and gives Lai a visible touch point with the cohort most exposed to platform-mediated narratives.
Neither the front-page defence pledge nor the disinformation session produced specific new policy commitments. The combined outing functions instead as agenda-setting for the months ahead, telling the domestic audience the Lai administration intends to keep defence resilience and Chinese influence operations welded together as the headline organising frame for the year. Taipei's defence-resilience messaging running on the same Sunday cycle as the Hegseth Shangri-La address also keeps Taiwan in the regional defence-policy headline conversation through Asia-time Monday.
Figures referenced: Lai Ching-te. — JudgeMarket.
