China is flooding Taiwan with disinformation
Taiwan to make biological weapons at a lab run by the island’s defence ministry, the report claimed. Taiwanese and American officials denied it. The allegedly leaked minutes, it transpired, were not written in the usual style of Taiwanese government records.
They were filled with official-sounding phrases that are used in mainland China, but not in Taiwan. This was probably Chinese disinformation, Taiwanese officials said. Yet the story spread to Taiwanese talk shows and influencers.
It soon evolved into a wilder claim: Taiwan was going to collect 150,000 samples of Taiwanese blood and hand them to the Americans, so they could develop a virus to kill Chinese people. This sort of disinformation is so widespread in Taiwan that analysts have given it a moniker: yi mei lun, or the “US scepticism" narrative. Its spread is becoming a major worry for Taiwan’s government and civil society in the run-up to a hugely important presidential election next January.
Taiwanese voters will in effect be asked to decide whether Taiwan should remain aligned with America in strengthening deterrence against a possible Chinese invasion, or should move towards building ties with China. The opposition Kuomintang has called the vote a choice between “war and peace", implying that the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s hostility towards China will provoke it to attack. Chinese state actors have backed that framing, spreading narratives that portray America, not China, as the island’s biggest threat.
Much of the disinformation is intended to reinforce that false message. Lo Ping-chen, a cabinet minister who since 2018 has been leading a government task force against disinformation, says it has “severely infiltrated" Taiwan’s society. “We used to
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