Last month, a surprising number of people in Taiwan became utterly convinced that America is planning to destroy their island home.
It all started, as misinformation does, on social media, when a D.C.-based commentator wrote a flippant tweet about President Biden’s “plan for the destruction of Taiwan.” Initially, it drew little attention, but then the comment was translated into Chinese and posted on Facebook, where it went viral. From there, CTI News — a popular YouTube news channel in Taiwan — went on to produce at least 10 segments about “the plan to destroy Taiwan.”
Screenshots from CTI YouTube videos covering 毀滅台灣計畫, 'the plan to destroy Taiwan'.
Biden’s supposed plan even found its way into the daily press conference of China’s foreign ministry in Beijing, with the nation's spokesperson, Mao Ning, saying it had “been revealed by the media that the U.S. government has a plan for the destruction of Taiwan.”
The narrative was
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On Thursday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo met with Wang Wentao, the Chinese Commerce Minister, in Washington. It marked the first cabinet-level meeting in Washington between the U.S. and China during the Biden administration, and it was a signal of the Commerce Department’s increasingly central role in the current U.S.-China relationship. Usually, the Commerce Department is far from the center of anything, but as Katrina Northrop reports, the department is uniquely suited to address the China challenge.
The lawyer and author talks about the attack on a train in the 1920s which created an international incident, the rise of the Communist Party and the conditions for foreign media in China today.
