DISINFO: The West is the sole responsible for growing tensions between China and Taiwan
SUMMARY
What are the reasons behind the rise in tensions between China and Taiwan? Xi Jinping announced this month that Beijing will never renounce the reunification, but this has been the position of the Central Committee of China’s Communist Party, so there is nothing new there. The novelties lie in the joint military exercises carried out by troops of the US, the UK and their allies in the Philippines Sea days before. So to understand this escalation we shouldn’t focus in the tense relations between Beijing and Taipei, which hadn’t changed in 70 years, but to put the spotlight instead in the role of the other actors that are intervening in this situation, considering that China’s global rise is what keeps the White House awake at night.
RESPONSE
By claiming that there is nothing new in Beijing’s stance towards Taiwan, this disinformation story ignores China’s latest moves towards the island, such as the record number of Chinese military aircraft that entered Taiwan’s Air Defence Identification Zone in early October. This led Taiwanese minister of defence Chiu Kuo-cheng to affirm that the tensions between China and Taiwan are at its worst point in 40 years, and to claim that the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army may be fully capable to invade the island by 2025.
Besides, Beijing’s ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’, its boycott against Australian goods or its recent moves in Hong Kong -such as the imposition of a draconian National Security Law, the crushing of the autonomy of the city and the massive repression against the democratic movement-, is leading observers to fear that China is adopting a more aggressive stance in the pursuit of its political goals in the international field.
Certainly, some recent events such as naval exercises in the Philippines Sea are intended to send a message to China, and other Western moves like the AUKUS alliance are perceived by Beijing as provocative, contributing to the tensions. But the goal of this disinformation story is to put all the blame on China’s adversaries while deliberately blurring the full picture, in order to promote the longstanding pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about an ever-aggressive imperialist West.
See other examples in our database, such as claims that the West is applying an “Anaconda ring” of conflicts against China as previously did against Russia, that Hong Kong protests are the West’s revenge on China for not waging war against Russia, that sanctions against China are proof that Western values are nothing but liberal totalitarianism, or that the US seeded chaos in Afghanistan to undermine China and Russia.