Time for Taiwan to turn the narrative around

When Taiwanese president Lai Ching-te said China should focus on retaking land occupied by Russia, he turned China’s narrative around, and this is exactly what Taiwan needs.

China is nowhere as strong as it seems, and its claim on Taiwan is baseless, but it fully intends to fake it until it makes it. China manages to project an aura of invincibility and a sense of inevitability that aims at achieving what everyone seriously involved in Taiwan has understood: Beijing wants to take the island without a fight by scaring everyone into surrendering and accepting its lies about the island.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wants the Taiwanese people themselves to be frightened until they’d rather give up, and the rest of the world must be convinced that defending Taiwan is a lost cause that isn’t worth the pain.

And most of the time, China doesn’t have to work hard to push its narrative that all is lost. Taiwan, and most like-minded democracies, have disregarded this global psychological offensive for too long, enabling Beijing to create a permanent background noise in its favour even though its message is actually clumsy and its methods rather basic.

China dominates the narrative by default, because it is the only one that even tries. This is something I witnessed in my time as a journalist around Taiwan: China doesn’t even need any sort of 3D chess strategic thinking to relay its message. All it needs is to endlessly repeat it in the most simple terms, and the laziness, ignorance, and general apathy of its opponents do the trick: China’s message is amplified by a lack of interest in countering it. It is not because of corruption or a wish to serve propaganda; it is simply laziness, ignorance, and complacency, especially in newsrooms.

China has one perfect tool for it: America’s most reputable international news agency. Media rely essentially on Reuters and Associated Press (AP) for their video and audio grabs, and international news stories are based on what these two agencies will provide. It is important to know that AP provides the content of Chinese state media CCTV to its clients, meaning newsrooms are granted the use of whatever propaganda images China wants to bring on their table. Of course, AP includes a disclaimer at the beginning of every newsreel that those are not part of AP’s editorial choices, and no self-respecting journalist in any democracy would repeat whatever script comes with these reels. But I saw what the effect is: underpaid, exhausted, or simply unqualified journalists will cherish the opportunity to use these images to illustrate their story. And even if the story is not overly pro-Chinese, the images are what China wants to show: warships fearlessly cutting the waves, soldiers parading, missiles being shot… A dream come true for a journalist looking to fix an exciting story within a tight deadline, serving China their audience on a silver plate, presenting them terrifying images of Chinese forces about to overwhelm Taiwan and short grabs justifying its claims. Why even try to resist?

Journalists also need experts, none the least because they are the only people who are always eager to speak: try to interview government officials and dive into a rabbit hole of bureaucratic obstacles, but any academic would readily jump in an online call for an interview, and that’s what you need when you must fix up a story on a deadline. And you would never believe how many people hold a PhD or previous experience in intelligence, military, or diplomacy, until you start paying attention to cross-Straits relations.

A massive ecosystem of China watchers built their personal brand on reading the future, propelled by a media industry that would grant the honours of their front page to anyone with a varnish of respectability who picks up a megaphone and screams loudly their own personal prediction on when a war will happen.

It’s like a supermarket: you can shop around for an expert who will tell you their two cents about when Taiwan will meet its doom. I sometimes make it a game to count down how many occurences of “might”, “may”, “could”, “possibly”, and other variations of “maybe” I can find in their analyses.

The use of weasel words and constant conditional mood means they will be right whatever happens. Exploring the widest span of options only makes them look superficially smarter. For readers who browse through what seems like a legit source, what will remain imprinted in their mind is the general idea that Taiwan is already lost and there’s no point dying for it. But if you make the effort to trim through the uncertainties of their discourse, nothing remains: these people know nothing, which is not surprising because nobody knows if and when a conflict would arise. But the damage is done: someone got taps in the back about their cleverness, and everyone who saw the headline thinks I am about to face the biggest thing since the Normandy landings in my neighbourhood. It’s not even China that is at fault for it: we simply give up on fighting equally against their false narrative, in favour of a fauna of fortune-tellers that provide an ingestible story.

And China’s discourse is now so deeply ingrained that our experts and journalists do not even need to be nudged further; they already accepted it. In an otherwise very interesting and well documented article , the respected Paul Krugman committed the mistake of repeating the well-worn cliché that “you don’t have to study much history to be aware that autocratic regimes sometimes respond to domestic difficulties by trying to distract the population with foreign adventurism” in reaction to China’s economic woes. It is alarming that even such a high-level personality as Paul Krugman repeats that trope as if it were obvious and did not need to be supported by facts, when actually looking into “much history” teaches us there is literally not one occurence in modern times of a war conducted by a dictator to drive attention away from domestic troubles. Every article mentioning domestic trouble in China will be inundated with comments that Xi Jinping will attack Taiwan to distract his population from domestic troubles, based on the false narrative that dictators often do this.

In fact there is no such pattern, and indeed no such example, at all. For starters, war is too costly to serve as a distraction, especially in times of economic troubles. When I interviewed researcher Azar Gat on his work on the history of warfare, he demonstrated that war typically costs around half of a nation’s GDP. The concept of waging war during economic instability defies practicality. The logistical complexities, resource allocation, and strategic foresight required for conflict belie the notion of using war as a swift diversion tactic.

The Falklands War is a frequently cited example. But while Argentinian dictator Leopoldo Galtieri’s decision to invade the Falklands was influenced by a degree of domestic discontent, it was propelled more by an erroneous assessment that the British would not fight back and the perceived ease of victory. If anything, Galteri invaded the Falklands precisely because he thought it would not start a war. This is not the case for Taiwan, at least until the defeatist narrative has defanged the Taiwanese and their allies.

The baseless stereotype that dictators are going to start a war when they are in troubleplays right into Beijing’s psychological warfare. It creates a mindset in which China should not be troubled lest it trigger a global apocalypse. When Paul Krugman concludes that “China’s domestic problems make it more, not less, of a danger to global security”, he unwittingly echoes Beijing’s propaganda: its narrative has been so thoroughly embedded in our subconsciousness that there is not even a need to push it further; our analysts are doing the job themselves.

Everything China says about Taiwan is a lie, and it is not even especially good at formulating them, but the other side has been enabling it for too long. If Lai’s declaration is a sign that the tables are going to be turned and that another narrative will be pushed, then Taiwan will benefit greatly. It is time now to offer an equally sharp and efficient message to assert that Taiwan can defend its right to exist.

Julien Oeuillet is a Taiwan-based journalist. He works for several English-language media such as Radio Taiwan International and television channel TaiwanPlus. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.