A fake news report from China claiming that its consulate in Osaka evacuated 750 Chinese from Kansai International Airport on Wednesday caused chaos for the Taiwanese representative office in Japan.
The report claimed that Taiwanese could be evacuated if they identified themselves as “Chinese,” a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, adding that Internet users contacted the office online asking why China could evacuate its people, but Taiwan could not.
The story was later confirmed to be fake when a Taiwanese traveler who was among those stranded at the airport confirmed that outside buses could not enter the airport’s pickup area, as the bridge to the airport was damaged and had been closed to outside traffic.
Instead, stranded travelers could take airport buses to nearby Izumisano Station, where they could board trains, or fast ferries to Kobe Airport.
The buses sent by the Chinese consulate picked up people from Izumisano, which is 11.6km from the airport, the traveler said.
The fake report showed that China was even willing to politicize disaster-response measures, the official said.
The report circulated on Chinese social media platform Weibo, with users commenting that their “mother country is so powerful” and one saying of non-Chinese trapped at the airport: “the foreigners trapped at Kansai International Airport are stupid.”
The use of fake news to cause social disruption is one of China’s “united front” strategies, the official said, citing Chinese interference in the aftermath of a Taiwanese man’s death in Kenya last month.
The man was traveling with a tour group near the shore of Kenya’s Lake Naivasha when he was attacked by a hippopotamus.
The Chinese embassy said that the man was Chinese, which was how media outlets then reported the accident, causing confusion for those responding.
Fake news affects countries worldwide and must be addressed by the government, the official said.
The Council of Agriculture yesterday signed a Taiwan-Australia Agricultural Cooperation Implementation clause to open a new export market for the nation’s pineapple crop. The clause is an addition to existing cooperation measures, it said. China on Friday last week abruptly announced that it would suspend pineapple imports from Taiwan starting on Monday, on grounds that it had on multiple occasions discovered “harmful organisms” in shipments of the fruit. The public and private sectors have since joined hands to purchase the local fruit to help the nation’s pineapple farmers. Canberra has requested that all pineapples for export to Australia have their crown buds removed,
A Tainan taxi driver is the Taiwanese with the longest name, after he last month changed it so that it now contains 25 characters, the Anping District Household Registration Office said. The 47-year-old man, formerly known as Huang Hsin-hsiang (黃鑫翔), applied for the name change on Feb. 26, in the hope that it would bring him good luck. His new name starts with Huang Da-lan (黃大嵐) and adds another 22 characters, meaning “Huang Da-lan is the blessed darling and sweetheart of the god of joy, god of wealth, god of misfortune, god of Earth and all the gods,” it said. With
POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS: As China attempted to promote its national image through humanitarian aid, its targets include New Southbound Policy countries, an expert said China’s “vaccine diplomacy,” which has become central to its foreign policy this year, might hamper Taiwan’s efforts to build relations with developing countries, an expert said. “China, as one of the few countries other than the United Kingdom and the United States to have produced a COVID-19 vaccine, will certainly use that as a diplomatic tool,” said Kung Shan-son (龔祥生), an assistant research fellow at the government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research. Beijing’s major goals in its “vaccine diplomacy” are to promote its national image through humanitarian aid and to solidify its relations with countries that are included in its
Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group might have lost its right to distribute the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19 and the ability to fulfill a contract in Taiwan, civic groups Taiwan Citizen Front and the Economic Democracy Union said yesterday. In a radio interview on Feb. 17, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), head of the Central Epidemic Command Center, said that last year, Taiwan was close to signing a contract to buy doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but that the deal was halted at the last moment, with some speculating that Chinese interference was to blame. On Monday last week, the center
RSS