Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: KMT/Facebook
THE KMT HAS begun leaning into political attacks on the national text alert sent out by the Ministry of National Defense (MND) yesterday. These attacks have increasingly taken the tenor of alleging that the text message alert was not a mistake, in that the English wording of the alert referred to the satellite launch as a “missile” launch, but a fake incident entirely concocted by the DPP for the sake of elections. The KMT has focused attacks on this rather than criticizing the substance of the text message alert, which led to confusion, or the Tsai administration itself’s apparent confusion. The incident takes place mere days before the presidential election is to take place on Saturday.
That is, the warning was for a Chinese satellite launch, which unexpectedly crossed into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). What led to confusion, however, was that the English text for the alert referred to the launch as a “missile” and the Chinese text referred to a “rocket.”
This caused confusion among both Chinese and English speakers, even among DPP policymakers. As much of the international press in Taiwan was in the midst of a press conference with Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu when the text message alert was issued shortly after 3 PM, Wu stated that the alert had been for a satellite launch.
Screenshot of the text
By contrast, Premier Chen Chien-jen, who was then being cross-examined in the Legislative Yuan over publicizing the contracts for Taiwan’s domestically manufactured vaccine, Medigen, interrupted the proceedings to state that he had received a text message about China firing a missile. Evidently, Chen had looked at the English part of the text message first.
The confusion may have resulted from a failure of translation. As many Chinese-language commentators suggested, the writer of the text may not have distinguished between “rocket” and “missile”. Either way, the MND may have only had mere seconds to respond, and was drawing from pre-established text.
The MND later apologized for the confusion that had resulted. Nonetheless, it still took the MND close to four hours to post information about the incident on its English-language Twitter account, despite that responding to disinformation and misinformation requires speed, particularly when it comes to incidents that could stoke regional geopolitical tensions. Compared to Chinese air incursions into Taiwan’s ADIZ in which the MND can release data after the fact, news of the incident had already spread widely, but the response from the government was still slow on this front. That four hours passed before an English-language tweet was issued occurs despite that the text message alert itself was issued quickly.
It is to be questioned if the satellite launch was an attempt to intimidate Taiwan before the election. Launching a satellite on an unexpected trajectory could conceivably have been a means of intimidation that stopped short of the provocation of firing an actual missile over Taiwan. One has seen similarly with China emphasizing balloon incursions of Taiwan’s airspace rather than using warplanes in the lead-up to the elections.
After the alert, a wave of bots alleged mass panic in Taiwan in response to the incident, when relative calm prevailed in Taiwan. It may be in the interests of the Chinese government to depict Taiwanese as afraid of Chinese military threats, as detected by the Taiwan Fact Check Center in terms of discernible trends in disinformation ahead of the vote.
The criticisms from the KMT, however, suggested that the incident was concocted entirely for the election, rather than criticizing the translation issues in the text, even as it claimed that national security should not be politicized. A tweet from the KMT’s English-language Twitter account pointed to a previous incident in which China fired a rocket to launch a satellite into space over Taiwan in 2022, yet this did not lead to any national text message being sent out. Still other attempts to downplay the missile threat have emphasized that the launch was announced beforehand.
Taipei mayor Chiang Wan-an in particular has been strident, calling for firings in response to the mishap by the Tsai administration. By contrast, the Tsai administration has emphasized the unexpected nature of the course of the rocket’s trajectory, as well as that it is better to be prepared than to be caught unaware.
In a similar timeframe, a document released by New Party legislative candidate Hou Han-ting claims that the DPP is engaged in efforts to create disinformation intended to drum up a sense of “national doom”, a term originating from the 2020 election cycle about a sense that the nation would come to a bad end if the KMT won the presidential election. The DPP has responded that the document is photoshopped and threatened to sue him in response. Hou was previously one of the New Party youth spokespersons who were accused of running an online media outlet as a disinformation outlet and spy ring for China.
Regardless, it may be that the KMT and pan-Blue camp as a whole prioritizes attacking the Tsai administration over the text alert and politicizing the incident, in alleging it was fake altogether. This takes priority over readiness for a potentially fatal incident, or one which leads to a significant uptick in cross-strait tensions.
Tweet by the KMT on the missile launch
The KMT would be embracing a conspiratorial worldview in casting doubt on the incident as a whole, rather than acknowledging the incident as real but criticizing the Tsai administration’s response. This also casts doubt on the reliability of the Taiwanese military, never mind that the KMT has historically claimed to stand for the interests of veterans in Taiwan. It took the KMT some time to settle on this response, but in consideration of the sharp polarization of the party at present, in which the deep blue wing of the party seems to dominate, this may not be surprising. Yet what does surprise is that the KMT with its response seems to be tacitly acknowledging that a sense of “national doom” from Chinese threats implicitly benefits the DPP and that it knows this, too.
It is to be seen how the incident affects the election. To be sure, the incident could have been one used by the KMT to lean into attacks on the Tsai administration as mismanaging crisis responses–even in the event of Chinese threats against Taiwan–and casting doubt on the Tsai administration’s claims that it is the best choice for an effective defense against China.
Instead, the KMT has chosen to lean into a narrative that simply alleges that threats from China are concocted by the DPP for the sake of elections and not real in the slightest, as has been an undercurrent of its election campaigning to date, but has rarely illustrated so openly. This could, in fact, backfire for the KMT if it reinforces the view of the party as simply accommodating of Chinese threats and attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of the public about the reality of the threats.