Trump Doesn’t Need to Be a Prop in Xi’s Political Show — SkimNews
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- Taiwan's National Security Bureau traced roughly 100 suspicious accounts spreading more than 9,000 coordinated social media messages during Trump's May meeting with Xi in Beijing, timed to launch alongside Beijing's own messaging about Taiwan.
- Trump said publicly in May that arms sales to Taiwan could be treated as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Beijing; afterward the State Department's Chinese-language spokesperson declined to comment on the arms package and White House officials said Trump would decide "soon."
- Chinese state media described the Trump-Xi summit as "the first head-of-state reception of its kind in 60 years" and a "milestone," with a CCTV program portraying Xi as a great-power leader steering China-U.S. relations "onto the right course."
- Beijing dispatched scholars and researchers to place op-eds in major American outlets repeating a "constructive strategic stability" narrative that the article says subtly recasts Taiwan as a problem that could drag China and the United States into war.
- A viral Hillary Clinton clip from her September 10 "Morning Joe" appearance was mistranslated and re-edited in Taiwan into a false claim that she urged Taiwan to surrender, even though her original words described what she believed Xi might be calculating about U.S. capacity to defend allies.
- The same cognitive-warfare pattern surfaced again around the September Trump-Xi summit, with Xi's "peace" narrative aimed simultaneously at a domestic Chinese audience, a global audience, and Taiwanese voters ahead of local elections, according to the article.
Why it matters: For Taiwan, the cost of U.S. ambiguity is concrete: Beijing is converting Trump's public musings about treating arms sales as a bargaining chip into propaganda aimed at eroding Taiwanese confidence in Washington. If that ambiguity persists, the author argues, Beijing gains leverage at every summit and Taiwan's defensive room to maneuver shrinks in lockstep.
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