The Battle for Hearts and Minds: A Dive into How Taiwan’s Pro-China Media Depicts Ukraine and Russia

In this week’s post, we consider how the pro-China media in Taiwan has been covering the war in Ukraine.

If you’ve been reading our newsletter for a while, it may surprise you to learn that there’s pro-China media in Taiwan and that it supports Russia. But Taiwan’s media landscape is bitterly polarized, and has been since at least the Chen Shui-bian era of the early aughts, when Albert recalls people living in completely separate universes. The gulf has only widened in the past two years, as the COVID crisis has pushed China to ramp up its disinformation and propaganda campaigns in an attempt to sway Taiwanese public opinion—public opinion being a sterile term that fails to capture one of the most important issues today: the battle for the hearts and minds of the people. 

These are fires that have smoldered for some time, of course, and they’re not unique to Taiwan. Just as the polarizing rhetoric of a Fox News in the U.S. can break up families and sever relationships, the media diet o…