Taiwan will 'not provoke confrontation' with China, vice president says
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Taiwan will not provoke a confrontation with China, the self-ruled island's vice president said Friday, lamenting Beijing's 'aggressive military posturing' against the island democracy that China claims as its own.
'We do not seek conflict. We will not provoke confrontation,' said Bi-khim Hsiao, adding that her government has urged Beijing to communicate 'with parity and respect.'
Hsiao, who has served under Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te since their election win last year, said her government has seen 'a dramatic uptick in provocative and proactive CCP efforts to infiltrate, sabotage and divide our society," referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
China claims self-ruled Taiwan as its own territory and has repeatedly threatened to annex it, by force if necessary. In recent years, Beijing has ramped up its military intimidation of the island, sending jets and ships nearby almost daily.
China refuses to speak with Hsiao and Lai and has labeled them 'diehard 'Taiwan independence' separatists,' a designation for which it has threatened the death penalty.
In a notable attempt of alleged intimidation by Beijing, Czech intelligence officials last month said Chinese diplomats planned to stage a car crash during Hsiao's 2024 visit to the country. No crash occurred, but a Chinese official ran a red light while following Hsiao's car.
Speaking at the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents' Club in Taipei, Hsiao said she has experienced 'varying degrees of pressure and threats' over the years, including sanctions by China.
'But I will not let that intimidate me or stop me from voicing my views or from voicing the views of the people of Taiwan, and we will continue to be active in the international community,' she said.
Regarding recurring U.S. intelligence reports that China may be planning to invade Taiwan before 2027, Hsiao said her government is focused on preempting that.
'Everything we are doing right now is to prevent such a conflict from happening — not just in 2027, but ever,' she said.
Taiwan is 'very urgently investing in our self-defense capabilities' in order to deter 'any miscalculation and any attempt at disrupting the peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait,' she added.
Taiwan on Friday wrapped up annual military drills, which simulated defenses against a possible invasion by China. The drills included fortifying ports and possible Chinese landing points on the island, as well as civil defense exercises.
Taiwan sources most of its weapons from the United States, which is bound by its own laws to provide the island with the means to defend itself.
Like most countries, the U.S. does not recognize Taiwan as country, but acts as its main unofficial ally. Washington supports preserving the status quo in Taipei's relationship with Beijing, which means neither side should make a move toward independence or annexation, respectively.
Taiwan's relationship with the U.S. is 'very important' and has historically held through different administrations while garnering bipartisan congressional support, Hsiao said.
Trade negotiators from the two sides are working 'around the clock' to reach a deal that would pre-empt tariffs of 32% on all Taiwanese goods from coming into effect Aug. 1, she said. Washington lowered tariffs on Taiwanese goods to 10% for 90 days to allow for the trade talks.
The tariffs are part of duties President Donald Trump levied against nearly all U.S. trading partners beginning in April, accusing them of running large trade surpluses.
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Atlantic
22 minutes ago
- Atlantic
This Is the News From TikTok
When he learned one night this summer that the United States had bombed Iran, the content creator Aaron Parnas responded right away, showing what's bad and what's good about using TikTok for news. Shortly after 7:46 p.m. ET on June 21, he saw Donald Trump's Truth Social post announcing the air strikes. At 7:52, according to a time stamp, Parnas uploaded to TikTok a minute-long video in which he looked into the camera; read out the president's post, which identified the suspected nuclear sites that the U.S. had targeted; and added a note of skepticism about whether Iran would heed Trump's call for peace. As traditional media outlets revealed more details that night, Parnas summarized their findings in nine more reports, some of which he recorded from a car. Parnas wasn't adding elaborate detail or original reporting. What he had to offer was speed—plus a deep understanding of how to reach people on TikTok, which may not seem an obvious or trustworthy source of news: The platform is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, which lawmakers in Washington, D.C., fear could be manipulated to promote Beijing's interests. TikTok's algorithm offers each user a personalized feed of short, grabby videos—an arrangement that seems unlikely to serve up holistic coverage of current events. Even so, according to a Pew Research Center poll from last fall, 17 percent of adults—and 39 percent of adults under 30—regularly get informed about current affairs on the app. Fewer than 1 percent of all TikTok accounts followed by Americans are traditional media outlets. Instead, users are relying not only on 'newsfluencer s' such as Parnas but also on skits reenacting the latest Supreme Court ruling, hype videos for political agendas, and other news-adjacent clips that are hard to describe to people who don't use TikTok. Last summer, after the first assassination attempt on Trump, one viral video fused clips of the bloody-eared Republican raising his fist with snippets of Joe Biden's well wishes. Simultaneously, Chappell Roan's ballad for the lovestruck, 'Casual,' played, hinting at a bromance. On my For You page in June, as U.S.-Iran tensions flared, I saw a string of videos known as 'edits'—minute-long music montages—on the general topic. One spliced together footage of zooming F-16s, Captain America intimidating his enemies in an elevator, and bald eagles staring ominously while AC/DC's 'Thunderstruck' blared. Skeptics might wonder: When people say they get their news from TikTok, what exactly are they learning? Frequent consumers of current-affairs content on TikTok insist that they can decipher what's going on in the world—that, even if they have to extrapolate facts from memes, the brevity and entertainment value compensate for a lack of factual detail. 'A lot of things are in simpler terms on TikTok,' Miles Maltbia, a 22-year-old cybersecurity analyst from Chicago, told me. 'That, and convenience, makes it the perfect place to get all my news from.' And as more and more users turn to TikTok for news, creators such as Parnas are finding ways to game the algorithm. Parnas, who is 26, is a lawyer by trade. He told me that he monitors every court case he deems significant with a legal tracker. He was immersed in politics at an early age. (His father, Lev Parnas, gained brief notoriety as an associate of Rudy Giuliani during Trump's first term. 'I love my dad,' Aaron Parnas has said. 'And I'm not my dad.') C-SPAN is on 'all day every day.' And he's enabled X and Truth Social notifications for posts from every member of Congress and major world leader. When he decides that his phone's alerts are newsworthy, he hits the record button. His rapid-reaction formula for news has made him a one-man media giant: He currently has 4.2 million followers on TikTok. He told me that his videos on the platform have reached more than 100 million American users in the past six months. His Substack newsletter also has the most subscriptions of any in the 'news' category, and he recently interviewed Senator Cory Booker, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, and this magazine's editor in chief. Still, Parnas's TikTok model relies heavily on reporting by other outlets. And Parnas's 24/7 information blitz may be jarring for those whose media-consumption habits are not already calibrated for TikTok. There's no 'Good evening' or 'Welcome.' But he's reaching an audience who other media don't: Many of his viewers, he thinks, are 'young people who don't watch the news and never have and never will.' He added, 'They just don't have the attention span to.' Ashley Acosta, a rising senior at the University of Pennsylvania, told me she liked the fact that Parnas is his own boss, outside the corporate media world. She contrasted him with outlets such as ABC, which recently fired the correspondent Terry Moran for an X post that called Trump a 'world-class hater.' Nick Parigi, a 24-year-old graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, also sees Parnas as a valuable news source. 'You're getting less propagandized,' he told me. 'It's not pushing an agenda.' Last year, Parnas explicitly supported Kamala Harris's presidential candidacy, but he prides himself on delivering basic information in a straightforward manner. 'I wish we would just go back to the fact-based, Walter Cronkite–style of reporting,' he told me. 'So that's what I do.' For Parnas to sound like the CBS News legend, you'd have to watch his TikToks at half speed. If Parnas is a genre-defining anchor, Jack Mac is the equivalent of a shock jock. A creator with 1.1 million followers, he uses the term 'jo urnalisming' to describe his work, which amounts to commenting on stories he finds interesting or amusing—such as a 'patriot' New York firefighter being suspended for letting young women ride in his firetruck. 'Do I think TikTok is the best source for news? No,' Olivia Stringfield, a 25-year-old from South Carolina who works in marketing, told me. But she's a fan of Mac because he offers 'a more glamorous way to get the news'—and a quick, convenient way. 'I don't have time to sit down and read the paper like my parents did,' Stringfield said. Robert Kozinets, a professor at the University of Southern California who has studied Gen Z's media consumption on TikTok, told me that users rarely seek out news. It finds them. 'The default position is: Algorithm, let the information flow over me,' he said. 'Load me up. I'll interrupt it when I see something interesting.' On a platform where little content is searched, creators dress up the news to make it algorithm friendly. The Washington Post is one established media brand that has leaned into the growing format of TikTok news skits. In one video about the Supreme Court, a Post staffer wearing a college-graduation robe wields a toolbox mallet as a gavel to channel Chief Justice John Roberts, and when she mimics him, her background turns into red curtains. 'South Carolina can cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood,' she says. Dave Jorgenson, who launched the Post 's TikTok channel in 2019, announced recently that he's leaving to set up his own online-video company —a testament to the demand for this new style of content. From the January 2025 issue: The 'mainstream media' has already lost The Post 's embrace of TikTok has been unusual for an outlet of the newspaper's stature. The prevalence of vibes-based content on the video platform raises obvious questions about truth and accuracy. Many users I spoke with trusted crowdsourced fact-checking to combat misinformation, via the comments section. I asked Maltbia, the analyst from Chicago, how he knows which comments to trust. 'I'll usually look at the ones that are the most liked,' he said. 'But if it still sounds a little shady to me, then I'll probably Google it.' Parnas defended the integrity of TikTok news. 'There's no more misinformation on TikTok than there is on Twitter, than there is on Fox News, than sometimes there is on CNN,' he told me. That claim is impossible to verify: TikTok's factual accuracy is under-researched. One assessment by the media watchdog NewsGuard found that 20 percent of TikTok's news search results contained misinformation—but no user I spoke with bothers with the app's search function. Whether TikTok will continue to gain popularity as a news outlet isn't yet clear. Citing fears of hostile foreign control over a major communications platform, Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation aimed at forcing TikTok's Chinese owners to sell. But Trump has now delayed implementation of the law three times since he took office. In the meantime, users of the platform keep stretching the definition of news. On TikTok, 'news is anything that's new,' Kozinets, the USC professor, told me. Entrepreneurial creators who care about current events will keep testing delivery formats to gain more eyeballs on the platform. And even if TikTok is sold or shuts down, similar apps are sure to fill any vacuum. The challenge of packaging news for distribution by a black-box algorithm seems here to stay.
The Hill
an hour ago
- The Hill
TikTok can shape America's next generation and Beijing knows it
If Washington doesn't act urgently, content pushed by TikTok and consumed by young Americans will result in future U.S. leaders unwittingly parroting China's talking points, advocating warped views and, most dangerously, acting in ways that are in Beijing's interests but undermine U.S. national security. There is admittedly no 'smoking gun,' but TikTok represents a highly plausible vector of intelligence collection. ByteDance, TikTok's parent firm, claims it is committed to U.S. national security, but is legally bound to cooperate with the Chinese Communist Party. The People's Republic of China almost certainly uses TikTok, at a minimum, as a collection platform to monitor public opinion. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. and TikTok agreed in January 2023 to maintain all U.S. data within the U.S., but there are concerning reports of leaks. With 170 million U.S. users, TikTok provides Beijing with real-time, granular insight into American public opinion. That real-time data collection would prove enormously useful, for instance, in assessing U.S. willingness to fight in a hypothetical conflict over Taiwan. But the challenge from TikTok with America's youth is not just collection, but influence. Early evidence suggests this is already underway. A Rutgers study found TikTok suppressed unfavorable accounts of sensitive topics, including Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Uyghur rights and Xinjiang. 'Heavy' users expressed elevated positive attitudes toward China's human rights record and greater interest in traveling to China. Given that the company's black box algorithm thwarts independent verification, we likely have seen only the tip of the iceberg of Beijing's efforts to sway the U.S. public. The algorithm could convulse U.S. domestic politics by sowing discord and highlighting divisions, an outcome that serves Beijing's interest in undermining U.S. cohesion and painting D.C. as an unreliable partner. Indeed, rather than bolstering one candidate or another, TikTok may act as an anti-incumbent tool. In the 2024 election, TikTok contributed to President Biden's low approval ratings, according to one Democratic strategist. In that election, President Trump's support among 18-29-year-olds, which disproportionately comprises TikTok's user base, rose by seven points from 2020. And yet, by April, only three months into office, Trump's support among young people has declined markedly — by up to 27 points. While there are admittedly many variables at play, TikTok can amplify alienation and short-term sentiment swings. Whatever one's politics, it's dangerous for China to retain levers that can subtly shape American public opinion, especially by amplifying dissatisfaction. It's worth noting that as Beijing uses tools to manipulate the U.S. public, especially its youth, it's taking meaningful steps to protect its own young people. Douyin, the version of TikTok used in China and also owned by ByteDance, is required by authorities to enforce a 'youth mode,' limiting users under 14 to app usage for just 40 minutes a day. It also locks them out between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. daily. The contrast is stark: China exports attention-fracturing content while shielding its own youth from it. China's use of TikTok may allow it to influence mass and elite opinion. And in fact, TikTok may be uniquely effective at influencing elite views, by enabling microtargeting. Given TikTok's effectiveness and deniability, as well as Beijing's determination to supplant the United States, Chinese security services are likely tweaking TikTok's algorithms to micro-target key users. Chinese security services can directly shape TikTok's algorithm — rather than merely exploit one built by others — giving it a deniable, end-to-end influence over what users see. Crucially, any elite-focused information operation via TikTok would be even more difficult to detect in the unclassified domain than efforts to shape mass public opinion because of how narrow and precise the targeting would be. For far too long, U.S. leaders on both sides of the aisle have failed to take action against the platform. And the reported decision by President Trump to tell U.S. companies they can ignore the law barring American companies from engaging with TikTok represents a new and immediate danger to U.S. national and economic security. At a minimum, it is imperative to ensure the U.S. is not allowing companies or individuals to engage with TikTok so long as its algorithm is controlled by a Beijing-linked company. But U.S. policymakers need to go even further and consider, for example, more ambitious measures such as national limits on short-video screen time for minors. The status quo is incomprehensible and dangerous: Young Americans are being asked to unwittingly face off against an algorithm that may be a tool of Chinese intelligence services. Allowing this dynamic to persist risks eroding the cognitive, civic and strategic foundations of American leadership. Jonathan Panikoff is a senior fellow in the Atlantic Council's GeoEconomics Center and the former director of the Investment Security Group, overseeing the intelligence community's CFIUS efforts at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Joseph Webster is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and editor of the independent China-Russia Report.
Time Magazine
2 hours ago
- Time Magazine
Trump's Decision to Fire BLS Chief Echoes Putin's Strategies
President Donald Trump's firing of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday afternoon just after she delivered a negative jobs report echoes the impulse of many leaders to shoot the messenger. Trump declared, 'I've had issues with the numbers for a long time. We're doing so well. I believe the numbers were phony like they were before the election and there were other times. So I fired her, and I did the right thing.' While Trump may or may not be friends with Vladimir Putin, he is clearly following the Russian President's HR staffing guidelines to eliminate lieutenants who bring bad news. As we've documented before, the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) has a long history of manipulating official economic statistics to please Putin, 'bending over backward to correct bad numbers and burying unflattering statistics' under the pressure the Kremlin has exerted to corrupt statistical integrity, especially since Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The reliability of official statistics from China has also been brought into question, leading analysts to rely on a wide range of unofficial or proxy indicators to gauge the true state of the Chinese economy. Even China's former Premier, the late Li Keqiang, reportedly confided that he didn't trust official GDP numbers. Read More: What to Know About the Jobs Report That Led Trump to Fire the Labor Statistics Chief Like other strongmen, Trump has repeatedly shown a pattern of manipulating data to suit his preferred narrative. Trump's surprise firing of BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer has quickly caught the attention of technical market analysts and economists on both sides of the political spectrum. One side cheers the push to disrupt a slow, bureaucratic federal agency. The other side shouts in dismay over concerns about yet another example of Trump politicizing an apolitical institution. Both responses are warranted. The accuracy of BLS data has long been questioned as major revisions only come in months later. To their credit, the BLS, in addition to other statistical agencies, has publicly recognized a need to modernize its methodology. Unfortunately, though, the severity of job revisions has worsened since the COVID-19 era, with no successful program to address the issue. The downward revision on Friday of more than 250,000 jobs marked the most significant adjustment since the depths of the pandemic. However, Trump's accusations against the BLS of rigging the job numbers to make him and the Republican base look bad, and his subsequent firing of McEntarfer based on a belief that BLS revisions were politically motivated, are yet another step closer to authoritarianism. Introducing his latest conspiracy theory, the President went even further by suggesting McEntarfer, whose career spans two decades across Republican and Democratic Administrations, rigged the numbers 'around the 2024 presidential election' in then-Vice President Kamala Harris' favor. Trump conveniently fails to mention that his definition of 'around' was back in August 2024. Recall, the 2024 presidential election was a full three months later in November. Revisions are not unusual behavior by the BLS. They are a critical part of the natural process for developing an accurate picture of the largest, most dynamic economy in the world. The average size of job revisions since 2003 is not insignificant at 51,000 jobs. And, despite what Trump may want Americans to believe, his tariff policies have created an unprecedented level of uncertainty in the U.S. economy, comparable only to that of 2020, with many economists expecting a recession to follow as a result. Bloomberg reporting has pointed to a possible connection between the severity of negative job revisions and recessionary economic environments. The BLS has also been subjected to DOGE-led hiring constraints and other resource rescissions. In addition, the Trump Administration's disbanding of the Federal Statistics Advisory Committee in March both eliminated one of the main engines for enhancing agency performance and, perhaps, in what should have been a concerning harbinger, abolished the canary in the data integrity coal mine. Complaints about BLS methods are legitimate, like the reliance on enumerators over scanner data, and deserve attention, but this is not how to fix it. Read More: What Trump's Win Means for the Economy This is far from the first time Trump has subordinated statistical integrity to political theater. From crowd sizes to weather forecasts, vote counts to tariff formulas, Trump has discarded facts for fictions that play to his political favor. Trump doesn't just bend the truth—he twists the numbers until they resemble propaganda and then silences those who disagree. As CBS News titan Edward R. Murrow warned 65 years ago: 'To be persuasive, we must be believable. To be believable, we must be credible. To be credible, we must be truthful.'
