With China announcing military exercises ahead of a planned visit by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the island of Taiwan, social media pages and accounts circulated a video that was said to show US warships there.
But this video was actually posted over a year ago.
The video shows what appears to be pieces of a naval fleet over which squadrons of warplanes fly.
“The US Navy parade near the island of Taiwan,” the accompanying comment read.
The appearance of this publication comes following China announced a few days ago that it will conduct military exercises, last Saturday, in the Taiwan Strait, in a step that precedes Pelosi’s unconfirmed visit to Taiwan.
China considers Taiwan, the island of 24 million people, part of its territory and aims to reunite it with the Chinese mainland, without ruling out the use of force to do so.
Beijing opposes any initiative that would give the Taiwan authorities international legitimacy and any official communication between Taiwan and other countries, and therefore opposes the visit of Nancy Pelosi.
Although US officials regularly visit Taiwan, which is separated by a narrow strip of water from mainland China, Beijing sees Pelosi’s visit as a major provocation.
In this context, the Chinese authorities supervising maritime security announced the organization of “military exercises” on Saturday off the coast of Pingtan Island in Fujian Province (east), located opposite Taiwan.
In this context, the video, which was said to be of the US Navy near the island of Taiwan, also appeared.
However, this video is old, as a search for it on search engines showed that it was published in April of the year 2021 on Tik Tok.
This video was published as belonging to the US Navy, and the Agence France-Presse team was unable to confirm its circumstances or its truth.
But the mere publication of it a year ago denies that it was a photographer in the past days, as the misleading publications claimed.
Chinese spread?
On the other hand, users of social networking sites circulated pictures that they claimed were the deployment of the Chinese army by sea and air in the strait. However, the photos are old and have nothing to do with recent political developments between Beijing and Washington.
The publication includes four pictures of ships and warplanes at sea. Its publishers commented, “Exclusive photos of the deployment of the Chinese army by sea and air in the Taiwan Strait.”
But the pictures circulating in the publications are old, published in 2018, and have nothing to do with all these developments.
The first photo distributed by Agence France-Presse on April 12, 2018, shows ships, planes, submarines, fighters and the aircraft carrier China’s Liaoning during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s inspection tour of the Chinese Navy in the South China Sea.
The second photo distributed by the agency on April 15, 2018, is of J15 fighters aboard the aircraft carrier Liaoning during exercises in the East China Sea.
And the third image was published in a Archyde.com report on military exercises in the East China Sea in April 2018.
The fourth and final photo distributed by Agence France-Presse on May 11, 2018, is of two Chinese fighters during an exercise over Taiwan.
