TFC weekly monitoring report, April 24-30, 2023

These are claims that held our attention last week:

The pictures hung in the US military's war room do not show the Eight-Nation Alliance

On April 19, the House of Representatives Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and Washington think tank the Center for a New American Security conducted a war game simulating a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Right after that, a picture on Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter) claiming to show "the US military hanging photos of the Eight-Nation Alliance in the war room" has gone viral on social media. 

The screenshot of the Weibo post published on April 23

The Eight-Nation Alliance was a multi-national military coalition set up in 1900 to defend legations and Christian missionaries attacked by Chinese Boxer rebels in China. The US was one of the nations.

This claim was then picked up and widely promoted by Chinese and Hong Kong media outlets and social media users and eventually spread to Taiwan's social media platforms and then Taiwanese media outlets, linking the photo to the recent war game simulation. 

Some Taiwanese political pundits used the photo to comment on the relationship between China and the US, suggesting that there is no mutual trust between the two countries.