“A report in the Economist describes how China seeks to influence Taiwan’s election, scheduled for next January. As an example it cites a story that reached United Daily News, one of Taiwan’s top newspapers, revealing leaked documents in which the US asked that biological weapons be manufactured at a lab run by the island’s defence ministry. Soon these documents were shown to be pretty crude Chinese fakes, but by then the story had spread to Taiwanese talk shows and influencers. Eventually the story was embellished further, turning it into a plot to collect 150,000 samples of Taiwanese blood to develop a special virus to kill ethnic Chinese.”