A Chinese satellite launch has triggered a nationwide emergency alert in Taiwan days before its presidential election, prompting alarm and confusion as the English portion of the message erroneously translated satellite to “missile”.
The bilingual air raid alert blasted over loudspeakers and was sent to every mobile phone in Taiwan shortly after 3pm local time (0700 GMT), warning people to “be aware”. The message said in Chinese that China had launched a satellite at 3.04pm and it had flown over the southern part of Taiwan. The English portion said “[air raid alert] missile flyover Taiwan airspace”.
At about the same time, Chinese media reported the successful launch of a scientific satellite, known as the Einstein probe, from the Xichang launch centre in Sichuan province.
Chinese authorities had not given notice of the launch, and Taiwan’s defence ministry said its trajectory – shown on maps to fly south-east across the southern end of Taiwan – was “abnormal” and may cause risks on the ground.
“The … military immediately used the national warning system to inform the people to be alert,” it said, adding that no debris from the rocket booster fell outside Chinese territory.
The launch and alert came at a moment of anxiety in Taiwan, where presidential elections will take place on Saturday, under threat from Beijing, which claims it as a province and threatens to annex it.
The election, like all previous elections since Taiwan democratised in the late 1980s, has been targeted by Beijing with military intimidation, cognitive warfare and economic coercion in an effort to get people to vote for its preferred candidate. In recent years, there has been increased military aggression including missiles shot over Taiwan during live-fire exercises.
Taiwan’s defence ministry later confirmed it was a satellite, not a missile, and apologised for what it said was an oversight in the English language used in the alert. “The wording of the original system was not updated to accurately express that the launched object was a satellite rather than a missile.”
Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, said launching the satellite over Taiwanese airspace so close to the election was a “grey zone” activity, putting it in the same category as China’s military flights into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone and a recent run of Chinese weather balloons flying over Taiwan.
“All these kinds of tactics … remind people here in Taiwan that there is a danger of war,” he said. “With these kinds of threats against Taiwan I think we should be clear-eyed, and not be provoked.”
Opposition parties accused the Taiwan government and defence ministry of fearmongering. A legislator for the opposition Kuomintang party, Ling Tao, said there were no emergency alerts during previous satellite launches, or when actual missiles were launched during the 2022 People’s Liberation Army drills held in retaliation to the then US speaker, Nancy Pelosi, visiting Taiwan. Ling questioned if the ruling Democratic Progressive party was “using the CCP [Chinese Communist party] to intimidate people”.
The military said national air defence warnings were issued in accordance with its emergency response regulations, “and will not be interfered with by party politics”. Outside of the mistranslated English, the military defended its processes, saying it had “full control of the whole event” and acted with transparency.
The Chinese portion of the text also prompted some confusion and bemusement, with “flying over the south part” sharing some characters with “Vietnam”, and leading people to think the satellite was much further away, over the southeast Asian nation.
A popular social media page ran a poll asking if people read “Vietnam” or were “too scared to see anything clearly”. More than 85% of people said they read “Vietnam”. The supermarket chain Carrefour quickly posted an advertisement on Facebook, writing: “Alert! Did you also read the message wrong? Let’s drink some Vietnamese coffee in the afternoon to wake up.”
The incident also prompted unusual Twitter activity, with dozens of accounts tweeting “looks like a false alarm, but a lot of people were scared”. Most of the accounts were created in May 2023 and had few followers.
Wu was also among those who initially misread the message. The alert sounded in the middle of a press conference being held by the foreign minister for hundreds of mostly English-speaking foreign media in Taiwan to cover the election. Reading the alert on a phone screen, Wu initially told the crowd it was a satellite launch that flew over Vietnam, and was nothing to worry about.
Additional reporting by Amy Hawkins and Chi Hui Lin
