Early on Friday morning in India, a video purporting to show a Chinese Su-35, a Russian-built plane used by the Chinese military, shot down in Taiwan began to spread like wildfire online, promoted by military-oriented accounts with large followings, by quick-hit news sites, and throughout Indian social media as a whole. A confused—and irate—Taiwanese government strongly denied the claims, which, as of writing, has barely dampened the Indian enthusiasm for them. The story itself will probably burn out within a day or two, but its emergence shows how entangled nationalist fantasies are becoming in Asia, and how dangerous they might be.
It’s unclear where the video actually came from, what it shows, or even how recent it is—but the most likely possibility seems to be an air accident in China itself. The plane involved may not even be a Su-35, but a J-10, a Chinese-built plane with a record of engine failures. Taiwan actually shooting down a Chinese plane would be an enormously significant, and risky, move. At worst, it could be the spark of a war; at best it would provoke economic and political retaliation from China—even if the Chinese had deliberately violated Taiwanese airspace. There was immediate worry inside the Taiwanese government that the video might have been a deliberate attempt to stir tensions. That seems unlikely. Instead, what happened is a compounding of bullshit on both the Chinese and the Indian sides.
