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In a rhetorical escalation, the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship newspaper compared Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to the Nazis, echoing Russia’s justification for its invasion of Ukraine. This is part of China’s broader pattern of weaponising and rewriting history to suit its needs.

On 28 August, the party’s mouthpiece, People’s Daily, featured an article by Wang Yingjin, head of the Center for Cross-Strait Relations at Renmin University in Beijing. In it, he argued that the DPP’s recent drive to unseat dozens of opposition legislators through mass recall votes was doomed to fail.

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China’s cognitive warfare against Taiwanese democratic institutions is part of a long-running campaign. For instance, during large-scale Chinese army drills around Taiwan in April, party-state propaganda arms depicted Lai as a literal ‘parasite’.

However, referencing the Nazis is the ultimate political slur, a global fallacy that dehumanises opponents and silences debate. Wang’s charge is more consistent with Moscow’s playbook in Ukraine, where ‘Nazification’ has been used as a pretext for Russia’s illegal invasion.

Is this a precursor to a Chinese ‘de-Nazification’ campaign? Beijing’s immediate aim is likely more tactical: to sow division, weaken the DPP and erode Taiwan’s democratic institutions.

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