US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan briefly crashed Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, as millions in the country discussed and debated her Asia trip.
The microblogging platform apologized for a half-hour outage of its mobile app in the period immediately before Pelosi’s landing at 10:40 p.m. on Tuesday, when countless messages tracking her plane flooded social media.
Pelosi’s trip, marking the most senior US official visit to Taiwan in a quarter century, is seen as a provocation by Beijing, which considers Taiwan a part of its territory. Newt Gingrich, who was speaker in 1997 when he visited the island, said last month that she absolutely had to go so that China understands the US is not a “paper tiger,” a phrase popularized by Mao Zedong to describe opponents who looked more terrifying than they actually were.
The move has magnetized attention on social media globally as well as within China, with Twitter’s worldwide trending topics including Taiwan, Pelosi and US-China tensions.
Responses on Weibo flipped the “paper tiger” accusation toward China itself, with some netizens in the country expressing disappointment that their government repeated rhetorical flourishes without adopting harder measures to stop Pelosi’s trip. Hu Xijin, the prominent former editor-in-chief of the Global Times, suggested in a now-deleted tweet that Chinese warplanes could “forcibly dispel Pelosi’s plane” and later posted to Weibo saying that the official response didn’t live up to expectations.