The strange trifecta of Gambia, Kenya, and tourism in "punishing" Tsai has now become a Journalistic Fact: a claim widely shared among journalists, that is largely false. Indeed, one of the fascinating things about it is that it is a fact scrupulously honored by pro-Taiwan and pro-China writers. I wrote in The Diplomat a while ago:
The wide but erroneous evaluation of the affair of the Kenyan phone scammers as a move by Beijing to pressure Tsai Ing-wen simply shows how the frameworks the media uses to understand the China-Taiwan relationship conceal and distort the complexity of that relationship. They are easily hijacked by partisan commentators: in this case, pro-Taiwan commentators portraying it as a move against Tsai in order to heighten the sense of threat to the island nation, while their opponents used it to show how electing Tsai was a bad idea, since it angered China.(Click on read more, it's a long one!)
