Taiwan beach 'invasion': How a digital stunt turned into propaganda

A simple Douyin video became a powerful tool in China's digital propaganda against Taiwan.

- ABHINANDAN MISHRA

Exclusive On May 17, 2025, a little-known Chinese Douyin user with just 83 followers, Cheng Yi—who goes by the handle "Shandong Kaige"—posted a video of himself landing on a beach in Taiwan, planting the Chinese national flag, and declaring symbolic victory.

What appeared to be a personal stunt rapidly transformed into a multi-layered digital influence operation—engineered, amplified, and aligned with Beijing's geopolitical messaging.

Douyin, China's domestic version of TikTok, is a short-video platform developed by ByteDance. Though it shares a similar interface with TikTok, Douyin is a separate, China-only application operating under China's censorship regime.

Its closed ecosystem, embedded with surveillance controls and state content filtering, has increasingly become a tool for amplifying strategic narratives and symbolic provocations.

According to an exclusive investigation by Cyabra—a Tel Aviv-based AI-powered platform that monitors influence operations and fake accounts online—findings shared exclusively with The Sunday Guardian show that the video evolved from an obscure upload into a cross-platform propaganda event in under 48 hours.

Cyabra's forensic mapping documents the viral arc of the incident: from initial post to grassroots amplification to institutional narrative reinforcement.

Cheng Yi, identifying himself as "Shandong Kaige," uploaded the video to Douyin showing himself landing on a beach in Taiwan via rubber boat, planting a Chinese flag, and declaring symbolic victory.

The next day, the video spread rapidly across Chinese platforms like Weibo, then began surfacing on international platforms including Facebook and X, where nationalist and diaspora communities shared it widely.