As China carried out live-fire drills and rehearsed a military blockade in the waters surrounding Taiwan this week, 70-year-old Liao said she wasn’t worried about war. She was enjoying life as a retiree, playing mahjong with her friends and keeping an eye on the stock market.“Everyday life hasn’t been impacted,” Liao told Al Jazeera as she was having her hair shampooed and cut in time for the new year at a salon in New Taipei City. “I’ve lived in Taiwan for 70 years. I’m used to it. We all still have to wash our hair.”“We’re not scared,” Liao’s hairstylist agreed. In fact, she hadn’t even noticed that the drills were happening. “Working people don’t have time to pay attention to these things. All they can do is work,” Liao said.It’s not that the Taiwanese don’t care about threats from China. While life, for the most part, remained undisturbed this week during what China called “Justice Mission 2025”, information about them circulated rapidly on social media and was broadcast across Taiwan’s 24-hour news channels.Disinformation – a regular component of such exercises – also circulated widely, including a propaganda video showing an aircraft flying close to the Taipei 101 skyscraper that Taiwan’s government dismissed as fake.Threats from China, though, have become a regular part of life for the Taiwanese peo …
