Taiwan’s outgoing President Tsai Ing-wen plans to flee in a U.S. plane if war erupts with China, according to an unsubstantiated report first published in 2021 and echoed in the run-up to the island’s January 2024 general election.

Another story said Tsai had given her confidantes VIP “runaway” passes.

They are among the many unsupported tales of Tsai’s preparations to escape harm that have been fed into the island by Chinese state media outlets, according to an analysis conducted for Reuters by the Information Environment Research Center (IORG), a Taiwan-based non-government organisation.