Responding to China’s ban on BBC World News, the United States, Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand should expel CGTN executive officers. CGTN is China’s major international news outlet, its version of Russia’s RT propaganda network.
Top line: Beijing has no right to promote its own propaganda in the West while simultaneously obstructing accurate reporting on events inside China. According to China’s Global Times propaganda outlet, the ban is eminently justified. Unofficial English-language messenger of China’s foreign policy chief Yang Jiechi, the newspaper claims that the BBC “deliberately throws mud at China, and the decision to suspend its broadcast sends a clear message that China doesn’t accept fake news.” Irony aside (China’s fake news machinery is second only to the Kremlin), Beijing’s action demands retaliation.
It’s clear what has driven Xi Jinping’s regime over the edge here.
Namely, the BBC’s exceptional reporting on China’s human rights abuses against the Uighur peoples of its far northwestern Xinjiang province. The Chinese Communist Party is upset that the BBC has helped the world know how Beijing has thrown more than two million innocent people into gulag reeducation camps. And that Beijing has then forcibly sterilized these people and detached them from their families to serve as slave-like labor. But the particular cause for this ban appears to have been the BBC’s Feb. 2 report on China’s use of young Uighur female prisoners as rape factory products. Such reports, you see, do not fit well with Xi’s smiley-faced-lies to the world. Lies such as Xi’s claim that he cares about reducing carbon emissions and seeks only “win-win” cooperation with the world. Reports like those the BBC produces cut through the lies. They hint at the actual truth: Communist China is evil. And the reports make the truth obvious (unless that is, you’re a politician from the United Arab Emirates or Pakistan).
Building on his early efforts to consolidate Indo-Pacific partnerships, President Biden should draw a line in the sand.
The U.S. and its closest “Five Eyes” allies must not tolerate this injustice against truth and fairness. After all, it’s clear that this might just be the start. The Global Times evinces as much when it quotes pro-regime Professor Li Haidong. Li says that “it is possible that China will take further retaliatory measures, depending on whether the BBC will correct its wrongs, and stop distorting issues such as Hong Kong, Taiwan and Xinjiang. If not, China is likely to expel BBC journalists based in Chinese mainland.” Li says that “if journalists fail to report real China, kicking them out is the right thing to do.”
I’d put it a different way. If China doesn’t like accurate reporting, then there’s no reason Western democracies should tolerate its deliberately inaccurate reporting on our soil. China’s expectation that it can have its propaganda cake and eat facts is outrageous. It speaks to the defining arrogance, enabled by nominal American allies such as Germany, at the center of Xi’s foreign policy.
As a bare minimum, the U.S. should join with its allies to expel CGTN’s executives. New Zealand might not join the collective effort, but the four other allies probably will.
