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In addition to the heavy restrictions it places on foreign journalists trying to report the truth about its far western region of Xinjiang, China has a new tactic: to label independent coverage as “fake news.”
At night, traveling for hours on the highways of the Xinjiang desert, the unmarked cars that had followed us from the moment we arrived were following us at full speed, driving dangerously close with their headlights on.
Their occupants – who never identified themselves – forced us to leave a town by chasing us from restaurants and shops, ordering the owners not to serve us.
Hannah Bailey, who specializes in China’s use of state-sponsored digital disinformation at the Oxford Internet Institute, suggests this fiercely critical attack in English, but with Chinese subtitles, makes it unusual.
“It was clearly produced with both international and domestic users in mind,” she told me, “which is somewhat different from previous strategies.
“Previous content produced for mainland audiences has been more critical of Western countries and more nationalistic, while content produced for international audiences has struck a more conciliatory tone.
The China Daily report focuses on an altercation outside the front door of a textile factory in the town of Kuqa, where the BBC team was surrounded by a group of local leaders and officials.
The allegations it contains, based on body camera recordings provided by police arriving at the scene, are easily dismissed. A polite exchange between our team and a police officer is used to suggest that the BBC has exaggerated the role of the authorities in preventing us from reporting.
But the China Daily chooses not to mention that some of our footage was forcibly removed and we were forced to accompany the same policeman to another location so that she could review the remaining footage. And it does not provide any explanation of the larger context, nor does it give the BBC any right of reply.
For less than 72 hours in Xinjiang, we were continuously followed and on five occasions approached by people who tried to prevent us from filming in public, sometimes violently.
In at least two cases, we have been accused of violating the privacy of these people on the grounds that their attempts to arrest us caused them to walk in front of our camera.
Uniformed policemen participating in these “incidents” twice deleted our footage, and on another occasion we were briefly detained by local officials who claimed that we had violated a farmer’s rights by filming a field.
China’s propaganda efforts can show just how damaging Xinjiang’s coverage has been to its international reputation.
But attempting to attack the Western – usually censored – media at home carries some risk, in that it can reveal glimpses of stories that would otherwise remain out of the public domain.
A satellite photo, dated May 2019, shows a large group of internally displaced people between the Kuqa textile factory and a nearby re-education camp, with a watchtower and interior security walls.
The China Daily, which officially refers to the camp as a “vocational training center,” suggests our attempt to film was pointless because, they say, it closed in October 2019.
If this is true, it simply proves that the camp was operational when the image was taken – and confirms that this is a compelling reason for further investigation.
Now, both Chinese and Western audiences may wonder who the people in the photo were, why they were being moved between the camp and the factory, and whether the work they were doing there was likely to be entirely voluntary. (BBC News, Beijing)
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