China Bashing: How Low Can Western Media Go Lim Teck Ghee

For the last four years, readers of media newspapers and websites in the US, Britain, Australia and their allies – especially after Trump’s presidential victory in 2016 – have been the targets of a concerted move to demonise China and to bring down China’s standing in the world.

This cold war approach is in sharp contrast to earlier more objective and sympathetic reporting on the country.

It is happening not only because of the fear that China is gaining ground in key sectors of international economic and geopolitical competition.

It has also come about because China is now seen in some quarters as the principal threat to US and western dominance of the global system – a dominance unchallenged since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1992.

Today western news reporting on China or elsewhere, on any topic however unimportant that may have the remotest connection to China – technology, culture, space, global warming, health, the environment, vaccines and others – is likely to be written up to reinforce negative stereotypes of China.

Both simplistic and subtle messages are inserted to discredit and reflect poorly on the country, its government and its people.

Most recently, journalists who are Chinese or Asians have been recruited, and non-western sources and names are provided at strategic positions in the news article to give the impression of balanced and objective reporting.

Some of the media strategies practised by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, BBC, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Sydney Morning Herald, Sky News Australia and their media allies in Asia such as Nikkei Asia and the Times of India in their news reporting on China include:

Deletion, lowering or ghosting the profile of positive news on China

Sensationalism, falsification and disinformation

Baseless smearing

Loaded words and vague terms

Use of biased respondents and providing soft facts

Reliance on bandwagon effect

Western anti-China-oriented journalism extends to slanted coverage of tragedies such as the recent floods in Central China where voyeuristic and perverse reporting can be seen in the abnormally large number of images showing the devastation and human toll in Zhengzhou by some western media weather channels.

Anti-China Olympics reporting

The most recent example of the western media taking up a position even more extreme than that of the official mouthpieces of their governments comes from the New York Times.

Touted in the industry as a national “newspaper of record”, ranked 18th in the world by circulation and 3rd in the US, the NYT picked on the Olympics to engage in its latest bout of China bashing.

In an article by its Southeast Asian bureau chief, which shows a warped political thinking and logic, the newspaper that claims to seek the truth and help people understand the world, had the sensational title of “The Chinese sports machine’s single goal: The most golds, at any cost”.

Claiming that China had manipulated the Olympics for political purposes, the article accused the Chinese government of “putting tens of thousands of children in government-run training schools”, exposing them to health and mental stress risks and funnelling these young athletes into “less prominent sports that Beijing hopes to dominate”.

More than a cry baby article

A cry baby piece written after the end of the first week of the Olympics when China was leading in gold medals, the article – besides the political objective of running down the Beijing government and sports authorities – added a racist twist to the gold medals that China had won:

Beijing’s focus has been on sports that can be perfected with rote routines, rather than those that involve an unpredictable interplay of multiple athletes.

British international relations analyst, Tom Fowdy, in exposing the article’s ideological and racial blinkers, pointed out that the piece was patronising, ridiculous, and just outright insulting to the Chinese Olympians who dedicate their lives towards competing and excelling in their chosen events as does any athlete from anywhere in the world. His conclusion:

Sport is sport, and may the most deserving athletes win, wherever they are from. The fact that the New York Times could produce such an utterly dreadful article on China is not surprising, yet it is endemic of a broader trend in US media, which – in line with the government’s foreign policy – has become as negative, vilifying and outright hysterical as possible.

Is it any wonder why people in China have come to increasingly despise foreign reporting? The big three US newspapers in particular – the NYT, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal – spew an endless daily conveyor belt of anti-Chinese stories which seek to nitpick, discredit, and attack every single development within the country, often on utterly ridiculous premises.

How discerning readers have responded

Analysis of the responses from readers to the articles in the NYT twitter and RT website indicates that some are not buying the western media anti-China news bashing.

These are examples of comments from readers:

It’s almost like NYT and their ilk just rehash these hit pieces every time there’s an Olympics going on. Just screams bu**hurt when their team isn’t on top.

Playing into the Sinophobic view that Chinese people are somehow more machine-like in their brain, as opposed to us free-will-having Westerners.

All those allegations against China are utterly ridiculous considering the fact that the US lures promising athletes from poor countries aiming for success in sports and revelations about US athletes using banned drugs under WADA permission.

Americans are simply unable to tolerate other countries’ successes because they are under the delusion that they’re the ‘shining beacon on the hill’ that should guide the world. Everything is a zero-sum game in their view.

We had four years of anti-Russia hysterics. It was a mental illness that was untreated and morphed to include Anti-China hysteria. It is like crazy people have taken the US common sense and logic as a hostage. This is such bizarre behaviour of a country, you might believe that maybe we are suffering a ‘mass hysteria’ breakdown of society. I can’t believe that the US, a once well-respected country, has become morally bankrupt. And lie, cheat, steal, whine.

What’s next in western media’s China bashing

So what’s likely to feature next in the western media’s xenophobic China reporting?

We have already seen the media fixation with condemning China on Tibet, Hongkong, Xinjiang, Huawei, the China virus, and so on.

Coming up next is likely to be the Beijing Winter Olympics and climate change. Finger-pointing at China and scare mongering has already started in Australia with one of the main presenters at Sky News Australia sensationalising news that “China emits in 16 days what Australia does in an entire year”.

The inconvenient truth is that on a per-capita basis, China’s carbon emissions are much less than Australia’s.

The latest data in 2018 shows China with a per capita carbon emission of 7.4 metric tonnes or less than half of Australia’s 15.5.

Also pertinent is that the carbon emissions from China are an outcome of higher-income countries outsourcing their emissions-intensive industries to China.

On climate change, the bigger picture which Australia’s media and public need to pay attention to is that Australia is the worst-performing country on climate change policy according to the latest international ranking of 57 countries.

The 2020 Climate Change Performance Index prepared by a group of think tanks comprising the NewClimate Institute, the Climate Action Network and Germanwatch, looks at national climate action across the categories of emissions, renewable energy, energy use and policy.

Across all four categories, Australia ranks as the sixth-worst performing of the 57 countries assessed.

The expert report found that the Scott Morrison government “has continued to worsen performance at both national and international levels” and noted that the government “is an increasingly regressive force” in climate change negotiations.

In contrast, China compares favourably with a ranking of 33 and the country’s leadership has been praised for “implementing many significant policies in multiple sectors that have implications for climate change” as well as for its “increased show of climate leadership”.

Undoubtedly there are many examples of what has gone wrong or needs improvement in China, as with most other countries in the world.

A western media campaign which identifies China as the pivotal existential enemy to the world and aims at destabilising it will not only stiffen anti-west and popular sentiment in China. It is also dangerous and ultimately inimical to western interests.

This article was published in The Sun dated 16 August 2021. Republished with permission from The Sun.