{"id":3474,"date":"2017-03-03T20:53:47","date_gmt":"2017-03-03T20:53:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.iuhrdf.org\/en\/2017\/03\/03\/chinas-response-reports-torture-fake-news\/"},"modified":"2017-03-03T20:53:47","modified_gmt":"2017-03-03T20:53:47","slug":"chinas-response-reports-torture-fake-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/chinas-response-reports-torture-fake-news\/","title":{"rendered":"China\u2019s Response to Reports of Torture: \u2018Fake News\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> \u201cFAKE NEWS,\u201d a Twitter post declared. \u201cPrejudice-based,\u201d another said. \u201cCleverly orchestrated lies,\u201d a news article asserted.<\/p>\n<p>By JAVIER C. HERN\u00c1NDEZ<br \/>\nMARCH 3, 2017<\/p>\n<p>BEIJING &mdash; &ldquo;FAKE NEWS,&rdquo; a Twitter post declared. &ldquo;Prejudice-based,&rdquo; another said. &ldquo;Cleverly orchestrated lies,&rdquo; a news article asserted.<\/p>\n<p>President Trump&rsquo;s&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/02\/17\/business\/trump-calls-the-news-media-the-enemy-of-the-people.html\">harangues against the American news media<\/a>&nbsp;appear to have inspired a new genre of commentary in&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/topics.nytimes.com\/top\/news\/international\/countriesandterritories\/china\/index.html?inline=nyt-geo\" title=\"More news and information about China.\">China<\/a>&rsquo;s state media, whose propagandists spiced up social media posts and news articles with Trumpian flourishes this week.<\/p>\n<p>People&rsquo;s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, mimicked Mr. Trump&rsquo;s characteristic bluster &mdash; and his fondness for capital letters &mdash; on Friday in denouncing Western news coverage of a Chinese lawyer and human rights advocate who said he had been tortured.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Foreign media reports that police tortured a detained lawyer is FAKE NEWS, fabricated to tarnish China&#39;s image <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/xDfMUmtYfH\">https:\/\/t.co\/xDfMUmtYfH<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/cH8i81xb0T\">pic.twitter.com\/cH8i81xb0T<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; People&#39;s Daily,China (@PDChina) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/PDChina\/status\/837544551317303296\">March 3, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>An article on the topic a day earlier by Xinhua, the state-run news agency, had accused the foreign news media of &ldquo;hype&rdquo; and suggested that legal activists were manipulating the press to &ldquo;smear the Chinese government.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;The stories were essentially fake news,&rdquo;&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/chinaplus.cri.cn\/news\/china\/9\/20170302\/929.html\">Xinhua wrote<\/a>, adopting a phrase that Mr. Trump has embraced.<\/p>\n<p>The Chinese government has long denounced Western news organizations as biased and dishonest &mdash; and in Mr. Trump, Beijing has found an American president who often does the same.<\/p>\n<p>The irony in China&rsquo;s criticism is apparent, given Beijing&rsquo;s history of obscuring facts and censoring stories that officials deem a threat to the party.<\/p>\n<p>Experts said on Friday that Mr. Trump&rsquo;s continuing attacks on the news media would help lend credibility to Chinese efforts to undermine Western ideals and foreign journalists.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;Trump&rsquo;s attacks on the media will offer a good excuse for Chinese officials to step up their criticism of Western democracy and press freedom,&rdquo; said Qiao Mu, a journalism professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University. &ldquo;China can turn to Trump&rsquo;s attacks to say Western democracy is hypocrisy.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">It seems to be a fashion for some to believe those imagination &amp; prejudice-based &quot;torture stories&quot;. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/Yb0AN5oIkx\">https:\/\/t.co\/Yb0AN5oIkx<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; China SCIO (@chinascio) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/chinascio\/status\/837149243492093952\">March 2, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Some of Mr. Trump&rsquo;s remarks about the news media would not seem out of place in some of China&rsquo;s leading broadsheets, where commentators regularly denounce independent reporting by foreign news outlets on delicate subjects like Taiwan or religious persecution.<\/p>\n<p>Rights advocates said Mr. Trump had given China an opportunity to further distort the boundaries of journalism.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;If the Chinese version of journalism, which is really only propaganda, is considered mainstream, it will challenge the understanding of what real journalism should be,&rdquo; said Patrick Poon, a researcher for Amnesty International in Hong Kong.<\/p>\n<p>The heated commentary in the Chinese news media came in response to foreign coverage of a Chinese lawyer, Xie Yang, whose account of torture at the hands of interrogators was widely reported in January, including in&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/01\/20\/world\/asia\/china-lawyer-torture-xie-yang.html\">The New York Times<\/a>. The reports about Mr. Xie, who is still in custody, were based on transcripts of his interviews with his lawyers.<\/p>\n<p>Xinhua&rsquo;s report suggested that the account of the torture of Mr. Xie, who was formally arrested last year on a charge of inciting subversion of state power, was fabricated.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;Investigations by reporters and an investigative team have showed that the accusations were nothing but cleverly orchestrated lies,&rdquo; the report said.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Investigations reveal &quot;torture stories&quot; about Chinese lawyer Xie Yang are nothing but cleverly orchestrated lies<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; China Xinhua News (@XHNews) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/XHNews\/status\/837021507909992449\">March 1, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Xinhua said&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/01\/19\/world\/asia\/china-lawyer-jiang-tianyong-germany.html\">Jiang Tianyong<\/a>, a prominent human rights lawyer, had invented the story and shared it with foreign activists.<\/p>\n<p>One of Mr. Xie&rsquo;s lawyers, Chen Jiangang, denied that on Friday. In a statement, Mr. Chen reiterated that Mr. Xie had provided the account of his torture, describing in detail the meeting at which he had done so.<\/p>\n<p>Chinese officials routinely block efforts to report on topics that the government deems delicate. On Friday, the BBC&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/world-asia-china-39137293\">reported<\/a>&nbsp;that its journalists had been harassed by the authorities in a village in Hunan Province while trying to interview a woman who says her family&rsquo;s land was stolen. The BBC said that its journalists were assaulted during the encounter, and that a crowd in the village had smashed the crew&rsquo;s cameras.<\/p>\n<p>Owen Guo contributed research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> \u201cFAKE NEWS,\u201d a Twitter post declared. \u201cPrejudice-based,\u201d another said. \u201cCleverly orchestrated lies,\u201d a news article asserted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3473,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-3474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3474\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3474"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=3474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}