Is information inherently less trustworthy and authoritative because the source is Chinese? It’s a question Westerners must grapple with as the US government and corporate journalists intensify their online “psychological operations” against China to manipulate public opinion in support of another Cold War (FAIR.org, 5/15/20),
The racist Orientalist trope of Chinese people being inherently dishonest and unreliable sources of information was on display in Western media’s recent campaign to vilify a Chinese official for sharing a political cartoon criticizing recently reported Australian war crimes in Afghanistan (BBC, 12/1/20).
If you think that this cartoon is pretending to be a news photograph of an actual war crime, you might need to brush up on your visual literacy skills.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian forwarded on Twitter (11/29/20) a computer graphic by a Chinese graphic artist known as Wuheqilin that depicted a grinning Australian soldier holding a knife to the throat of a child while reassuring, “Don’t be afraid, we are coming to bring you peace!” The image is done in a photorealistic style but is obviously surreal: The figures are standing on a giant jigsaw puzzle, depicting the Afghan flag, which has an enormous Australian flag draped over it. The soldier is pulling the flag over the head of the child, who holds a symbolic lamb.
After courageous Australian whistleblower David McBride released the Afghan Files to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in 2017, exposing war crimes committed by Australia’s special forces in Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Justice Paul Brereton conducted a four-year review of Australian special forces conduct in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2016. He found evidence, presented in the recently released Brereton Report, that 25 perpetrators had unlawfully killed 39 Afghan civilians.
Some of the killings allegedly took place as patrol commanders told young soldiers to make their first kill by executing prisoners, in a practice known as “blooding” (ABC, 11/19/20). The report references earlier work by military sociologist Samantha Crompvoets (Guardian, 11/19/20), who disclosed allegations that two teenage Afghan boys had their throats slit by Australian Special Air Service operators (SAS), who also conducted “body count competitions” and indiscriminately killed “squirters”—villagers who fled from a helicopter’s approach.
For Western media, it is the country that commits war crimes, not the one that criticizes them, that is the aggrieved party (NPR, 11/30/20).
Western media headlines reacting to Wuheqilin’s political cartoon ignored the context of real Australian war crimes, instead framing the story as a patently allegorical image being “fake” or “doctored.” The important information was not that Australia had committed war crimes in Afghanistan, but that a Chinese government official had been spreading offensive images containing false information.
- Business Insider (12/1/20): “China’s Fake Photo of Australian Soldier Harming Child is Part of ‘Dirty Game,’ Australian Special Forces Soldier Says”
- NPR (11/30/20): “China Refuses to Apologize to Australia Over Official’s Tweet of Doctored Image”
- Globe and Mail (12/3/20): “Canada Comes to Australia’s Defense Over Fake Image Circulated by China”
- CNN (12/1/20): “China’s Slur on Australian Soldiers Is Just the Latest Step in a Long Campaign by Beijing”
- Australian Broadcasting Corporation (11/30/20): “Doctored Image of Australian Soldier Described as China’s Attempt to Win Over Conspiracy Theorists, Other Beijing Bureaucrats”
- Reuters (11/29/20): “Australia Demands Apology From China After Fake Image Posted on Social Media”
- New York Times (11/30/20): “Australia Condemns Lurid Tweet by Chinese Official as ‘Disgusting Slur’”
- New Zealand Herald (11/30/20): “Jacinda Ardern Reveals NZ Concerns With China Over Its Use of Fake Image in Feud with Oz”
- SBS (12/2/20): “’This Is a New Low’: US Backs Australia as China Refuses to Apologize Over Fake Image Post”
Headlines exercise formidable narrative control—particularly since most readers don’t make it past them. Notice that these make the judgment on readers’ behalf that the political cartoon shared by a Chinese official is deceptive and offensive—without explaining what the content of the image is. In this nonexhaustive sample, not one headline mentions the word “Afghanistan,” and only one of them references a child being harmed. Thus these headlines manage to reverse reality by making it seem as if China is the nation that has committed a crime, not Australia!
The New York Post‘s feature (12/1/20) on artist Wuheqilin was accompanied by a video of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison declaring that China should be ashamed to have called attention to his country’s war crimes.
But how is the image shared by the Chinese official “fake”? A revealing New York Post report, “Chinese Artist Behind Fake Image of Australian Soldier Says He’d Make More” (12/1/20), calls Wuheqilin an artist in the headline, and a “graphic artist” in the article itself, yet his work is nevertheless described as a “fake image” rather than “art,” which is what artists usually make.
The Post provided Wuheqilin’s motivation behind creating his CG illustration:
He said he had a sense of “fury and trembling” after reading reports about elite Australian troops’ “brutal killing of 39 civilians” in Afghanistan, including an unsubstantiated account about how “soldiers cut the throat of two 14-year-old Afghan teenagers with knives.”…
“I created this CG illustration based on my anger and shuddering. The artwork was simply created out of a sense of humanitarianism,” Fu wrote for the Global Times.
“I hope that more people will see this painting and pay attention to this real tragedy,” Fu said, adding that he used an Australian flag to cover some bodies of Afghan civilians behind the soldier in the image.
In other words, it is a political cartoon like any other political cartoon, and obviously isn’t meant to be taken literally. News reports are supposed to represent literal fact, yet it’s Western journalists who have been serving as dishonest sources of information by obtusely referring to allegorical artwork as a “fake image,” a “digitally fabricated image” or a “heavily manipulated image,” instead of referring to it accurately as political artwork, and putting it in context of the actual war crimes it critiques.
It’s unclear what Australia hoped to achieve with their denunciations of “fake images,” since it ironically has brought even more attention to the scandal than had it simply remained silent. Should China have published videos of Australian soldiers killing an unarmed man, or photos of them drinking beer out of a dead Taliban fighter’s prosthetic leg instead? The best way to avoid embarrassment is to simply avoid committing war crimes, yet it appears that Australia is more offended by criticism of their war crimes than the atrocities themselves.
In future instances when Western media condemn the Chinese government for sharing information critical of the West, the main question independent-minded people should ask is whether the information is true.
Killing the messenger of the killings
All Chinese citizens are required to help with security and spy. The Chinese continue to be duplicitous regarding COVID. Is it any wonder people think they lie?
Cho, if the west is so bad, go to China. We have no laws preventing that. Walls are built to keep people out, not to keep people in. Sayonara Cho.
I’m so looking forward to your apology article, when Trump leaves office. Let’s see if you have the courage to retract your Chicken Little article.
Tim, you are making Joshua Cho’s point. You seem to be engaged in some some sort of aberrational contest with “duplicitous”, imagined enemies. When I think of China I remember Isabelle Mao, who put together an incredible textbook to help English speakers learn Chinese, the Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu, and my tai chi teachers who learned from a Chinese master years ago. If you want to learn about disease check out “Epidemics and Society”, by Frank Snowden.
Yup John this seems to be Tim’s hobby, to browbeat the FAIR contributors into submitting to a faux libertarian neoreactionary will.
People like Mr.—will-not-tell-us-where-he-gets-his-news—Tim, are the same type of illiberal phonies who say shit like:
“Well, if you’re so worried about surveillance, then don’t keep any secrets.”
Libertarian my ass….yeah right….up until they meet someone they politically disagree with or cannot comprehend. Then it’s full throttle autocrat.
The only one who needs to go to China is you Tim, tell you what, I’ll buy you a round trip ticket if you go with me….whaddiya say?
(You will have to cover your half of other expenses)
I’m so looking forward to your apology article, when Trump leaves office. Let’s see if you have the courage to retract your Chicken Little article.
_____________________________________________________
No apology is necessary. Trump tried his damnedest to subvert an election and remain in power and has done untold damage to the country and its institutions in the process.
The fact that he’ll actually leave on Jan. 21st doesn’t make it “no-harm-no-foul” regardless of how you wanna spin it.
Joshua, have you heard about this book: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745340791/keenie-meenie/ ? Don’t know how many Australians end up in KMS, but the book evidently focuses on a culture of violence and forgetting. I’ll try and get around to it, as it appears that Miller is one of the better UK journalists.
Duh. If the source is from a government — any government — its likely propaganda. The more authoritarian the government — the less trustworthy the content. China doesn’t have something like FAIR. If it did, the contributors would be sent for re-education and lose social credits.
Fritz,
What do you think of his other point though, when propaganda is true? Should it be ignored simply because the West perceives China as authoritarian?
If that were the case, the U.S. should ignore everything coming from Saudi Arabia. Except that oil….Duh.
I do not know whether it’s just me or if everyone else experiencing problems with your website.
It looks like some of the text within your posts
are running off the screen. Can someone else please provide feedback and
let me know if this is happening to them as well? This could be a issue with
my web browser because I’ve had this happen before. Appreciate
it
So when the Chinese protest war crimes committed by Australia against Afghanistan citizens, it’s an outrage? So the Chinese are not permitted to criticize because Asian lives are less than.
Joshua, keep at it. I know it’s hard, the depths to which the corporate media will stoop must make you dizzy in their duplicity, thanks, Mike Liston
The point isn’t that doctored images like this should be universally banned, but that it is highly inappropriate for a senior diplomat of a major powerhouse country to be propagating these false images. To state the bleeding obvious, what is acceptable conduct in media circles is radically different from diplomatic protocol.
For some more context to this article, the Chinese diplomat Zhao Lijuan is a known provocateur, who specialises in needling and antagonising western countries, among other things, he has tweeted that the US army was responsible for bringing COVID-19 to China:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/13/asia/china-coronavirus-us-lijian-zhao-intl-hnk/index.html
Meanwhile the MSM bizarrely continues to disregard the growing evidence of a lab leak by the WIV and the associated cover up by Ecohealth alliance:
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/ecohealth-alliance-orchestrated-key-scientists-statement-on-natural-origin-of-sars-cov-2/
https://www.latestly.com/world/coronavirus-leaked-accidentally-from-a-lab-in-august-or-september-2019-claims-norwegian-virologist-2202064.html
Andy,
This was a cartoon not a “doctored image”. A doctored image would mean there is an existing image somewhere that was manipulated.
The hair splitting of whether the cartoon comes from a diplomatic channel or a news media one, is a moot point compared to the more salient question “Is it true that Australia committed war crimes?”
Finally, no a Norwegian virologist did not say that the virus had unnatural origins, full fact dot org explains it like this:
“A Norwegian virologist has made claims about the non-natural origins of the new coronavirus. But this claim is not in a new peer-reviewed paper he co-authored. The scientific community widely agrees that the virus was not artificially engineered.”
Just so you know Independent Science News is considered a junk science pseudoscientific super spreader of conspiracy theory and conjecture. Go to MediaBiasFactCheck, All Sides, Politifact or Snopes and see for yourself.
I use Scientific American, Live Science and Science Daily for my scientific information, not some wack job website with little credibility.
Yes, I’m aware that the Independent Science news website has a somewhat mixed reputation, which mostly relates to its criticism of biotechnology; although I actually discovered this website due to the prominent scientist and the world’s foremost bio-weapons expert, Professor Richard Ebright, posting a link to it on his Twitter feed. Additionally, the article I linked is neither conjecture or conspiracy but a simple statement of fact about the role of ‘Ecohealth alliance’ in orchestrating a misleading statement from scientists that there is no possibility that COVID-19 is either a virus that involved some level of human intervention or a natural virus that accidentally leaked from a lab. A number of prominent scientists have since questioned this claim and many others are understandably too scared to publicly air their views.
By all means, keep burying your head in the sand about the depressing likelihood that the greatest global crisis since 1939 was all the result of lax protocol by scientists in central Hubei, but the continuing insistence of a a natural zoonotic transfer of COVID-19, despite zero evidence, is immensely depressing. I doubt you’ve ever been to Wuhan; I actually have been there many times when I lived in mainland China. With it’s freezing cold winters, it’s an unlikely destination for a natural zoonotic transfer; and things get even murkier when you consider that Wuhan has the world’s largest research lab for novel bat coronaviruses, and one with a questionable safety record.
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/the-case-is-building-that-covid-19-had-a-lab-origin
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html
No one is arguing against or trying to deflect from the fact that Australian special forces committed war crimes in Afghanistan. The Australian Government publicly acknowledged the findings of the enquiry. This is an example of an open democratic society at work. Imperfect? Absolutely, but I know where I would rather live.
I was interested to find this website because I always like to think critically, challenge my own underlying assumptions and hidden biases (which we can only do once we acknowledge that they exist!), So a website with a name like fair.org picqued my interest.
But this article was a disappointment to say the least. No objectivity. The author sounds like nothing more than an extension of the Chinese Comminist Party’s propaganda office.
The thing that stood out for me in this incident, how could the CCP assume the moral authority to criticise Australia for undertaking this legal enquiry and disclosing the findings? After all, we are talking about a totalitarian regime that is based upon lies and deception, that violates the most basic human rights of its people on a scale that could not be matched by all the democracies combined, that is engaged is mass espionage against western nations and will got to extreme lengths to quash any and every form of dissent.
This has nothing to do with the Chinese people or western perceptions of them. It is the Chinese government, with its fundamental disregard for human life and liberty, that redefines the meaning hypocrisy. But such governments will always be inherently insecure, unstable and downright scared. Once we understand this, their behaviours start to make sense.
China has had its fair share of cheerleaders in western media, business and government circles over the years, but even these people are coming to recognise the inevitable fact that, since Tiananmen, nothing has fundamentally changed.