Inconvenient Truths In Western Demonisation Of China

 

From the “Wuhan lab origins of COVID-19” to the alleged “Xinjiang genocide”, the lack of caution and fact checking by agencies such as CNN and BBC have awakened media watchers to re-examine even earlier Western narratives on Chinese history such as the “Tiananmen Incident” of 1989. 

 

Let us look at some of the Western reports on these controversial issues. I have pointedly avoided quoting Chinese sources:

1. The “Wuhan lab origins of COVID-19”

It has been conclusively proven that COVID-US did not originate at the Wuhan market, nor in Wuhan at all, nor even in China. These reports from Western sources have, not surprisingly, been ignored by the main cable networks or else, they have been buried and overwhelmed by the “official” narrative:
 
The New York Times of Aug. 8, 2019 reported that the CDC totally shut down the US Military’s main bio-lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, due to an absence of safeguards against pathogen leakages, issuing a complete “cease and desist” order to the military. 

 

It was immediately after this event that the ‘e-cigarette’ epidemic arose. We also had the Japanese citizens infected in September of 2019, in Hawaii, people who had never been to China, these infections occurring on US soil long before the outbreak in Wuhan but only shortly after the locking down of Fort Detrick.

Then there was the Reuters report of June 19,  2020 that scientists in Italy had found traces of the new coronavirus in wastewater collected from Milan and Turin in December 2019, suggesting that COVID-19 was already circulating in northern Italy before China reported the first cases. 

 

Scientists said the detection of traces of the virus before the end of 2019 was consistent with evidence in other countries that COVID-19 may have been circulating before China reported the first cases on Dec. 31. 

 

Another Reuters report of June 27, 2020 stated that Spanish virologists in the University of Barcelona had found traces of coronavirus in a sample of Barcelona wastewater collected in March 2019, nine months before the COVID-19 disease was identified in China.

Despite these respectable Western and international press reports showing that the coronavirus did not even originate from China, it did not stop the Western media from giving full rein to the US President and his cohorts continuing to emulate Goebbels by referring to the “China virus” and the “Kung Flu”. And 18 months on into the COVID-19 pandemic, the notion that the virus began in China remains in media circulation as a supposed “fact” today.

2. The alleged “genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang”

To sabotage China’s Belt  and Road Initiative (BRI) and justify sanctions against China by the allegation of “genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang”, the Western media have joined the crusade to condemn China for this alleged gross human rights abuse.

The US-led Western campaign to sanction China was based on their claim that China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. It was the former Secretary of State under the Trump administration, Michael Pompeo who had first made the allegation of Uyghur genocide against China and now, the Biden administration has endorsed this claim without providing any further evidence.

This allegation has been taken at face value by Western media such as CNN and BBC and accepted as “fact” by many viewers, including “comprador intellectuals”. It was instructive that the BBC had their knuckles rapped when they attempted to pose the rhetorical question about the alleged violation of human rights in China to Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University:

 "I'm not sure why the BBC started with listing only China's human rights abuses. What about America's human rights abuses? The Iraq War, together with the UK, was completely illegal and under false pretences. The war in Syria, the war in Libya, the continued sanctions against civilian populations in Venezuela and Iran, walking away from the Paris Climate Agreement for the last four years, unilateral trade actions that have been deemed illegal by the WTO. The US has serious human rights issues to deal with, not only rights violations by the US government abroad but also continued massive racism, white supremacism, and abuse of incarceration of hundreds of thousands of people in the US－African Americans, people of colour. So, I think that the whole premise of this story is a little bit odd."

Since then, Professor Jeffrey Sachs has written an article with William Schabas, Professor of Law, and author of ‘Genocide in International Law’ (The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified, Apr 20, 2021):

“The charge of genocide should never be made lightly. Inappropriate use of the term may escalate geopolitical and military tensions and devalue the historical memory of genocides such as the Holocaust, thereby hindering the ability to prevent future genocides. It behoves the US government to make any charge of genocide responsibly, which it has failed to do here…. Unless the State Department can substantiate the genocide accusation, it should withdraw the charge. It should also support an UN-led investigation of the situation in Xinjiang.” (Project Syndicate 20 April 2021)

Despite such a reproof from two authorities on genocide, Western media such as CNN and BBC continue to peddle Pompeo’s allegation of “genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang”.

3. The ‘Tiananmen Incident’

Having watched the behaviour of the Western media over their recent coverage of China’s alleged “violations of human rights”, I was curious about whether the Western narrative of “The Tiananmen Massacre” of 1989 was similarly skewed to suit their demonisation of “Communist China”. It didn’t take long to find the Wikileaks of 2011 on the Tiananmen Incident and they indeed did not fit the narrative of the Western media we have known ever since 1989:

“DURING A RECENT MEETING, A LATIN AMERICAN DIPLOMAT AND HIS WIFE PROVIDED POLOFF AN ACCOUNT OF THEIR MOVEMENTS ON JUNE 3-4 AND THEIR EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF EVENTS AT TIANANMEN SQUARE. ALTHOUGH THEIR ACCOUNT GENERALLY FOLLOWS THOSE PREVIOUSLY REPORTED, THEIR UNIQUE EXPERIENCES PROVIDE ADDITIONAL INSIGHT AND CORROBORATION OF EVENTS IN THE SQUARE.  THEY WERE ABLE TO ENTER AND LEAVE THE SQUARE SEVERAL TIMES AND WERE NOT HARASSED BY TROOPS. REMAINING WITH STUDENTS BY THE MONUMENT TO THE PEOPLE'S HEROES UNTIL THE FINAL WITHDRAWAL, THE DIPLOMAT SAID THERE WERE NO MASS SHOOTINGS OF STUDENTS IN THE SQUARE OR AT THE MONUMENT.”
(WikiLeaks: Public Library of US Diplomacy / Latin American Diplomat’s Eyewitness Account of June 3-4 Events on Tiananmen Square)

The Daily Telegraph of Britain also covered the release of the Wikileaks cables – “Wikileaks, no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square, cables claim” by Malcolm Moore, 4 June 2011:

“Secret cables from the United States embassy in Beijing have shown there was no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square when China put down student pro-democracy demonstrations 22 years ago. The cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and released exclusively by The Daily Telegraph, partly confirm the Chinese government's account of the early hours of June 4, 1989, which has always insisted that soldiers did not massacre demonstrators inside Tiananmen Square. Instead, the cables show that Chinese soldiers opened fire on protesters outside the centre of Beijing, as they fought their way towards the square from the west of the city…The army came up against ‘an elaborate system of blockades’, described in a cable from May 21, 1989, which allowed students to ‘control much of central Beijing’:

“The testimony contradicts the reports of several journalists who were in Beijing at the time, who described soldiers ‘charging’ into unarmed civilians and suggests the death toll on the night may be far lower than the thousands previously thought…In 2009, James Miles, who was the BBC correspondent in Beijing at the time, admitted that he had ‘conveyed the wrong impression’ and that there was no massacre in Tiananmen Square. Protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations with martial law troops. There was no Tiananmen Square massacre…"

In 2019, there was an opinion piece by Professor of Anthropology at Cabrillo College, California, an expert on Sino-US relations, Dr. Dennis Etler, “The Truth Behind the Myth of the 'Tiananmen Square Massacre':

“Although it has been well established that no “massacre” took place in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, the term is still widely used to refer to the violence that did occur in Beijing that fateful night. As is well documented the violence was instigated by agents provocateurs, mostly unemployed youth who were set adrift as China transitioned from the command economy of (Chairman) Mao Zedong era to the socialist market economy of the (Chairman) Deng Xiaoping era.  Mobs of these disaffected young people were set loose, firebombing PLA vehicles, incinerating their occupants, and torching whole convoys of army vehicles sent to secure order in the capital. There should be no doubt in any thinking person’s mind that agents of the U.S. CIA and the Taiwan based Guomindang were involved in recruiting them.

 
“The question that needs to be asked is … what led to this insurrection that the West refuses to let go of? That is why the U.S., and its captive media still rue the day that the CPC came to its senses and derailed the U.S. inspired counter-revolutionary movement that the Tiananmen protests had become. And that is why the Western media and politicians continue to harp on its suppression 30 years later.”

The release of the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables on the Tiananmen Incident in June 2011 was also covered by The Washington Post - “WikiLeaks, ‘Tiananmen massacre a myth’ by Elizabeth Flock, July 14, 2011:

“During the seven weeks of student-led protests in Beijing, Tim Russert on television’s ‘Meet the Press’ estimated thousands had been killed by machine guns in Tiananmen Square. The New York Times ran a story in which a Qinghua University student described machine guns mowing down students in front of a monument in the square. A week later, no evidence was found to confirm either account. Most people now agree that although there was no massacre within the square, hundreds of people did die.

 
“The story also draws from a report written by The Post’s former Beijing bureau chief Jay Mathews in 2010 for the Columbia Journalism Review, entitled ‘The Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press.’ In the report, Mathews also suggested that hundreds, not thousands of people died, and possibly none of them within the square.

“Tiananmen remains the classic example of the shallowness and bias in most Western media reporting, and of governmental black information operations seeking to control those media. China is too important to be a victim of this nonsense…”

As someone who had also been taken in by these gruesome Western reports of the so-called “Tiananmen Massacre” since 1989, I have found these revelations from Wikileaks most sobering. It is no doubt challenging to discern truth from spin, especially in this age and speed of fake news dissemination but learning to seek truth from facts is surely the mission of all peace lovers. If we are to do justice to peoples and their history and to work toward conflict resolution, it is the duty of all citizens of the world to set the record straight for posterity.

*Dr. Kua Kia Soong is a writer and human rights defender; former academic, MP and political detainee*