If you read any of the Western press (most UK or American) you will get a really distorted view about Hong Kong, and China. You will read things, so many things, that you will just “take in” as truth, and without a secondary source of information, you will start to believe it. And that’s how the “West” works. You keep people stupid and ignorant, and manipulate them in such a way that they “dance” to whatever tune you play.

I have been (by chance) reading some articles out of Hong Kong ( I mean, after all, I live next door to it.) and they (the articles) are very interesting in how illustrative they are to the amazing levels of disinformation pumped out of America and Britain over the last few decades.

All lies. All disinformation. All manipulation.

All the time.

We start with Billionaire Tycoon Jimmy Lai. And if you read the American (and British press) you might picture him as a freedom lover for democracy, and a fighter for justice and the “American way of life”.

• Jimmy Lai: Hong Kong democracy advocate and media …
• Jimmy Lai among five HK democracy activists jailed – Asia …
• Jimmy Lai, other pro-democracy activists given additional …
• Democracy swims against the tide in authoritarian world …
• For democracy, it’s a time of swimming against the tide …
• Exclusive-Adviser to jailed HK tycoon Jimmy Lai says Apple …

Nah.

Not even remotely true. He’s actually sort of like a Chinese version of Larry Flint, with the behavior of Harvey Weinstein , and the scruples of Hillary Clinton.

Here is a great article. Found HERE. It discusses Jimmy Lai’s “operation” in Hong Kong…

Fun fact:

For a newspaper with only 86,000 subscribers. He was mysteriously making HK$95 million every month (12.23 million US Dollars). 

Every time the HK government tried to audit him, a massive onslaught of anti-HK government protests, media, and assaults from both the USA and the UK stopped the effort. On numerous occasions, the UK and US government "stepped in" and put pressure on HK to free him and stop the investigations.

But when HK passed the insurrection law in 2020, his "operations" were investigated and it turns out that he was laundering enormous sums of cash directly out of the United States government for undisclosed purposes.

Just who is this “skuz-bucket”?

[1] The untold story of Apple Daily

By Nury Vittachi 29 Jun 2021

Deception, misogyny and quiet Americans

FIRST, LET’S LOOK AT the numbers which are being omitted in reports about the closure of Hong Kong’s Apple Daily newspaper.

NOT BREAKFAST READING

1) Apple Daily printed 86,000 copies a day, which meant that 98.5 PER CENT of Hong Kong’s 6,500,000 adults did NOT buy it with their breakfast noodles.

SIMPLE DECEPTION

2) The Western media is reporting that it was “Hong Kong’s biggest newspaper”. No. Not remotely true. Hong Kong’s most popular newspaper is free tabloid Headline Daily (1,012,000 a day, or more than ten times Apple’s circulation), and in the paid broadsheet category, leaders include Oriental Daily News (530,000 a day), and Sing Tao Daily (253,000 a day).

Hong Kong has always had a hunger for newspapers, and the mainstream voice has always been far, far more popular than Jimmy Lai’s one. That was true in the British era, and is true today, with the same newspaper groups at the top of the pile.

THE BIG STORY IN MEDIA

3) Maybe Jimmy Lai’s paper was top of the web charts? No. Alexa rankings for Hong Kong show HK01.com, Bastillepost and other online media far ahead of Apple Daily (and the fact that Hong Kongers visit mainland China shopping site Taobao significantly more than any local media site should tell us something).

HK01, in particular, has come from nowhere to dominate the local media scene. Lively, up-to-the-minute and often critical of the government, its existence and popularity gives the lie to the “press freedom is dead” trope of the Western media, and is the big story in media that foreign correspondents have all missed.

WHO CLOSED APPLE?

4) Apple Daily was not closed down by the Hong Kong government, but by its own board, comprising local people hostile to China, plus Americans.

The HK$18 million that the government froze was a small sum for a paper for a company with HK$95 million in revenues every month, financial analysts say. The paper itself boasted of having cash accounts of HK$531 million, enough to last 18 months.

In fact, the entire financial picture of the media group is an under-reported, under-studied mystery.

THE INFAMOUS NARRATIVE

5) So why did they close their own paper? As a PR coup, because they were absolutely confident that the international media, which means the Western media, would not tell the real story, but one which fits their anti-China narrative.

Oh, and also, it saves them money.

Apple Daily’s stunning lack of popularity among the good, honest, people of Hong Kong, was only eclipsed by its stunning lack of popularity among advertisers. The group has been losing more than HK$1 million a day, yes, A DAY, (which is more than US$1 million a week), amounting to several billion Hong Kong dollars over the past few years.

The paper clearly did not function commercially as a media company, so any healthily skeptical person would ask themselves: what was it for?

PRO-DEMOCRACY?

Oh, and another thing. Apple Daily wasn’t  “pro-democracy” either.

But more about that later. Let’s start from the very beginning, a very good place to start, as the great poet Oscar Hammerstein II said.

This headline from a UK newspaper called ‘i’ (for “Independent”) shows the typically false reporting characteristic of coverage of this story

CHAPTER 1)  BRUNCH AND PORNOGRAPHY

I FIRST MET Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, founder of Apple Daily, at a politician-packed brunch party in 1995. It was at the luxurious Hong Kong apartment of L. Gordon Crovitz, a senior executive for the Wall Street Journal group. His wife Minky was the perfect hostess.

Garment tycoon Lai wasn’t how I expected him to be, but I liked him. Behind his sad puppy eyes was toughness. He was in the process of launching an oppositional, China-baiting newspaper.

We all congratulated him for taking a step that was clearly brave and very likely foolhardy: he would inevitably get into trouble.

It was only after I had left that brunch party that something occurred to me: the hosts were all right wing United States people, and the invited politicians were all from the Hong Kong opposition. It was like a convention of people who didn’t like China.

MISOGYNY RULES

Over the next few years, Apple Daily carved its place in the city’s media scene over the next few years, and this reporter, like most Hong Kong people, were shocked and horrified.

Lai’s publications made a niche for themselves by taking the lowest of the low paths. There was sex and sensationalism, outrage and scandal, allegations and celebrity gossip of the tawdriest kind, and worse, pornographic stories and  reviews/ critiques of sex workers and massage parlours.

The Hong Kong community is a rather gentle, low-crime, conservative, majority female society, and the present portrayal of Apple Daily as the natural voice of the community was and is deeply misleading.

The paper, crude, brutal and sexist, was for men. Jimmy Lai, in a 1995 interview with the South China Morning Post, said: “Our porn page is not very well done, but we have to have it because man has basic needs.”

LOWERED STANDARDS

Other publications lowered their standards to compete, and the Hong Kong newsstands became embarrassing to walk past. Remember the “downblouse” photo of schoolgirl Alice Patten on the front page with the headline: “The peaches are ripening”?

The misogyny and cruelty to women and children were shocking, with people being hurt constantly – and discovering that the newspaper simply didn’t care.

After a few years, it felt like most people knew individuals who had been hurt by Apple Daily. The Hong Kong public preferred its traditional newspaper voice, and Jimmy Lai’s newspaper could never rise above being a minority interest, thank God.

Another Western media group gets it wrong: the information above was distributed by AFP, one of the biggest news agencies in the world.

One 1998 story, sadly typical of the paper, stuck in my mind: Apple Daily published a feature about an unbelievably crass man who apparently sought out prostitutes soon after his wife had thrown their children out of a window to their deaths before jumping after them.

The paper later admitted paying the man to pose in bed with the sex workers for the photographs, knowing that it would be the most talked-about story of the week.

The paper was in trouble with the law, usually because of contravening the rules against obscene publications, every two or three months.

FLOUTED ETHICS

It also flouted basic journalistic ethics. Chequebook journalism was the norm. In 2000, an Apple reporter received a 10-month jail sentence for bribing police officers to reveal information. In 2019, the paper was widely reported to have given HK$1.5 million to a taxi driver for video footage of a married celebrity canoodling with a woman who wasn’t his wife.

Yes, it also did some positive work, like attacking civil servants for doing their jobs badly, but those few tales became over-politicized to an extent that they were not journalism, but political campaigning for its endless pro-America, anti-China message.

Then one day, I got a call. Apple Daily senior executive Mark Simon wanted to meet me and would like to me to give them some help.

CHAPTER TWO) THE MONEY PIT

MARK SIMON, now there’s an interesting character. People were already wondering if Jimmy Lai’s right-hand man was a CIA agent, given the newspaper’s anti-China stance.

I found the notion unlikely, and not just because we were friends. He was enormous and unhealthy looking, and would be unlikely to pass the most basic fitness tests. Also, he liked the limelight too much to be an agent, although there is a sub-group of agents who do their work in the spotlight.

In a discussion on that topic, someone asked me a related question: If not an agent, was Mark Simon a CIA asset, witting or unwitting?

I gave her a reply that my father’s experiences taught me: “Sweetheart, almost every journalist in the world is a CIA asset, witting or unwitting. That’s how the Western press works.”

 

ANIMATED NEWS

I met Mark at a coffee shop in Kowloon’s Ho Man Tin district where he introduced me to Marina Shifrin, an American woman who had been hired to write scripts for a new “3D animated news” venture for Next Digital, the parent company of the newspaper. The operation was based in Taiwan, where the group was doing very badly.

The animations were unfunny, getting few hits and were not being widely shared. Mark wanted me to give her the key storytelling points to creating viral media. It was hard to boil down decades of experience into a short lecture, but to sum up, I told her to be authentic, funny, detached and offbeat. We swapped contact details.

I left the meeting pondering how long a principled American woman could stay at such an unprincipled company.

BIGOTRY

For Hong Kong’s majority population a significant problem was Apple Daily’s undisguised bigotry. Apple popularized the term “locusts” for people from mainland China coming to Hong Kong.

This was a horrific mistake in the eyes of this community, where many people had mainland cousins, and recognized that the city’s businesses were reliant on mainland Chinese customers.

But here was the puzzle. Despite the repulsive content, there was a rock-solid partnership between the Apple Daily crowd and American media people—and on particular, the most hawkish and right wing of people in that country.

1. Gordon Crovitz remained closely in the loop. Crovitz’s wife, Minky Worden, was “media advisor” to the Hong Kong opposition for several years. Mark Simon had a US Naval Intelligence background and became president of Republicans Abroad in Hong Kong.

Other media highlighted the fact that Apple-style muckraking made ordinary people feel unsafe

HK PEOPLE GENEROUS

To combat its bad reputation for bigotry, Apple sometimes accused others of the same thing. In 2013, it ran a front-page anti-government “scoop” reporting that Executive Council member Franklin Lam, said: “I utterly discriminate against new immigrants.”

Unfortunately for the reporters, the meeting had been recorded and the tape showed that what he actually said was: “I utterly do not discriminate against new immigrants. On arrival in Hong Kong, they are legally Hong Kong citizens. They are also first-class citizens.”

The truth is that Hong Kong people are generous, and the city has an extensive program to help mainland immigrants settle in.

Jimmy Lai meets Mike Pence: picture from Mike Pence’s office

CHAPTER 3) UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE

The world is being told that Apple Daily is a pro-democracy paper. Let’s talk about that. In 2013 and 2014,  Hong Kong civil servants announced the results of a years-long process to introduce a one-person-one-vote system to this city.

A Chinese University survey of the public showed that some 55 percent of people were in favor of proceeding with the government’s universal suffrage plan, providing that satisfaction could be achieved on the composition of the “broadly representative nominating committee”.

But Apple Daily and the more strident members of the opposition called for the whole universal suffrage package to be jettisoned, as not being sufficiently close to Western liberal democracy. (In fact, the Hong Kong system allowed direct voting for the leader, unlike UK and US systems, where you vote for parties, and the party or the electoral college appoint a leader.)

FAUX OUTRAGE

The Western media, including this reporter, who was writing op-eds for the New York Times at the time, got caught up in the faux outrage, and the path to democratic self-government that Hong Kong civil servants had taken literally years to build was demolished in a single day.

Many academics and journalists (including the present writer), later realized that we’d made a huge error, denying Hong Kong people an important chance to take the first steps towards a more democratic system.

GETTING IT RIGHT AT LAST

In Taiwan, Marina Shifrin worked until 3 o’clock in the morning and then made a video of herself holding an “I quit” sign and dancing at multiple locations in the Next Media offices.

It went viral on the internet, winning her 19 million views, plus a job offer of working in televison in the United States. She left Taiwan as fast as she could.

REVOLUTION CONSULTANTS

In late 2014, Western “revolution consultants” revealed that they had been working with Hong Kong anti-China campaigners for almost two years before the “Occupy Central” campaign shut down much of the business center.

Leaked documents revealed that Jimmy Lai was secretly handling the finances for those protests: more than HK$40 million (US$5.2 million) came from unknown sources and went to hostile groups in Hong Kong.

In one of the emails, Lai spoke scathingly about the protest leaders, saying they “could accomplish nothing if there was no help”.

MILLIONS OF DOLLARS

Hong Kong was swept by rumors, later confirmed, that the US State Department had a budget of millions to destabilize China by poisoning minds against the country in its outlying areas – Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet and Mongolia.

Piece by piece, stories of unexplained payments popped up. It became clear that the cash coming through the National Endowment for Democracy was peanuts compared to money from other American sources. But it was hard to find the links between the odd bits of news that popped up.

For example, in May 2016 the Independent Commission Against Corruption highlighted an undeclared payment of HK$250,000 from Mark Simon to an opposition politician. It was not clear where the cash originated.

But by that time, observers of the Hong Kong scene noted that we very often saw the same factors coming together: Americans, mystery money, Jimmy Lai, and anti-China politicians.

AIMLESS VIOLENCE

In 2019, civil unrest again broke out and Apple Daily strongly backed the pro-independence protesters calling for Hong Kong to be “freed” from China, despite the fact that between 80 and 93 percent of Hong Kong people strongly oppose independence.

The protesters wanted Donald Trump to take Hong Kong from China, possibly the worst idea in history.

Bizarrely, Apple Daily gave the biggest encouragement to the aimlessly violent people who had no plan other than to destroy Hong Kong’s economy, close the airport, and generally cause mayhem. There was no conceivable way that the endless destruction of public facilities would lead to more democracy, as Hong Kong people pointed out repeatedly in talk shows and on social media.

Indeed, it was obvious that the process Apple Daily was encouraging could have no possible outcome except to cause Beijing to intervene – which was, of course, the whole point. Accusations that this city was just a pawn in a bigger game in which Jimmy Lai was serving the United States became impossible to dismiss.

THE US RIGHT WING

Also clear was that Jimmy Lai strongly favored the right wing of the United States, since they were more actively anti-China. In May, 2020, Jimmy Lai launched a  #TrumpSavesHK campaign on its front page. “Trump is a statesman,” Lai wrote in the newspaper in October.

Behind the scenes, Apple Daily dug into its coffers to commission a fake report “revealing” that Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden had secret dealings with China. Managed by Mark Simon, the project was a direct bid to interfere in the US elections, and ensure a Trump win.

Again, we saw creative, out-of-the-box thinking, but also an appetite for deliberate deception of the public – the journalist credited with writing the dossier didn’t exist, but was a fake name with a computer-generated face.

Throughout this period, the paper called for international sanctions on Hong Kong, even though the city was being hammered for reasons mired in disinformation. I don’t think anyone taking a genuinely detached look at the paper’s actions over the past few years could possibly call it pro-democracy, or even pro-Hong Kong. It worked instead to actively harm this community.

Oh, and the misogynistic harm to women and children has continued. Earlier this month, Hong Kong saw the end of a court case involving Apple Daily staff pretending to be related to a female celebrity in order to get a birth certificate for her child, which they then published.

ON BOARD

This month, the board of Apple Daily, not the Hong Kong government, closed the newspaper.

Who is on the board? There’s American journalist Mark Clifford. There’s L. Gordon Crovitz, the charming but staunchly right wing former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, who invited me to that brunch party at his home 26 years ago.

His wife Minky Worden has become a key voice in the US campaign against the 2022 Winter Olympics in China.

Ms Worden is a senior staff member at Human Rights Watch, a group which has been criticized by more than 100 cultural figures, including Nobel Peace Laureates, for its  “close ties to the government of the United States”.

Since Olympic activities in mainland China always involve Hong Kong city too, the success of her campaign would further harm the long-suffering people of this city.

LEFT SUDDENLY

Meanwhile, Mark Simon, who told journalists he was in Hong Kong to stay, left the city suddenly to move to Taiwan shortly before the promulgation of a US-style security law, which among other things, targets people who take overseas money to interfere in local politics.

But of course none of this will be covered in the international media. It doesn’t fit the narrative.

The Western media will repeatedly report that Beijing is to blame for Apple Daily’s problems in Hong Kong, hoping and praying that no one will point out the key fact that demolishes the argument: The newspaper group has been even more of a disaster in Taiwan, where it has stopped all its print publications, despite the island allegedly having glorious USA-Style True Democracy. USA! USA!

TALK TO HONG KONG PEOPLE

If you want the real story of this newspaper, perhaps speak to the 98.5 per cent of Hong Kong adults who did not buy a copy of Apple Daily with their breakfast every day.

And perhaps spend a moment reflecting on Jimmy Lai’s connections with the right wing of the United States, and what the jailed publisher thinks of Hong Kong’s anti-China movement – that they “could accomplish nothing if there was no help”.

[2] And now to Cuba

Here’s what the Hong Kong folk feel about Cuba. After all, America now has it’s sights on invading it, or starting a war there… oh, you know… for the usual reasons.

• Biden says Cuba is a ‘failed state’ and calls communism ‘a …
• Statement by President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. on Protests in …
• Cubans take to streets in rare protests over lack of …
• Cuba sees largest protests in decades as economy …
• Why has Cuba exploded in protests? It goes beyond the U.S …
• Cuba’s Protests Are Bigger and Angrier Than Ever Before
• Biden facing pressure from all sides to respond to Cuba …
• Some U.S. politicians voice support for Cuba protesters as …

Yah. Any day now, America is going to invade Cuba for Freedom™ and democracy™.

How ‘freedom’ became a scary word

By Nury Vittachi 17 Jul 2021

Destabilization process is now farcically predictable

THE WORLD’S WEALTHIEST, most militaristic country (The United States) wants to deliver “freedom” to Cuba, a tiny community which has committed the unforgivable sin of doing things in a more socialist way. But whatever your politics, the extraordinary re-purposing of the word “freedom” as a tool to amplify unrest and distort discussions should concern us all.

Hong Kong people, in particular, have seen this entire process before. In fact, we could pretty much write the script for what’s happening in Cuba ourselves. Ten things to consider:

1.) Turn on the anti-Cuba social media

Yes, there are social and economic problems in Cuba. That’s how it works. The destabilization process ALWAYS piggybacks itself on genuine grievances. These are amplified with a disinformation campaign.

At least 1,500 of the social media accounts that participated in the #SOSCuba operation were created in a 48-hour period: July 10 and 11, said Julian Macias Tovar, social media analyst.

2.) Turn on the fake tweets.

Cuban internet investigators found the majority of the fake tweets came from the United States.

The tweets focused on the narrative key word “freedom” and pointedly instructed readers to dismiss any suggestion that the US embargo had any relevance to what was happening.

One of the main pro-US social media voices talking to Cubans was a notorious anti-government source called Yusnaby.

Yusnaby, Cubans wryly noted, is pronounced like “U.S. Navy” said with an accent.

3.)  Engage the ‘Bots.

Many of the messages came from random “pretty” faces and were bot-signed up so quickly that they didn’t have time to delete the automatically generated numbers after their fake names.

So “Rachel” (see below), who looks like a supermodel, apparently likes to be known as Rachel76039947.

4.) Fire-hose of messages floods the internet.

The entire, huge torrent of messages took a pro-US and anti-government stance, and many said the exact same thing in the exact same words. They were clearly fake but Twitter did not delete them.

Many of the pro-US, anti-government voices on social media joined recently, have no friends or followers, and somewhat unusual names!

5.) Heavy coverage of tiny protests.

The early Cuban protests were small (a few hundred people) but received far more coverage than much, much larger events elsewhere. Independent media outlet BT News noted that more than 100,000 people marched for Palestine, such as in the demonstration pictured below, at the same time, but got far less coverage.

6.) Freedom™ and democracy™

When Hong Kongers see something like this happening, we wait. We wait for the mainstream media to give the protesters/ pro-US side full ownership of words like “freedom” and “democracy”.  At the same time, they will unfairly label the home team/ government as the enemies of freedom and democracy.

Here’s the New York Times doing precisely that in a hilariously blatant manner: “Shouting ‘freedom’ and other anti-government slogans. . . ”!

7.) Lie using fake photos

The small size of many of the Cuba demonstrations was a problem for the pro-NATO narrative.

CNN misleading people into thinking the picture it is using comes from Cuba when it’s actually from Miami, as the street sign shows. TYT repeatedly did the same thing.

8.) American President reads THE script.

By Sunday night, some Hong Kongers watching the process were already waiting for US President Joseph Biden to perform his part in the script, saying something that associates one side with “freedom” and the other with the words “authoritarian regime.”

On Monday, he did just that.

9.) Switch and confuse the videos and images

Below is a widely reprinted NYT report which misled countless millions of readers into thinking this AP picture of a reasonably well-attended gathering was of a pro-US, anti-govt protest, when it was actually a pro-government rally.

Fox News and the Financial Times did the same thing with the same picture. This picture actually showed a pro-government rally. (Spotter: Alan MacLeod)

10.) Amnesty International performs their role

By Tuesday, newswatchers in Hong Kong were waiting for the next standard element in the destabilization script  — which would be for the comically biased Amnesty International to do its normal trick.

Amnesty works hard to produce reports making the home team look like faceless killing machines, and the pro-US, anti-govt side look like young, cool human beings with glorious US flags calling for, yes, “freedom” (libertad). 

On Wednesday Amnesty International did precisely that, as you can see from the lead elements on the front page of the UK organization’s Cuba report, below.

Amnesty International is “comically biased”

NEXT IN THE SCRIPT

In fact, the Cuba protests have been so predictable that Hong Kong people can even tell you the next steps coming up.

• There will be demands for US troops to come and “solve” the problem.
• There will be complaints of police brutality.
• The UK and the US will say they “stand with” one side, as if they know for a fact that group of protesters represents everyone.
• And we’ll all see the same words repeated over and over again — “freedom” on the pro-US side and “authoritarian regime” on the other.

IGNORING THE WORLD

By claiming “freedom” as a sacred principle it owns, the United States has given itself license to ignore the global community.

Just last month, the United Nations overwhelmingly voted in favor of a resolution to demand the end of the US economic blockade on Cuba, for the 29th year in a row.

The United States ignored it, as did the media.

NO SELF-AWARENESS

This week, a US politician used the word “freedom” four times in a single tweet about Cuba. “America stands for freedom,” said the unintentionally hilarious declamation by Val Demings of Florida.

I’m assuming that staff at the New York Times have enough self-awareness to know that the word “freedom” used in the American way is seen by people outside the US as a joke – but I may be wrong.

Perhaps some US citizens have a more sophisticated understanding of the situation than journalists: the humorous meme at the top of this post is widely shared in various forms and appears to originate in the United States. Here’s another version:

But some journalists don’t get the joke. One of the New York Times write-ups about the Cuba protests included a starry-eye quote from a protester: “What I saw today was people seeing freedom for the first time.”

HOWEVER VIOLENT

For more than 40 years, the world has watched the CIA travelling the globe to rebrand pro-US groups, however violent they are, as the voices of “freedom”, and home teams as the enemies of freedom, however well they feed and serve their populace.

Few people know this better than the Hong Kong people. During the US-backed riots of 2019, a Hong Kong friend posted terrifying images of black-clad thugs, radicalized by endless Apple Daily reports, storming into a spotless train station and using iron rods to terrorize staff and smash everything in sight.

His caption: “Freedom is coming.”

And the reason why I started to read some of the HK news…

yeah. I wanted to do a follow up on who these jackasses were who was attacking my videos of bus rides, sizzling Hunan beer, and cheap wine. I wanted to know!

[3] Rich outlet tries to savage citizen journalists

IN A HILARIOUS BOTCH-UP, the BBC yesterday inserted numerous links to anti-China features into an article defending itself from claims that it was anti-China.Here’s what happened.BBC journalists wrote an article attacking China-based “citizen journalists”. The bloggers defended themselves by saying the BBC and other Western media had a clearly biased, negative attitude to the Asian developing nation.The BBC’s editors yesterday printed the article (above) — but sprinkled it with links (see picture below) which powerfully proved the critics’ point that the BBC is biased against China.In effect, the BBC said “we’re not anti-China — by the way, here’s a link to an article showing how China is a dystopian hellscape! And another one. And another one. And another one.  And . . “.It’s hard not to laugh.

 

It gets better. In fact, yesterday’s BBC article should go down in history as a textbook example of self-defeating journalism for at least four reasons.

First, you cannot argue against the allegation that you present a strongly one-sided view by including a list of article links that prove conclusively that you present a one-sided view.

 

Lee and Oli Barrett, residents of China, have become popular bloggers

SENSE OF IRONY

Second, the article attacks ordinary individual bloggers in China (like those in the picture above) by implying, with no hard evidence, that they receive government cash to do what they do, which is to show China in a positive light.

Yet we all know for a fact that the BBC journalists making the accusation receive  government cash month after month to do what they do, which is to present China in a negative light.

(The BBC’s annual budget is GBP3.5 billion.)

Staff in the BBC newsroom appear to have had their senses of irony surgically removed.

Outrageous! A government sponsored media outlet in China offers money to stringers, the BBC said

THEY PAY STRINGERS

Third, the BBC report reveals, shock horror, that CGTN, a government-financed news outlet, now offers CASH PAYMENTS to STRINGERS!

OMG!

The BBC writers mysteriously forgot to mention that the BBC, also a government-financed news outlet, also offers cash payments to stringers (much larger sums). They’ve been doing this for decades.

I know this for a fact because I was a stringer for the BBC for years.

At this point, I became seriously worried about the toddler-level lack of self-awareness in the BBC newsroom.

Jason Lightfoot is another independent blogger attacked for giving another side of the story

MOTIVATION MYSTERY

Fourth, the BBC writers say: “It’s unclear what drives the foreign vloggers – whether they believe in China’s messaging or are motivated by the lure of local fame and fortune instead.”

It’s only unclear what motivates them if you haven’t watched a single one of their videos. If you do, you can see they are ordinary people doing their best to provide desperately needed balance to the reports put out by dedicated Sinophobes like, well, BBC Newsroom staff, to pick a random example out of the air.

LET’S TALK ABOUT MONEY

Actually, let’s talk about money, something BBC journalists HATE to discuss.

The BBC’s hatchet job presents no evidence whatsoever that the Barretts, Barrie Jones, or Jason Lightfoot are paid a single yuan for having the opinions they have, or for choosing to show the positive side of life in China.

In contrast, BBC journalists have very good salaries for showing the negative side of life in China. I hope the bloggers attacked by BBC journalists Kerrie Allen and Sophie Williams realize they have the moral right to ask them how much the BBC pays them.

OVERPAID JOURNALISTS

I’ve worked at the BBC on and off for decades and I can tell you that some BBC journalists get paid A LOT. When BBC newsroom head James Harding left in 2018, his salary was GBP340,000 a year. Election specialist Jeremy Vine gets more than GBP600,000 a year.

Of course most people in the newsrooms get less than that, but at least 40 BBC journalists are paid more than the British Prime Minister’s GBP150,000 salary, a Press Gazette study showed in 2017. Political editor Laura Kuenssberg gets GBP200,000 to GBP250,000 a year, for example.

Barrie Jones upsets Western journalists by refusing the parrot the US State Department narrative.

FACTUAL INACCURACIES

The ultimate irony is that the unpaid amateurs in China regularly do a better job of covering China than the salaried professionals.

The same BBC article gives a good example of how history changes when that all-important nuance goes missing.

The BBC reporters say “Citizen journalist Zhang Zhan was jailed for four years after making a number of vlogs during Wuhan’s coronavirus outbreak.”

That’s not what really happened. Zhang Zhan was an anti-lockdown campaigner jailed for repeatedly trying to disrupt anti-covid measures. She herself said that she was not a journalist. Her own videos show clearly that she was the Chinese equivalent of the US anti-vaxxer brigade, refusing to follow health guidelines and creating deliberate public confrontations with people trying to follow the rules.

But that’s a nuanced version of her case, which you can only get if you live in this country and talk to people here — rather than attack from the other side of the planet.

THE 50-CENT ARMY

 

The BBC reporters also dredge up the old chestnut about the “50-cent army”, apparently unaware that most Chinese government clickers have been retired, simply because they are no longer needed. They’ve been replaced by real voices who speak out without pay.

An SCMP report about the rise of young people in China defending their community by commenting on social media, making the civil service pro-China “wumao” unnecessary

The so-called “wumao” are no longer necessary now that young people who are sick and tired of their community being misrepresented (groups like the Diba and the fangirls) are providing a robust defense of the country, far more creatively and without the need for payment.

They even create quite stylish memes (see below).

Above is a Diba meme from Weibo

The BBC report also omits the fact that it’s actually US intelligence groups such as the SR (military intelligence) and the CIA which flood social media columns with politically charged fake comments, often easy to spot.

There’s something creepy in the article too.

The “expert” quoted at length in the BBC report is Robert Potter, described as a “cybersecurity researcher”. The BBC omits a key fact that commentator Daniel Dumbrill yesterday highlighted. The top two names on Potter’s organization’s funding list are the State Department of the United States and the United States Department of Defence.

Yes. Exactly.

Think Mike Pompeo, CIA, Anthony Blinken.

The US State Department

So, to sum it up, honest, ordinary people who spend their own time and money offering useful additional views of life in China, from within China, are accused of receiving government cash by distant people who actually ARE receiving  government salaries working for a government news outlet and showcasing the views of people paid by the US government.

NEED FOR INTEGRITY

This is why we need UNBIASED journalists covering China and it doesn’t matter if you have qualifications or not — what matters is that you have enough moral integrity to tell the truth: which is that the community we call China is really not that different from the other major communities around the world.

One last thing: From a professional journalistic point of view, there’s another issue with the BBC article.

Very similar articles have already appeared in other British news outlets. Here is an example below from the Times of London.

Same victims, same news angle, similar headlines, similar allegations, similar quotes.

Copying? Or co-ordination? Journalists don’t normally regurgitate their rivals’ old stories in this way.

There’s something very wrong going on here.

This reporter’s father was one of the first investigative journalists in Asia. He had a saying: “Everything is about something else.”

[4]Switching China for the US is a huge mistake

Australia has put itself at a stark disadvantage by casting its lot with the US instead of the trading partner that has underwritten its growth over decadesUS WRITER AND FORMER military analyst Daniel Ellsberg recently revealed that the Pentagon Papers, most of which were released in 1971, also confirmed that the United States contemplated using nuclear weapons against the Chinese mainland in 1958, to “defend” Jinmen, also known as Kinmen, an island about 10 kilometers from the mainland city of Xiamen, on behalf of the Kuomintang in Taiwan.We need to recall that China had no nuclear weapons at that time－only the US and the Soviet Union did.Ellsberg also said the administration of former US president Lyndon B. Johnson had covertly engaged in a range of extremely destructive attacks against the North Vietnamese forces and their supporters during the Vietnam War.‘NUKING’ A DEVELOPING COUNTRYSo the US, at least from a planning point of view, saw nothing fundamentally immoral about launching a nuclear attack on a huge developing country that possessed no such arms.This was a little over 10 years after seeing the horrific nuclear devastation in Japan. Fortunately, the plan was not implemented.

Manly Beach, Sydney, Australia: picture by Simon Rae/ Unsplash

AUSTRALIA AS COURIER

Even more startling, from an Australian point of view, is the recent disclosure that Australia, was, in 1964, given an extraordinary US-courier task.

Gregory Clark, a former Australian diplomat, has just revealed that in that year, Australian foreign minister Paul Hasluck demanded that the Australian Embassy in Moscow (where Clark worked) arrange a meeting with the new Soviet leadership.

In a meeting with premier Alexei Kosygin at which Clark was present, Hasluck carried a message from Washington, requesting that the USSR join the US in Vietnam to stop the “bad communists” in Beijing and North Vietnam to expand southwards.

Kosygin’s response was blunt.  Moscow would do all it could to support the Vietnamese people in their struggle against US imperialism – and he wished the Chinese would do more to help.

After the commencement of China’s reform and opening-up policy in 1978, however, the US generally welcomed the rise of China.

‘a popular, genial understanding of China as a vast, poor, peasant-based country’

The US relationship with China has gone through a striking transformation over the past century.

Once, compassion was dominant. The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Pearl S. Buck wrote The Good Earth over 90 years ago while living in Nanjing. The book helped shape a popular, genial understanding of China as a vast, poor, peasant-based country with a remarkable history.

TRADE BOOMED

During the period when the US welcomed the rise of China, immense business opportunities were recognized and trade boomed, generating academic, intellectual and general interest in China.

Now that China’s economy is around 70 percent of the size of the US economy in raw US dollar GDP terms, the US has made clear its huge vested interest in seeing the rise of China strikingly reduced and contained.

Thus the US mood has gone from being sorry for China, then helpful to China, to being stridently hostile to China.

‘China does not purposefully threaten Australia in any serious way’

 

Examined rationally, the strategic position for Australia is clear. It has a huge vested interest in seeing the rise of China maintained and enhanced.

China is now Australia’s largest trading partner. Before the recent intense downturn in the Australia-China relationship, trade figures show that Australia’s annual trade surplus with China had topped A$50 billion (US$36.9 billion).

From 1991 until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Australia maintained the longest period of sustained economic growth ever seen within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. China, above all, has underwritten this outcome.

China does not (viewed outside of hawklike think tanks) purposefully threaten Australia in any serious way.

GUSTO AND NAIVETE

The US, on the other hand, does threaten Australia at a more menacing level: first, by encouraging intensified antipathy toward the trading partner who has done more to remake Australia in the last several decades than any other; and second, due to the serious hazard of being drawn into yet more US military adventures－possibly involving certain levels of forceful confrontation with China.

Australia’s relationship with China is very different from that of the US. The acute difficulty for Australia, however, is that Washington has been highly insistent that Australia join in the US-led Sino-containment project. Australia has taken up this damaging new brief with uncommon gusto and naivete.

Collaboration has been beneficial to both sides: Picture by Mimi Thian/ Unsplash

DEEP, LONG-TERM COST

Research by the Perth US-Asia Centre recently listed major income drops in trade with China, to Australia’s stark disadvantage, in areas including travel, education, coal, beef, wine, cotton and barley. In a number of cases, US exports to China have replaced those from Australia.

In 1964, Australia carried messages, like a tributary State, for the US.  Then the dark clouds lifted from Sino-US relations for several decades and Australia prospered, independently, like never before.

The dark clouds had lifted from Sino-US relations for several decades, and Australia prospered, independently, like never before. Now those angry clouds are back, and Australia is once again being told, by its best geopolitical friend, what it must do. It must stand up for US interests, which are called shared values, and never mind the deep, long-term cost to Australia’s national interest.

It is an extraordinary state of affairs that calls for deep reflection and review.

* * *

[5]OMG, those people are pro-China!

By Nury Vittachi 08 Jun 2021

Time to ditch the labels and choose diversity

MY DAUGHTER ONCE asked me if we were “pro-China”.“Sweetheart,” I replied. “We’re pro-everyone. We’re pro-China, pro-Hong Kong, pro-West, pro-East, pro-South and pro-space aliens, especially the latter.”Why would you be not pro any community or nationality? This is the age of diversity.My immediate family includes Americans, Chinese, Brits, and South Asians, and I have several friends whose bizarre behaviour strongly suggests off-planet origins—and the same surely goes for you too, dear reader.

This is the age of diversity; picture by Naassom Azevedo/ UnsplashAt this point, someone will always lean into this type of conversation and say: “Ah, but are you pro-Beijing?”To realize how ridiculous this is, look a Swede in the eye and ask: “Are you pro-Stockholm?” Ask a Honduran: “What do you think of Tegucigalpa?” Or grab a passing Bolivian and ask: “Are you in favor of La Paz?”People around the world don’t generally ask that question.

What the pro-Beijing question really means is: “Do you support the Western media’s demonization of China?”

Now THAT I can instantly answer. Actually, no, I don’t. Criticising others can be okay, if done sensitively and with positive intentions. Demonizing people is not.

Many Hong Kong people are stunned at how so much of the world’s media has ended up like US Republican lawyer Gordon C. Chang, following a Western-penned hyper-critical narrative of China, and blithely dismissing any criticism of his constant de-humanizing of Chinese people. “Demons just hate being demonized,” he explains.

(Chang authored the 2001 book “The Coming Collapse of China”, possibly the worst-timed publication in literary history, coming on the eve of China’s steepest rise into accelerated development and increased community pride.)

But Chang’s hostile angle permeates too much of the international coverage of Hong Kong and mainland China today.

I’ve lost count of the number of Hong Kong people who have looked at the ultra-hostile BBC coverage of Hong Kong and said to me: “What happened to the BBC?” (I usually reply: “Maybe Gordon C. Chang is now chief news editor” and they sadly nod, finding it totally believable.)

Journalists shape their stories to reinforce a narrative: picture by Jorge Maya/ UnsplashMaybe it’s not the journalists’ fault. Andrew Cline, a professor who studies this subject, once said: “Once a master narrative has been set, it is very difficult to get journalists to see that their narrative is simply one way, and not necessarily the correct or best way, of viewing people and events.”

Cline is right. We need to break free from that the narrow groupthink and let a little diversity into discussions.

People are thinking for themselves; picture by Jimmy Chan/ Pexels

• What if. . . China wasn’t a giant gulag at all, but a low-crime society which is thriving at astonishing rates?
• What if. . . Hong Kong’s security laws were demonstrably less draconian than those of the countries criticizing them?
• What if. . . the hundreds of millions of dollars that America spends to try to impose its system of governance on Asia is actually money that would be better spent on other things?
• What if. . . China was communist in name, but actually demonstrated a really interesting mixture of good bits of capitalism and socialism in practice?

I have discovered, to my delight, that the vast majority of ordinary people are completely open to such notions. But Western journalists less so. How can a tiny group of Hong Kong people battle global media behemoths?

Clearly we can’t. But I’m not sure we have to fight them. Journalists are not bad people. There are many good ones among us. I expect. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully. Surely!

And those of us who live in China can gently, perhaps, encourage them to see the other side of the story, by sharing stories of Chinese culture, Chinese business and just personal stories of Chinese people being human.

…

In directly related news, the Friday project has been running for a couple of weeks and response has been fantastic. More than a million people tuned into our conference, and the vast majority of people who responded to our articles have been positive. 

Only a small portion made a response which can be summed up in four words: “Run! Get the Labels!”

To people who throw the label “pro-China” at us as if it was an accusation, I’ll simply give the same answer I gave my daughter.

Yes, we are pro-China. We are pro-humans, sweetheart. And the people of China are humans too, whatever Gordon C. Chang says.

* * *

Conclusion

Just five stories out of Hong Kong. While you might not be getting any daily news reports about this regions except for the “evil communists of China”, the tone of the articles and the over all attitude of their views of America, the UK and Australia should tell you volumes. Please keep this in mind was the next six months advance and “play out”.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings

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