When journalists receive death threats and are verbally and physically attacked while working in a flooded area, one might expect a government to be at least concerned about it.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry did the opposite on Thursday.

It agreed with the attackers.

"There is no hate for no reason," said spokesman Zhao Lijian, blaming BBC, Deutsche Welle and Los Angeles Times staff for receiving death threats.

“Do you know how many Chinese internet users call the BBC?

Fake News Broadcasting Company, "the spokesman continued.

Friederike Böge

Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.

  • Follow I follow

The association of foreign correspondents in China, which had expressed "alarm" about the attacks, accused the spokesman of "twisting facts and discrediting the media environment in China".

The organization, to which the newspaper's two China correspondents also belong, was "created by a handful of journalists with prejudices against China".

China has interviews blocked

Zhao's rant has a history.

After the heavy rain in Henan province, which claimed more than 70 lives, the BBC journalist Robin Brant reported on the death of 14 passengers in a subway in the provincial capital Zhengzhou.

The report was distributed with fake Chinese subtitles that "people were thrown on the platform and left to die."

The local branch of the Communist Party Youth League then called for a campaign against the reporter. Whoever sees him in Henan should film him and share his location. The youth league in Henan is happy to provide its media channels with 1.6 million followers.

The call was later canceled, but had an effect. The Deutsche Welle journalist Mathias Bölinger saw himself surrounded and insulted by an angry crowd who thought he was the BBC reporter. A video of it circulated millions of times on the Internet, which caused Hetzer to act, who also threatened the Chinese employees of the media involved and published their personal data. The mood was further fueled by party media under the hashtag “Zhengzhou's citizens demand truthful reports from foreign media”, although it is unclear whether the crowd who attacked Bölinger were really ordinary citizens.

In a propaganda video, the party newspaper China Daily described Deutsche Welle as “an international propaganda agency financed by the German government”. Deutsche Welle accused the China Daily of endangering foreign journalists. In a letter to the newspaper's editor-in-chief, which was also sent to the Foreign Office in Berlin, company spokesman Christoph Jumpelt wrote on Thursday: “I can only see this video as your attempt to invite Chinese citizens to continue harassing foreign journalists. Any negative consequence will be your responsibility. "

In addition to agitation, there were other voices on the Chinese Internet.

For example, "If you refuse to give your voice to people, no matter how loud you shout, no one will hear you." There are still people in Henan who use foreign media to help the government deal with the flood criticize because the Chinese media are subject to massive censorship.

To prevent such interviews, the district authorities sent employees to local stores "to warn salespeople not to give interviews to foreign media".

An instruction to this effect was made public by the China Digital Times website.

A media report was deleted

The authorities' displeasure is also directed against Chinese reporters. An employee of Caixin magazine has since been taken into custody by the police for photographing hundreds of bouquets of flowers that mourners left in front of a subway station to commemorate the victims.

Such expressions of mourning are seen by the government as potentially destabilizing, which is why the authorities initially hid the flowers behind a cordon that was removed by angry citizens. A young man who was filming the flowers with a drone was beaten up by plainclothes police. A Chinese media report about the dramatic conditions in the flooded village of Wangzongdian was deleted from the Internet. As well as voices criticizing the fact that village cadres had presented false facts to the provincial party leader during a visit.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic in Wuhan, critics of this kind have been increasingly vilified by nationalists as henchmen of the West and are told that their remarks are being picked up by Western media. At the same time, the Chinese government has been running a defamation campaign against Western media for months. An example is set at the BBC.