The U.S. State Department says the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s practice of retweeting false images of Australian soldiers’ behavior in Afghanistan and spreading disinformation marks a new low for the Communist Party of China (CPC).
State Department Deputy Spokesman Cale Brown sent out a series of three tweets late Tuesday night (December 1, 2020) calling the latest attack on Australia another example of the Chinese Communist Party’s unfettered dissemination of disinformation and its pursuit of coercive diplomacy. He said that the Chinese Communist Party was spreading the redacted images on Twitter while preventing the Chinese public from reading the tweets.
Brown concluded his tweet by saying, “The CCP is spreading disinformation while covering up its horrific human rights abuses, including the detention of over a million Muslims in Xinjiang. The CCP is trying to change the subject to avoid responsibility. We cannot let them succeed.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian posted an altered image last Sunday (Nov. 29, 2020) on Twitter, which is banned in China, showing an Australian soldier holding a bloodied knife to the throat of an Afghan child.
A day later, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison demanded an apology. He called Zhao Lijian’s tweet “genuinely offensive, highly offensive and extremely shameless.
Morrison said, “The Chinese government should be ashamed of this post. It diminishes their standing in the eyes of the world.”
In addition to the U.S., the governments of New Zealand and France have previously expressed public displeasure at the Chinese authorities’ use of altered images to denigrate Australia. New Zealand Prime Minister John Aden said Tuesday that his government has taken the matter up with Chinese authorities directly. The French foreign ministry also issued a statement calling the actions of Chinese foreign ministry officials offensive and insulting.
However, the Chinese Foreign Ministry refused to apologize for Zhao Lijian’s comments and tweets, saying that his tweets were objective comments based on facts and that the pictures he quoted were satirical cartoons created by Chinese folk artists based on facts. Zhao Lijian, who is considered China’s “war wolf” diplomatic figure, not only did not delete the widely controversial tweet, but instead topped it.
Earlier, an independent inquiry into the war crimes of the Australian Special Forces in Afghanistan found that 39 detainees and civilians had been killed. The Australian government has indicated that 19 military personnel are at risk of criminal prosecution.
Prime Minister Morrison said Australia has conducted a transparent investigation into the alleged war crimes as a “free and democratic nation” should do.
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