By Gabriel Crossley
BEIJING (Reuters) – The BBC came under fire from Chinese officials and social media on Friday in a growing diplomatic dispute, a day after Britain’s British regulator revoked the TV license of Chinese state media CGTN.
For months, Britain and China have been at loggerheads over China’s controversy over differences in the former British colony of Hong Kong, concerns over the security of Huawei technology and the treatment of ethnic Uighur Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China.
The British British comcom on Thursday revoked the license of CGTN, the English-speaking sister channel of state broadcaster CCTV, after concluding that China’s ruling Communist Party has the ultimate editorial responsibility for the channel.
Minutes later, the Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a statement accusing the British Broadcasting Corps of citing “false news” in its COVID-19 report, apologizing and saying that the broadcaster was the pandemic politicized and repeated “the theories about the cover-up by China”.
The BBC said its reporting was fair and unbiased.
Wang Wenbin, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, on Friday pronounced Ofcom’s ruling as “politicians of the issue on a technical point” and warned that China reserves the right to provide an “essential response”.
The British Telegraph newspaper reported separately on Thursday that Britain had expelled three Chinese spies who were there on the journalistic visas in the past year.
The state media in China have intensified attacks on the British public broadcaster in recent weeks.
“I strongly suspect that the BBC was carefully instigated by the US and UK intelligence agencies. It has become a bastion of the Western public opinion war against China,” said Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Communist Party-backed tabloid. the Global Times, said on Twitter.
The BBC’s criticism of the Foreign Office on Friday was one of the top trends on the Weibo social media platform in China.
“BBC will not become bad oral broadcasting corporations,” ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Twitter.
BBC broadcasts, such as those of most Western news agencies, are blocked in China.
Some people have asked that the BBC be suspended in response to CGTN’s license.
“The BBC has been stationed in Beijing for a long time, but has always had ideological prejudices and deliberately broadcast false news from its platform and deliberately slandered China. After so many years, it was over that we took action,” said one Weibo user. .
The BBC’s coverage of Xinjiang has come under heavy criticism after it reported on Wednesday that women in internment camps for ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims in the region had been subjected to rape and torture.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry said the report had no factual basis. The Global Times said in an editorial on Friday that the BBC had ‘seriously violated journalistic ethics’.
(Reporting by Gabriel Crossley; Edited by Tony Munroe, Robert Birsel and Nick Macfie)