The Telegraph
China threatens retaliation after British regulator cancels state TV license
China has accused the UK of ‘political repression, double standards and hypocrisy’ after regulator Ofcom banned Chinese state broadcaster CGTN from British airwaves. The Foreign Ministry in Beijing accused Ofcom of taking a decision ‘on the basis of ideological prejudice and political reasons’, and ‘encouraged the UK to immediately halt its political ways and recent mistakes’. China “reserves the right to take action in response,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin without specifying any measures. Ofcom on Thursday revoked CGTN’s license to broadcast in the UK after finding that it was “ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party”, and violated rules requiring organizations to exercise editorial oversight and not. controlled by political bodies. It also appears that Beijing is mocking Ofcom’s finding. “China is a socialist country led by the Communist Party, and the British side has always clearly known the characteristics of the Chinese media from the first day CTN arrived and started broadcasting in the UK 18 years ago,” he said. Wang said. The ruling can be challenged in British courts, although CGTN has not said whether it intends to do so. While CGTN w is no longer allowed to broadcast programs in the UK, the organization is able to continue its operations, also from London, where it opened a major global broadcast in 2019. and anti-China forces ”- is also still able to publish content on its own website and on social media platforms. Western politicians, also in the UK, have increasingly expressed concerns about risks of disinformation and espionage as a result of the expansion of Chinese state media overseas. Three Chinese people understood that they were intelligence officers for the Chinese Ministry of State Security, which arrived in the UK under the false pretense of working for state media over the past year, the Telegraph revealed. However, the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Friday denied knowledge of it. “On the one hand, they function on normal journalists who collect news; on the other hand, they write so-called internal reports for the Party and the government, ”said Willy Wo-lap Lam, an expert on Chinese politics and government and deputy professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. China has invested billions of dollars in building its state-owned media presence abroad, with state-owned outlets including CGTN, Xinhua and China Daily, which have established numerous jobs abroad. Efforts picked up after leader Xi Jinping, who took power in 2012, began encouraging state media “to tell China’s stories well.” The expansion abroad is “considered by Party leaders to be essential to address what they see as a fundamental injustice in global public opinion,” Bandurski said. “But we can not forget that it is based on repressive measures at home and even on active pursuit of critics abroad,” he said. ‘It’s not a storyteller, and not China joining the rest of the world around the campfire to increase the variety of voices; it is one voice – that of the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese state media, government officials and embassies have also stepped up on Western social media, trying to present China’s coverage of a range of global issues, from human rights violations in Xinjiang to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Some platforms, such as Twitter, have begun to label accounts as ‘China State Media’ or ‘China Government Account’. In January, Twitter closed the account for China’s US embassy for a tweet defending Beijing’s policy toward Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang. Such material published by Chinese state media is usually aimed at audiences outside China, as platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are banned within the country by government censors, who strictly control news and information.