Minerva

This is just pure unadulterated propaganda by the BBC. And it takes literally 2 seconds to debunk: go on Xiaohongshu (or any other Chinese social networks), type a keyword related to the mudslide (I typed "泥石流", "mudslide") and you'll see thousands of posts with footage about it - including from state media (the first post in my screenshot is from People's Daily)🤷 Even crazier - which shows the extent to which the BBC thinks its audience are complete idiots - their lead example of footage that supposedly isn't being shown in China is… footage that comes from China! This is how they open their article: "The dramatic footage was almost impossible to miss. A torrent of water tearing through Gyirong Port, one of the main border crossings between Nepal and Tibet, sweeping away all in its path as hundreds of people fled for their lives. The scenes, captured by CCTV cameras, quickly spread on social media and onto screens around the world. Except here, in China." We've all seen this footage, which is Chinese CCTV footage, released first in China, and extremely widely spread on Chinese social media (it's in the 3rd post on my Xiaohongshu screenshot below 👇). It's literally insane: they think you're stupid enough not to notice that they're using Chinese footage as their lead example to claim China isn't showing footage 🤦 This also all points to a deeper issue: China does have a completely different and largely insulated media ecosystem with little overlap with Western media, and extremely little reach in the West. Which means it's trivially easy for outlets like the BBC to make false claims about what's happening in China that: a) their readers will never check: it's actually difficult to for foreigners to access Chinese social networks, if only for the language barrier. b) won't be challenged by the other side: Chinese media has so little reach in the West that there's essentially no one to push back. It's like lying about someone who isn't in the room. That's the irony when you read about "Chinese propaganda": the bigger issue is that it actually doesn't really exist - at least not in a material way - and therefore falsehoods about China can be written with an impunity that they could never get away with if they were writing about, say, France or Germany. As I keep repeating, this is actually mostly bad for the West because - given the importance of China in the world today - this is a country you simply cannot afford to misunderstand. Bad journalism about China is a strategic liability. So, in a somewhat ironic way, if there were one genuine "China threat" worth worrying about, it's this: that China is not great at communicating about itself with the outside world and Western publics are left with garbage BBC articles to understand it.

this is fucking insane