With Chinese Media Under Control, Beijing Sets Sights on Foreign News
By Tommy Walker
February 25, 2021
HONG KONG – The future of foreign reporting in China is being brought into question as the Chinese government aims to consolidate its control on media.
Beijing recently pulled the plug on Britain’s BBC World News amid China’s strained diplomatic ties with several nations in the West.
China’s move came after the BBC published a series of accounts by women from the Uighur ethnic minority, who spoke of rape, abuse and torture in the so-called re-education camps in China’s Xinjiang region. Beijing rebutted the reporting as false. Britain had also revoked the license of China’s state-owned CGTN television network.
In a statement reported by the state-affiliated Xinhua News Agency, China’s broadcaster regulator, the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA), said that the BBC violated regulations in its China-related reports and that its broadcast application would not be renewed.
Hu Xijin, editor of the Chinese state-affiliated media the Global Times, tweeted that the reports were “all false” and that the BBC “has become a bastion of the Western public opinion war against China.”
