Opinion | The BBC's Bad Faith agenda on China cannot be ignored
By Tom Fowdy
"Industrial espionage: How China sneaks out America's technology secrets" the BBC's world service page leads with this morning. The article proceeds to set out the argument that China's rise in technological capabilities is attributed primarily to technology theft, citing as its primary source that well-known, good-faith and completely apolitical organization known as the FBI. Another article, from just three days ago, is titled: "US-China chip war: America is winning". The article quickly plays down China's prospects of advancing in terms of semiconductors, praising US embargo policies as successful and proclaiming Huawei as "dead" (ignoring recent developments by the company).
What is notable about these two pieces in particular is that they aren't news reporting at all, they are effectively editorials, opinions, designed to push a particular point of view. But even when one looks beyond that and sees the BBC's daily reporting about China, it is likewise universally negative, with strong opinion points often placed into articles in the form of passive comments. For example, in a recent article about covid death tolls, the piece comments "China has been widely accused of underreporting coronavirus deaths, despite evidence of hospitals and crematoriums being overrun."
Accused by who? And from where? We are not given context, and where is such evidence of hospitals and crematoriums being overrun? We are never shown. Likewise, another comment by a correspondent says: "As a result, the official death toll is being ridiculed by Chinese people"- who? No evidence is given, which is strange given in the previous paragraph that the journalist argues the Chinese people hated zero-covid and demanded freedom. Similarly, when Shanghai experienced a lockdown, the BBC reported passively that "people were starving to death"- it didn't offer any proof.
I have written about this many times, but it continues to trouble me deeply that the BBC proclaims itself as the most "trusted" news reporter in the world, and is seen as such by some, despite the fact that when it comes to the matter of Foreign Affairs, the BBC World Service is actively and with much historical documentation both past and present, serving a function as a propaganda vehicle. The BBC has always served the Foreign Policy Agenda of the British government, a process which consolidated itself following the decline of the British Empire and the events of the Cold War, with the UK aiming to exert itself over former colonies.
This is not the stuff of speculation or conspiracy theory; it is very much established in fact. As stated on the British government's website "BBCWS is a public corporation of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office". Likewise, if you look at the BBC world's description of itself on its own website: "In 2016 the UK Government awarded it a £291 million grant administered by UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), for a four-year program of modernization and creation of new language services. In 2021, the FCDO provided £94.4m to help the BBC World Service build on its work upholding global democracy through accurate, impartial, and independent news reporting".
This itself affirms the blatantly geopolitical and ideological character of BBC reporting. In the process of such, the BBC World Service is not accountable to the British public, and exists outside of Ofcom rules as it is targeted at an international audience. The BBC website readers are given in the UK is different from the one you receive outside of the UK. Likewise, the BBC's reporting on Chinese topics also differs in tone, pending on which department produces it. For example, if BBC Business produces an article on China, it usually just relays impartial facts about a given development without any "additions". But on the other hand, if BBC World produces an article on China, it is laden with the deliberately negative and subtle "bias" in the form of which indirect comments and suggestions it places in its text.
The BBC is subsequently waging a propaganda war against China at the behest of the British government, who have subscribed themselves to the US agenda. It is deliberately reporting everything as negatively and cynically as possible, and tends to follow and promote the given US agenda against the country, amplifying and ramping up any criticism it can possibly muster. Nothing of course US politicians ever say pertaining to China is ever given any scrutiny or doubt, but always relayed in good faith as so-called "concerns". The BBC's coverage of the war in Ukraine is of course also as equally biased and one-sided, perhaps worse, where it relays every single claim by Ukrainian representatives at face values, even if it acknowledges it "cannot verify them", but that is a different matter. More to the point is that the BBC's reporting on China simply cannot be trusted, and is not being conducted in good faith.
The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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