By Gabriel Crossley
BEIJING (Reuters) – The BBC came under fire by Chinese officials and social media on Friday in an escalating diplomatic dispute, a day after the British media regulator revoked the TV license of the Chinese state media agency CGTN.
Britain and China have been exchanging barbs for months over China’s crackdown on dissent in the former British colony of Hong Kong, concerns about the security of Huawei technology and the treatment of ethnic Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region.
On Thursday, Britain’s Ofcom withdrew its license from CGTN, the English-language sister channel of state broadcaster CCTV, after it concluded that China’s ruling Communist Party had ultimate editorial responsibility for the channel.
Minutes later, China’s Foreign Ministry released a statement accusing the British Broadcasting Corp of pushing “fake news” into its COVID-19 reporting, demanding an apology, saying the broadcaster had politicized the pandemic and “theories about it. re-politicized hiding by China ”.
The BBC said its coverage is fair and unbiased.
On Friday, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, condemned Ofcom’s statement as “politicizing the issue on a technicality” and warned that China reserves the right to provide a “necessary response.”
The British newspaper Telegraph reported separately on Thursday that Britain had expelled three Chinese spies in the past year who had journalistic visas there.
Chinese state media has been ramping up attacks on the British public broadcaster in recent weeks.
“I strongly suspect that the BBC has been closely urged by US and UK intelligence. It has become a bastion of the Western public opinion war against China,” said Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Communist Party. tabloid backed the Global Times, said on Twitter.
The Foreign Ministry’s criticism of the BBC was among the top trends on the Chinese social media platform Weibo on Friday.
“The BBC will not become a Bad-mouthing Broadcasting Corporation,” ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Twitter.
BBC broadcasts, such as that of most major Western news outlets, are blocked in China.
Some people called for the BBC’s exclusion in response to the withdrawal of CGTN’s license.
“The BBC has long been based in Beijing, but has always harbored ideological biases and broadcast fake news from its platform, deliberately vilifying China. After so many years, it is a thing of the past when we took action,” said a Weibo user.
The BBC’s coverage of Xinjiang came under severe criticism after it reported Wednesday that women in internment camps for ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslims in the region were raped and tortured.
China’s Foreign Ministry said the report had no factual basis. The Global Times said in an editorial Friday that the BBC “had seriously violated journalistic ethics.”
(Reported by Gabriel Crossley; edited by Tony Munroe, Robert Birsel and Nick Macfie)