"Think tank" claims China runs campaign to discredit BBC? ASPI again

Tourists and local residents dance in the old town of Kashgar, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, July 11, 2018. (Photo/Xinhua)

A think tank has claimed that China is running a campaign to discredit BBC. But wait, which think tank? The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) –an institute infamous for churning out anti-China propaganda in Australia.

On March 2, John Sudworth, a BBC producer, revealed the “evidence” of the Chinese government's "forced labor" and "forced migration" against people in Xinjiang. The so-called evidence turned out to be deliberately edited footage that Chinese state broadcaster China Central Television had published a few years ago.

The BBC report had pulled up a video broadcast by CCTV in 2017 on how local officials in Pishan county of Hotan Prefecture in southern Xinjiang persuaded villagers to work in East China's Anhui Province. And by citing a professor, the BBC report interpreted the video as evidence of China's "system of coercion" to transfer ethnic minorities into factories far from their homes.

After the BBC was caught in the lie, the Guardian, one of the BBC's cronies, tried to save the BBC's face by publishing a nonsensical article that claimed the Chinese government was running a campaign to discredit the broadcaster. Interestingly, all the loud accusations came from the self-proclaimed “independent” think tank - the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

ASPI is an infamous institution that has consistently fabricated reports on China, and is inundated with a strong ideological bias. ASPI's hostility toward China can be explained by its sources of funding, much of which reportedly comes from defence contractors and foreign governments.

It was revealed that when the think tank was founded in 2001, it was funded by the Australian government through the Department of Defence.

It "was taking nearly 440,000 Australian dollars (about 311,000 U.S. dollars) from the U.S. State Department to track Chinese research collaborations with Australian universities," according to an article by Myriam Robin carried by the Australian Financial Review (AFR), citing Kim Carr of the Labor Party of Australia.

These tremendous benefits drove ASPI to forge a barrage of rumors against China. On numerous occasions, it has zealously served as a raucous mouthpiece for anti-China cliques in Australia and elsewhere in the West, constantly providing ammunition for the scare and smear campaign launched from Washington.

An article on iTWire, an Australian IT and telecommunications news website, wrote, "ASPI runs a hawkish line on China in a bid to hype up the fear index and make it possible for its donors to sell more weapons to countries in the Asia-Pacific region."

With studies full of ideology-driven and groundless lies, the academic credibility of ASPI has been severely damaged. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said that with such strong ideological bias, the institute is spearheading anti-China forces, and its academic credibility has been seriously questioned.

Bob Carr, former premier of New South Wales, said that ASPI pumps out a "one-sided, pro-American view of the world."

It is ironic that the Guardian, a news agency that prides itself on independent journalism, would put so much value on such a spurious study as ironclad evidence to shake off the bad reputation of its mendacious peer, the BBC. The truth is that resorting to such a one-sided study only reduces the Guardian’s credibility.