Taking away democracy

Rather like the CCP in Hong Kong, the BBC has taken away democracy. The BBC News website article Xi Jinping defends China's rule of Hong Kong , written by By Tessa Wong, BBC Asia Digital Reporter, previously said:

But Hong Kong has seen huge pro-democracy protests over the years and many, including Western countries, have criticised Beijing's growing interference in the city.

But now it says:

But over the years Hong Kong has seen huge protests and many, including Western countries, have criticised Beijing's growing interference in the city.

Why have they toned it down? 

Clarifying and Correcting, featuring friends of China and Lewis Goodall

 

Qing dynasty art, attributed to Ma Quan [no relation to Ma Barker]

Regular readers will know that we value those vanishingly rare 'BBC corrections and clarifications'.

They are like the most endangered species of butterfly - almost never seen and extremely hard to capture.

The latest pair are particularly intriguing. 

The first is unusually fulsome and concerns a China expert who writes nice things about communist China's influence in the world - winning plaudits from pro-CCP types in the process. 

She complained that the BBC edited her Today interview and removed a key bit of what she wanted to say:

Today

BBC Radio 4, 1 December 2021

In an item about Chinese ‘debt trap’ diplomacy we interviewed Professor Deborah Brautigan, who explained that this ‘is the idea that China is deliberately luring countries into borrowing more money than they can afford with the goal of using that debt for strategic leverage, to seize assets of some kind or otherwise push the country to do China’s bidding.’ She went on to give an example of the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota, saying it was used by the Trump administration to promote this theory.

However Professor Brautigan’s further point, that these ideas have little basis in fact, was edited out of the broadcast interview. In fact Professor Brautigan’s research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country, much less the port of Hambantota.

We apologise for the error.

7/2/2022

Googling around, it turns out that the BBC also wrote directly to the China-defending professor and blamed an editing error by an inexperienced producer.

Guess what though? The BBC's 'correction and clarification' misspelt her name. She's Professor Brautigam, not Professor Brautigan. 

Standards really are slipping at the BBC.

Talking of which, the other new 'correction and clarification' concerned yet another botched Newsnight report, and what looks like a particularly slipshod example:

Newsnight

BBC Two, 13 July 2021

A graphic attributed the following statement to the Government Race and Disparities Report 2021:

Not a single police force in England and Wales registered an arrest rate of less than 20 for every 1000 black people.

By contrast not a single police force in England and Wales registered an arrest rate of more than 20 for every 1000 white people

We should have made it clear that this conclusion had been carried by The Independent newspaper the previous year in a wider survey of social and economic data on disparities between different ethnicities in the UK and reflected statistics from a different Government website which was now out of date.

The most recent figures show there are four police forces with an arrest rate of below 20 for every 1000 black people.
4/2/2022

As I've moaned before, it's hard to track the guilty BBC party after these BBC statements about poor BBC reporting, as the BBC keeps its mouth shut and rarely names names, most likely in order to spare their people's blushes. So it often takes a lot of patient digging to track down the culprit and the context. 

'Advanced searching' on Twitter reveals however that it was my favourite Newsnight reporter, shiny-faced Lewis Goodall, who bungled it here.

Pleasingly, a retired police officer called him out on it for 'pedalling dodgy statistics' at the time - and for BBC-style race-baiting too:

As so often, it took over six months for the BBC to post that 'correction/clarification' on a page hardly anyone other than me reads. 

I think Lewis should correct it publicly on Newsnight and explain what he did wrong.

[Chances of that happening = Zero].

China v the BBC

It's been a dramatic week for the BBC as far as China goes. First, the BBC was banned in mainland China then, later, in Hong Kong.

The BBC issued two press releases on the matter:

The communist dictatorship accused the BBC of a 'slew of falsified reporting' on issues including Xinjiang and China's handling of coronavirus and said that 'fake news' is not tolerated in China.

BBC staff have taken to Twitter to back the BBC, including Nick Robinson:

My Mum used to hide in a cupboard in Shanghai in the 40’s to listen to the radio with her parents - refugees from the Nazis. They wanted the news from London not self serving propaganda. It was banned then. It’s banned now. The BBC will carry on giving the news to the world.

Limited speculation

  

The BBC was reporting yesterday that seven people have been killed in a knife attack in Kaiyuan in China's north-eastern Liaoning province. The BBC report says that "the motive remains unclear" and adds:

Violent crime is relatively rare in China, but the country has seen unrelated knife attacks in recent years. They have usually been carried out by people living with mental illness, or seeking revenge against officials or individuals known to them.

Hmm, in their hasty speculation there have they deliberately 'forgotten' the  2014 Kunming terrorist attack already? Called "China's 9/11", that was a coordinated knife rampage carried out at a train station by a group of Muslim Uighur separatists and resulted in 31 innocent deaths and 143 being injured.  

Of course, it probably doesn't have anything to do with that, but if a news organisation is going to speculate (as the BBC did here), why omit it? It's not as if China's relationship with Xinjiang isn't in the news at the moment. Since that atrocity, China has since carried out horrific repression against the Uighurs on a scale not seen in the country for decades. 

A curious historical fact, incidentally: remote Kaiyuan was the Manchurian birthplace of Sheng Shicai, the pro-Soviet warlord who ruled Xinjiang with a Stalin-like grip from 1933 to 1944. With Soviet help, he 'purged' - i.e. murdered - up to 100,000 people, mainly Uighurs, following an Islamic uprising. The odd thing is that Sheng fled to Taiwan with the Kuomintang in 1949 after the communist takeover and  lived there in comfortable retirement until 1970. Killing Mao's brother during the Second World War after the Soviets turned on him probably helped make his mind up.

Charles Moore v the BBC (Part 182)

 

Charles Moore is probably off John Simpson's Christmas card list. 

His latest Spectator column has the online headline The BBC has given up properly reporting on China. In it Mr Moore castigates the Corporation for having failed to replace Carrie Gracie as BBC China editor, for only having one correspondent there, and for preferring to safely report on Trump rather than report on China. 

The BBC is not happy. 

Here's the BBCs Robin Brant (intriguingly copying in Andrew Neil too): 

This Spectator piece is inaccurate, wrong and a misrepresentation. BBC News has THREE correspondents in China, not one. I am one of them, my brilliant and committed colleagues  John Sudworth and  Stephen McDonell  are the others. Fraser Nelson, Andrew Neil, please correct. 

And here's the aforementioned John Simpson (not copying in Andrew Neil): 

Charles Moore claims in the Spectator that the BBC has timidly 'given up anything like full reporting of China'.  Absolute rubbish. We have 3 full-time correspondents there, & the BBC has led the way in reporting the treatment of the Uighurs. Fraser Nelson: an apology, please.

The Spectator has added an update in response: 

Update: The BBC has been in touch to say that it has a grand total of three reporters in this country of 1.3 billion. But still, more than two years after Gracie’s departure, no China Editor. 

It would be interesting to know exactly how many reporters the BBC has in the US at the moment. 

*******

Update: John Simpson isn't giving up:

The Spectator has now ‘updated’ Charles Moore’s piece on the BBC in China.  Not enough, but it’s a bit less of an insult now to the team who revealed to the world what was being done to the Uighurs.  Let’s hope the Speccie checks its facts next time it attacks the BBC.

******* 

Much later update: John's still harping on about it, but is (charmingly) softening:

I confess I've got a soft spot for Charles Moore.  In 1989 I returned from Kabul with a strong story.  The Independent & the Guardian wouldn't run it: an Indie exec explained to me that in his experience TV people couldn't write. Charles printed it in the Speccie & was charming.

Now, that's an interesting anecdote it its own right. 

(How typical that he went to to Independent and the Guardian first! Very John Simpson!). 

Wonder what the story was and why left-leaning newspapers were reluctant to run it? I'm doubting even the internet will solve that mystery from 1989, but you never know....

Yet another update: And within seconds of |Googling, the answer popped straight up as the main answer to a search for 'john simpson 1989 spectator'. 

It's an impeccably BBC piece, even down to calling the strongest US critics of the Soviet Union's actions in Afghanistan "far-right".

So what went wrong for John Simpson with the left-leaning papers back in 1989? 

Well, he half-criticised a liberal US media icon Dan Rather, and even that was evidently too much for the faint-hearted Independent and the Guardian, even back then.

That Charles Moore published JS's article - even though it's what we might now call a 'left-liberal piece' to the letter, and went after Mr Rather's (right-wing) critics with no sympathy whatsoever for either them or their views - truly is a testimony to Charles Moore's and the Spectator's enduring willingness to grant a platform to people who aren't the kind of people Spectator readers usually agree with, or probably even want to hear from. 

And I'll keep on subscribing to it with added enthusiasm as a result.

Meanwhile

The FT's global China editor James Kynge is certainly right to call it "extraordinary" that the UK is "broadening its offer of visa rights to 3m people from Hong Kong, up from 300,000 previously". 

I'm also guessing he's right that Beijing is "likely to be incensed". 

This is a huge story, with so many potential ramifications.

And Harry Coles of the Mail on Sunday is surely also right to say that it "seems bizarre this is being all but ignored by so many broadcast outlets".

(Not that I've been following it particularly closely either, it must be admitted.)

That commitment from the UK Government to allow in so many people - if events demand - surely necessitates serious and urgent discussion. 

And public consent.

To bring in so many people could be excessively costly - especially as we're beginning to come out of lockdown, and appear to be about to suffer the unprecedentedly severe economic aftermath of lockdown. What would it mean for housing, public services, etc? 

And we are already - never mind what the BBC's Mark Easton says - a crowded country. 

But I can also see huge benefits from having lots of pro-British, democracy-loving Hong Kongers living alongside us - as well as the moral and emotional rewards of us doing a very good thing and rescuing the people of our former colony - to which we have such strong ties - from totalitarian Chinese rule. 

So what is to be done? 

Personally, I'd welcome them with open arms, but I might not be in the majority over that.

Again, public consent is the key thing here. Or ought to be. 

Back to 'core blog' matters: Is Harry Cole being fair about the UK's broadcast outlets? 

Looking just at the pro-immigration BBC, as we tend to do (given the blog's title), and using TV Eyes to catch up...

I see that BBC One's News at Ten on Thursday night just about covered it. It was mentioned in the last five minutes of their 35-minute long bulletin. The BBC's John Sudworth described what was going on in Hong Kong and Dominic Raab was shown stating the UK Government's commitment. No eyebrows - metaphorical or literal - were raised about the numbers of potential immigrants. (Very BBC! It takes me straight back to their biased behaviour in advance of the waves of EU migrants in the mid 2000s and the influx of Romanian and Bulgarian migrants in the mid 2010, both of which the BBC got badly wrong). The only hint of editorialising came when John Sudworth called the UK Government's decision a "surprise" announcement. From the tone of how he put that (impossible to transcribe) I gathered that he considered it a pleasant surprise. 

And, to give them their dues, Thursday night's Emily Maitlis-free Newsnight found time to sort-of cover the story. The estimable Mark Urban...(what on earth does he really make of all the recent, hot-headed, activist-style Newsnight stunts? Might he be a future whistle-blower?)...provided a clear overview of the situation in Hong Kong. The UK's offer was, however, mentioned almost in passing and no eyebrows - metaphorical or otherwise - were raised about it. Yesterday's Newsnight didn't touch the story.

And yesterday's BBC Breakfast and all of the main BBC One news bulletins also ignored it completely. 

So...

Massive events happening in a faraway territory about which we know something and the BBC isn't making a great deal of it then. Why? 

The UK Government commits us to potentially letting in up to 3 million people from Hong Kong, if needs demand, and the BBC doesn't bat an eyelid. Why? 

Chinese whispers

Some people - pacifists I guess - simply detest the military. When the daughter of some (former) friends learned that her husband-to-be had decided to join the army, she immediately broke off the engagement. Her parents recounted this sorry tale with pride, assuming we’d agree that this was the right, noble and only thing to do. Equally alarming was their assumption that the horror of being associated with the armed services was mutual. 

Ban the bomb!

Just as Bruce Kent and the CND movement still have their followers (perhaps not quite as out of touch as those poor chaps) others admire wise and wonderful military folk like Col Richard Kemp.  

I had toyed with the idea of writing about the BBC’s relationship with China - did you realise there was one?  - however, the subject seemed too complex and too much of a challenge. So now I can simply recommend the piece by Col Kemp, written for the Gatestone Institute. 

Colonel Richard Kemp CBE 

Do read it all, but the following extract should give you the flavour.  

“Chinese investment penetrates every corner of the United Kingdom, giving unparalleled influence here as in so many countries. Plans to allow Chinese investment and technology into our nuclear power programme and 5G network will build vulnerability into our critical national infrastructure of an order not seen in any other Western nation. Even the BBC, which receives funding from China, has produced and promoted a propaganda video supporting Huawei, to the alarm of some of its own journalists. All this despite MI5's repeated warnings that Chinese intelligence continues to work against British interests at home and abroad.”

A Jon Sopel question/opinion I can agree with

Jez attending tyrannical Xi's bash

A main story on the BBC News website tonight is:

My first thought on reading this was to reflect that a man who says we must talk to the likes of (his "friends") Hamas and Hezbollah and Sinn Fein/IRA for the sake of peace but who then refuses to attend a state dinner for the President of the United States is clearly a far-Left extremist with an extremely skewed moral compass. And I also see that my Twitter feed is alive today with praise for a tweet from a star BBC reporter making a related point:

Now, yes, Jon Sopel missed a question mark off the end of his tweet, but his question remains a very good one. 

One BBC critics I follow, Adrian Hilton, tweeted "This is the question which every journalist should put to prospective prime minister Jeremy Corbyn in every interview he gives between now and 5th June."

So, yes, I agree with Big BBC Jon here.

(BBC) wishful thinking

I was reading a review of a new book about China in The Times - 'Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping' by Le Monde's François Bougon - and stopped at the point where the reviewer said that M. Bougon "has discreet fun with those Anglo-Saxon commentators, prominent among them the BBC’s John Simpson, who saw in the new leader a “Chinese Gorbachev". Fancy a Le Monde economics correspondent singling out the BBC's World Affairs Editor to be the object of "discreet fun"!

Anyhow, here's the relevant passage (pp 35-36) from 'Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping'. It beautifully demonstrates the power of (BBC) wishful thinking in action: 

...the intellectuals were not the only ones who mistook their reformist dreams for reality. The journalists were also too quick to dub Xi the 'Chinese Gorbachev'. A veteran BBC journalist, John Simpson, admitted to having felt déjà vu in Beijing on Xi's appointment as Party leader in 2012. During the eighteenth Party Congress in November of that year, which marked the start of the Xi era, Simpson was reminded of Moscow in 1988, when he had been in the USSR to cover an important Soviet Communist Party meeting. Everything in 2012 Beijing reminded him of the moment when Gorbachev made the decisions that would lead to the end of the Soviet regime. And this sufficed to persuade Simpson that Xi Jinping was on the cusp of leading China into a 'radical change' towards democratisation. The liberals had not managed to implement such change in the 1980s, discarded and forgotten after the bloody repression of the Tiananmen democratic movement in 1989. Was it now to be achieved by this young leader, less heavy-handed in style than his predecessors? "Can Xi reform the system, without - like Gorbachev - destroying it?" Simpson wrote in The Guardian a few months later. "He has advantages that Gorbachev lacked, so it's not absolutely impossible. But I suspect things have gone too far for traditional Marxism-Leninism to survive". Also at this time, the fall of neo-Maoist and anti-liberal hardliner Bo Xilai, following accusations of corruption, seemed to attest to the Party's will to reform. 

Since then, however, Xi has defied expectations. Some expected a Chinese Gorbachev, and got a Chinese Putin instead.

Pedant's Corner

Having a blog affords you the chance to share with the world not only your devastating critiques of BBC bias but also your pedantic tendencies. 

Having spent over a year now very slowly and carefully reading John Keay's excellent if densely-detailed China: A History I do think that I now know more than I probably ought to about Chinese geography. I can actually tell my Shaanxi from my Shanxi. 

So when Kate Silverton told us about a terrible landslide in China on tonight's BBC One news bulletin my nit-picking ears instantly pricked up. 

The silver-tongued one said, "There's been a massive landslide in the far-west of the country...(in)...a village in Sichuan province". 

Alas, Sichuan is all too prone to devastating landslides. This one occurred in Xinmo village in Maoxian county, Sichuan. 

Sichuan, however, is not in the far-west of China. This, courtesy of Google Maps, is where the latest landslide took place:

The BBC-related point is that the BBC prides itself on being the gold standard of world journalism. It's surely not just being pedantic to point out that it sometimes gets its facts wrong. As here.