The American report, written by a branch of the State Department, concludes that China is conducting “information manipulation operations abroad.” Beijing denies this and in turn blames Washington.
China has accused the United States of being an “empire of lies” after the release of a report described by American diplomacy as “biased” that claimed Beijing was spreading disinformation around the world.
Chinese “digital authoritarianism”
This report from the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a US State Department service that purports to combat disinformation, accuses Beijing of spending billions of dollars each year on “information manipulation operations abroad.”
According to the document published on Thursday, China specifically promotes “digital authoritarianism” by funding propaganda, removing critical information or even controlling Chinese-language media.
GEC coordinator James Rubin said that if nothing was done, there would be a “slow and steady destruction of democratic values”.
A report that Beijing says “contradicts the facts and is biased.”
In a statement released Saturday evening, China’s Foreign Ministry condemned a report that “contradicts the facts and is biased” and “in itself constitutes disinformation.”
“The United States is itself the pioneer of information warfare directed against public opinion,” he charged.
The Chinese ministry points to the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird during the Cold War, designed to influence American and foreign media, or former American Secretary of State Colin Powell’s intervention before the UN Security Council in 2003 over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction to denounce.
“Layers of Lies Woven by the United States”
“Facts have proven time and time again that the United States fully deserves its title as an empire of lies,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.
“More and more people are seeing through the layers of lies that the United States has spun to maintain its own misdeeds and its inglorious way of maintaining its hegemony by denigrating others,” he emphasizes.
Beijing also accuses Washington of spreading “the lie of the century” about Chinese policy in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China.
Dealing with Uyghurs in the crosshairs
The United States has accused China of committing “genocide” in this vast region, which has long been plagued by bloody attacks attributed to Islamists and separatists – mainly from the Muslim Uyghur ethnic group.
For several years, Xinjiang has been the subject of draconian security policies in the name of combating terrorism.
More than a million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities are or have been detained, according to Western studies cited by human rights organizations. Beijing strongly denies these allegations.