China’s fake-pic use troubles PM

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has raised the Government’s concern over the sharing by a top Chinese official of a doctored image of an Australian soldier holding a knife to a child’s throat.

Although Ardern stopped short of what could be considered a strong rebuke for the move, she said it was a concerning development.

“New Zealand has registered directly with Chinese authorities our concern over the use of that image . . . in the manner that New Zealand does when we have such concerns,” she told media yesterday.

“An image has been used that is not a genuine image.”

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian, shared the image on Twitter on Monday and has since caused a diplomatic stoush between Beijing and Canberra.

Zhao’s tweet was in response to an Australian Defence Force (ADF) report last month that found there was “credible evidence” that Australian elite soldiers unlawfully killed 39 people during the Afghan war.

He wrote: “Shocked by murder of Afghan civilians & prisoners by Australian soldiers. We strongly condemn such acts, and call for holding them accountable.”

The image carries the caption, “Don’t be afraid, we are coming to bring you peace!”

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison reacted swiftly to the image being shared on social media, calling it “truly repugnant”, and called for an apology from China: “The Chinese government should be totally ashamed of this post. It diminishes them in the world’s eyes.”

But neither Ardern, nor her Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta, went that far.

“New Zealand doesn’t support disinformation that has the potential to be inflammatory and cause further comment,” Mahuta said.

She wouldn’t say what the Government’s message to China was and, when pressed, repeated the comment about disinformation.

Asked if she had spoken to the Chinese ambassador about this, she said: “Not as yet.”

But Ardern confirmed the Government had registered its concern directly with Chinese officials. “That, for us, is a principled position that New Zealand takes regardless of who that exchange is happening between.”

National Party leader Judith Collins said she hadn’t seen the Twitter image, but it sounded “abhorrent” and it was right to raise concerns with China.

The editor of Chinese newspaper the Global Times, hit out at Morrison, asking: “How could this Australian PM be so ridiculously arrogant to pick on Chinese FM spokesperson’s condemnation against the murder of innocent people?” Editor Hu Xijin also said Australia was at the “urban-rural fringe of Western civilisation where gangsters roamed” and had become a “Western hatchet man”.

The ADF report, which found evidence of junior soldiers being told to get their first kill by shooting prisoners and weapons being planted near Afghan bodies, blamed the conduct on an unchecked “warrior culture” among some soldiers.