Doctored tweet part of Beijing’s ‘sentiment mobilisation’

A Chinese official’s tweet that used a fabricated image of war crimes to criticise Australia’s record in Afghanistan was part of a coordinated misinformation campaign by Beijing to shift the world’s attention away from its human rights abuses in Xinjiang, a new report has found.

The tweet in November 2020 by Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian triggered an outcry from the Australian government. It featured a doctored image showing an Australian

special forces soldier slitting the throat of an Afghan child cradling a lamb. Then-prime minister Scott Morrison called a snap media conference from his Covid19 quarantine at the Lodge in Canberra to demand an apology from Beijing.

The apology never came but new research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) shows the tweet, along with two others aimed at Canada and Japan, has been effective at deflecting attention away from Beijing’s alleged human rights abuses.

Chinese academics at the

Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences have described the technique as ‘‘sentiment mobilisation and coercion’’. ASPI researchers Albert Zhang and Tilla Hoja found the method was also effectively deployed in April 2021 against Japan and June 2021 against Canada after both criticised China’s record.

‘‘These efforts were aspects of a broader [Chinese Communist Party] campaign seeking to deflect attention away from empirical research about Xinjiang by highlighting human rights issues within democratic countries,’’

Zhang and Hoja said in a report released yesterday.

In April 2021, Zhao tweeted a mock-up of the Fukushima power plant and the Great Wave of Kanagawa – a 19th-century Japanese woodblock of a tsunami. At the time Japan was pressuring China over its actions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. The tweet targeted Japan’s plans to release radioactive water from the disaster-hit Fukushima area. Then in June 2021, after Canada led an international coalition at the United Nations calling on China to allow investigators’ access into Xinjiang, Chinese state media published 85 articles in less than a month about the 1100 unmarked graves that had been found at four former Canadian residential schools for indigenous children.

Those stories were then used to shift the focus from China’s own human rights record towards a diplomatic dispute with its critic.

The Chinese government has accused ASPI, which is partly funded by the Australian government and has received funding from the US Department of Defence and State Department, of ‘‘concocting lies’’.