October 15, 2015
An Australian journalist was misquoted as saying the people of Tibet had a “wonderful life.” A popular American writer was incorrectly listed as the author of an op-ed parroting Communist Party talking points.
China’s state news media is known to go to great lengths to portray China in a positive light, massaging headlines and omitting crucial facts. But several prominent China experts have recently reported instances in which the words attributed to them in Chinese news media were fabricated or grossly changed.
Here is a look at some of the most notable cases: Roderick MacFarquhar, a professor of Chinese history and politics at Harvard, spoke about President Xi Jinping’s vision of a “Chinese dream” at a conference on Marxism in Beijing this month. He said Mr. Xi’s talk of a renaissance in China was “not the intellectually coherent, robust and wide-ranging philosophy needed to stand up to Western ideas.” But Global Times, a state-run newspaper, had a different recollection. It paraphrased Mr. MacFarquhar as having said that the Chinese dream would “make great contributions and exert a positive impact on human development.”
In an email on Wednesday, Mr. MacFarquhar called the paraphrasing a “total fabrication.” Global Times has since removed the line from its story.Peter Hessler, a writer for The New Yorker and the author of several books on China, was surprised to see his byline appear atop an op-ed in China Daily, a state-run newspaper, in January. The article heaped praise on China’s political model, stating, “I think I have a better understanding of how essentially stable the Chinese system is.”
Mr. Hessler demanded a retraction, saying the newspaper had repackaged material from a previous interview and omitted crucial parts. But China Daily editors would only remove the article from its English-language website. Mr. Hessler later wrote about the experience for The New Yorker, saying, “In the end, I should have known better, because China Daily is notorious for pushing the regime’s agenda.”
Rowan Callick, an Australian journalist, returned from a government-led trip to Tibet two years ago to find he was featured in a China Daily article about the region. Tibet is known for social unrest, but the article quoted Mr. Callick, the Asia-Pacific editor of The Australian, as saying, “I was quite taken aback to see what a wonderful life the locals are living.”
Mr. Callick had met with officials and local journalists in Tibet, but he said he had never uttered those words. Mr. Callick said he later received a private apology from the reporter, who explained he had mistaken Mr. Callick for somebody else. The original article is still on the website of CCTV, the state broadcaster.
Rory Medcalf, the head of National Security College at Australian National University, was startled when an op-ed appeared in Global Times under his name in 2012. Mr. Medcalf had granted an interview to the paper but had never consented to an op-ed. The article distorted his views, he said, including a section that referred to Tibetans as “separatists,” a term Mr. Medcalf said he did not use.
Global Times took the unusual step of publishing an apology from a reporter who had interviewed Mr. Medcalf. “What I see from this unfortunate incident is the challenges Chinese media, and China as a whole, face in the expanding international engagement,” the reporter wrote.
In an email on Wednesday, Mr. Medcalf said that the recent series of fabrications and misquotations of foreign experts reveals the tensions between China’s strict media controls and the aspirations of some Chinese journalists to produce honest journalism.
“We cannot assume that all the journalists in the Chinese state media, or indeed the foreign subeditors sometimes employed there, are comfortable with the contortions their material sometimes has to go through before it reaches an audience,” Mr. Medcalf said.
