NEWS//China vs US propaganda
China and the United States are engaged in a propaganda skirmish at the intersection of the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and the current civil unrest over George Floyd's death. Like two people verbally sparring over how wrong the deeds of the other were, one side of this skirmish is saying, "what you did was wrong," while the other side counters, "But what you did was worse."
The United States is castigating China for the events in Tiananmen Square on June 3-4, 1989. Meanwhile, China is noting the protests, additional deaths, and riots, fueled by George Floyd's death, that have broken out across the United States.
China on the U.S.
For example, the Global Times, a voice for China's government, has highlighted the U.S. protests. It published an op-ed article by Sun Chenghao on June 2. "It has been obvious that Trump is not a president who can effectively respond to such national crises. He has failed both tests of the epidemic and the national chaos…. If the racial conflict in the US cannot be resolved, similar riots may occur again in the future. The chaos started in Minneapolis will further exacerbate the US' social divisions. No matter how the chaos will be eased, the deeply-rooted structural problems in the US society are not being resolved. US' class conflicts, inequalities in wealth, and racial friction will continue.”
The Global Times also reported that "some netizens compared the video footage from protest scenes in US cities with those from the Hong Kong protests in 2019, as certain US officials hailed riots in the Chinese city as a 'beautiful sight to behold' but when similar a scenario occurred in their own soil, they urged police to brutally crack down on it.”
Bloomberg.com quoted China's foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, “U.S. politicians call riots in other countries ‘a beautiful sight,’ they ignite flames everywhere and wish the world to be in chaos,” state broadcaster CCTV said separately in a commentary Saturday. “But when the minority groups in their own country are fighting for legitimate rights, they cannot wait but to crackdown harshly. Such hypocritical double standards are truly disgusting.”
Zheng Liang, a research fellow on communication and human rights at the Guangdong-based Jinan University, was quoted by the Global Times, "A great majority of Chinese don't support rioting or violence…. They all remember how hard the US politicians and Western media had worked to defend the Hong Kong rioters since last year. However, when similar riots happened in the US, they all see the US government's tough stance and media's reports on the incidents, which are in sharp contrast to those in Hong Kong," Zheng said.
The U.S. on China
State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus has claimed that the Chinese Communist Party is “breaking their word” by curbing the autonomy of Hong Kong. “We saw the extradition law put in place in Hong Kong. We saw thousands of protestors, for the past year, take to the streets. Those protests were sometimes violently put down. People were arbitrarily detained. We’ve seen the erosion of the rule of law in Hong Kong" (Fox News).
Secretary of State, Michael Pompeo reflected on the Tiananmen anniversary by saying, "Thirty-one years later, the total number of missing or dead Tiananmen protesters is still unknown. The United States continues to applaud their aspirations, and the American people stand with the families still grieving their lost loved ones, including the courageous Tiananmen Mothers who have never stopped seeking accountability for their children’s deaths, despite great personal hardship and risk. We reiterate our call for a full, public accounting of those killed or missing…. We mourn the victims of June 4, 1989, and we stand with the people of China who continue to aspire to a government that protects human rights, fundamental freedoms, and basic human dignity."
Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica, Newsweek, Bloomberg, Reuters, FoxNews, MSNBC, Global Times01, Global Times 02