China’s Response to Reports of Torture: ‘Fake News’<br />Foreign media reports that police tortured a detained lawyer is FAKE NEWS, fabricated to tarnish China’s image https://t.co/xDfMUmtYfH pic.twitter.com/cH8i81xb0T An article on the topic a day earlier by Xinhua, the state-run news agency, had accused the foreign news media of "hype" and suggested<br />that legal activists were manipulating the press to "smear the Chinese government." "The stories were essentially fake news," Xinhua wrote, adopting a phrase that Mr. Trump has embraced.<br />Investigations reveal "torture stories" about Chinese lawyer Xie Yang are nothing<br />but cleverly orchestrated lies Xinhua said Jiang Tianyong, a prominent human rights lawyer, had invented the story and shared it with foreign activists.<br />The heated commentary in the Chinese news media came in response to foreign coverage of a Chinese lawyer, Xie Yang, whose<br />account of torture at the hands of interrogators was widely reported in January, including in The New York Times.<br />Experts said on Friday that Mr. Trump’s continuing attacks on the news media would help lend<br />credibility to Chinese efforts to undermine Western ideals and foreign journalists.<br />People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, mimicked Mr. Trump’s characteristic bluster —<br />and his fondness for capital letters — on Friday in denouncing Western news coverage of a Chinese lawyer and human rights advocate who said he had been tortured.<br />Qiao Mu said that Trump’s attacks on the media will offer a good excuse for Chinese<br />officials to step up their criticism of Western democracy and press freedom,
