Translate the following paragraphs into Chinese
China accuses western media of fake news about human rights
The Guardian among outlets to report on alleged torture of lawyer Xie Yang,
which sparked Beijing’s Trump-style rebuke
China has launched a Donald Trump-style attack on foreign media, branding claims
that a leading human rights lawyer was tortured by government agents fake news.
Xinhua, the government’s official news agency, accused the overseas media of
“hyping” a series of “cleverly orchestrated lies” by publishing reports about
the plight of attorney Xie Yang, who was detained in July 2015 at the start of a
crackdown known as China’s war on law.
Reports about Xie’s alleged torture by security agents surfaced on overseas
human rights websites late last year. More detailed accounts of similar claims
subsequently appeared in newspapers including the Guardian, the Wall Street
Journal, the New York Times and Japan’s Asahi Shimbun.
Experts said the allegations, while impossible to verify, were consistent with
abuses previously documented by human rights groups.
On Thursday, however, China’s Communist party-controlled media launched
unusually pointed criticism over the claims that Xie had been abused, directing
its ire against four articles published by overseas websites focused on human
rights in October and November 2016.
Xinhua claimed an independent team had been sent to investigate claims of Xie’s mistreatment and concluded the “so-called torture did not happen”.
Its reporters, who were given access to both detained men, claimed Xie said he was in good physical condition and was being treated well by prison guards who were giving him nine hours’ sleep each day and “decent food”.
The Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper claimed Jiang had encouraged Xie’s
wife, Chen Guiqiu, to invent the torture claims.
It alleged she did so believing that once such information was handed to foreign
diplomats and reporters it would “spread like wildfire”. Foreign journalists
were “great enthusiasts” for negative stories about the Chinese government and
saw information about torture, human rights issues and the rule of law as
“treasure”, it added.
David Bandurski, an expert on Chinese journalism from the University of Hong
Kong, said Beijing had long used the concept of fake news (jia xinwen) to
discredit reporting it did not approve of.
“Fake news has been an accusation levelled at western media coverage of China
for many, many years,” he said, pointing to a 2009 article in Seeking Truth, the
Communist party publication, that claimed foreign reporters were using fake news
“to blacken China’s reputation”.
“There are many unfortunate parallels between the language used by Mr Trump on
the media and the sorts of attacks we’ve seen in authoritarian countries like
China,” Bandurski said.
Sarah Cook, a senior research analyst for east Asia at the Freedom House
advocacy group, said the attempt to cast Xie’s alleged torture as fake news was
part of an attempt to smear the lawyers and activists targeted by the crackdown.
Beijing was using such articles “to try to justify what they are doing to these
very brave and courageous and generally honest people”, she said.
But Cook said China’s fake news claim also underlined how Trump’s use of the
concept to discredit unwanted press coverage was being picked up by different
authoritarian regimes and leaders and state media around the world.
The US president’s repeated attacks on the media not only made it harder for
Washington to criticise press freedom violations elsewhere but also provided
“cover for regimes like the one in Beijing” to attack the press, Cook said,
adding: “I’m assuming they must be pretty pleased.”
Patrick Poon, a Hong Kong-based Amnesty International activist, said while
China’s state-run media routinely accused foreign counterparts of producing
biased or inadequately sourced articles about the country, it was rare for the
charge of fake news to be made.
“It seems the Chinese media is borrowing the term from Donald Trump to discredit
the western media,” Poon said. “It is really worrying.”
Poon described the state media stories attacking the torture claims as
unconvincing and full of inconsistencies.
The reports about Xie’s alleged torture published in the Guardian, the New York
Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Asahi Shimbun were based on detailed
transcripts of conversations between the prisoner and two of his lawyers, Chen
Jiangang and Liu Zhengqing, that took place in January.
Chinese reports did not directly refer to those stories or interviews but
instead focused on four less detailed accounts that were published late last
year by dissident-run human rights websites including China Free Press and Boxun.
Cook said Xinhua’s report appeared to have been at least partly fabricated and
that China’s claims about fake news appeared to be “a propaganda strategy, to
muddy the water surrounding these allegations” of torture. “The whole thing
strikes me as very suspicious,” she said.
Speaking to Reuters, Xie’s lawyer Chen said his client’s torture claims were
genuine.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/02/china-accuses-western-media-fake-news-human-rights