If you have been paying any attention to Western media, including all forms of social media with US or Western-block origins, you quite possibly believe that China is ruled by the most evil regime since at least World War II!

You will have heard about the horrific “genocide and ethnic cleansing” that is happening in Xinjiang, China’s most western autonomous region. Supposedly “mass rapes, and mass sterilization programs” are being carried out against Uygurs; and they are being held in “concentration camps”, of course.

And, if the past few decades have shown us anything, it is that the United States of America can be a very sore loser

It has been stated by many that, rather than being factual, all this horrific reporting is actually an attempt by the West to demonize China in order to turn the entire world against China before likely going to war, like it did to some governments it found fault with in the past decades. 

Why? As William Briggs recently wrote in johnmenadue.com webpage, China’s economic star is rising, and America’s best days are behind it.”

And, if the past few decades have shown us anything, it is that the United States of America can be a very sore loser.

Just look at what happened to Libya. The US bombed Libya back to the stone age and many observers of Middle Eastern events strongly believe that this was because the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi wanted to move off the petrodollar and use gold for the oil trade instead. 

So, what is the truth about Xinjiang?

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I was personally in Xinjiang many years ago, and saw no obvious ethnic tensions at that time. But that was a while ago.

Jerry Grey, a retired Aussie living in Guangdong province went on a bike tour through the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region thousands of miles away in late 2019. He wrote that he had seen nothing of the prison camps or any of the other horrors reported (or magnified) by people who have never set foot in either Xinjiang or other parts of China.

What about the one million Uygurs “locked in concentration camps”, reported by the media? It turns out that this number comes from the so-called World Uyghur Congress which is headquartered in Munich, Germany. Hilariously, in a video interview with a representative from this Congress that I watched, when asked where the one million number came from, the representative answered, “the media”. Astounding circularity!

And, therein lies the rub. Quite clearly the Western mainstream media are responsible for a process of telling half-truths or outright lies in order to demonize China, with the final intention pointing to war.

As WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said, “every war in the last 50 years has been created by media lies”. And THAT is the reason Julian Assange rots in Belmarsh prison near London, for creating a system to allow people to see the actual truth – raw documents - of what is happening in our world. 

How does this process of false narrative building happen? The basic modus operandi is to produce so-called “news”, often based on “leaks” from “unnamed but supposedly reliable sources”. 

So, for instance, someone from the US intelligence community will tell a US media outlet that there are “mass rapes of Uygurs” in Xinjiang. The media then run with this and sell it as truth. They embellish. Dramatize. Horrific details are included, with the goal being to get emotional reactions and raise the levels of fear and disgust in the reader and viewer. 

Then, the whole process is put on repeat, day after day with the same messages. In other words, they use the technology of brainwashing. 

It’s called “manufacturing consent”.

This was done for Syria, with the supposed use of chemical weapons by the Bashar al-Assad government. It turns out of course that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons inspectors actually on the ground at the time have now informed the world that chemical weapons were not used, and that the original official OPCW report was, in effect, a lie. 

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That was a big lie that was then magnified by the media globally. For example, the BBC was involved in staging horrific scenes of people apparently injured by those very same chemical weapons. Which means, they lied, and knowingly. Almost all other media parroted the “Assad kills his own people with chemical weapons” narrative.

To say such things, of course, makes one an “Assadist”, which brings us to the other part of the Western dynamic -- massive censorship supported by across-the-board “cancellation” of people who are simply sharing elements of the truth.

Another example is Chinese publications getting kicked out of the US so that US readers would not be exposed to alternate narratives, or even facts! People supporting China on Twitter and other social media have had their accounts removed or labelled. People who have lived in China for a long time, decades even, and speak up for China, are also demonized as CCP trolls, Wu-Maos (something cheap), tankies (Communist and anti-American) and the like. There are massive pile-ons designed to get China supporters to stop saying anything that flies in the face of the official narrative. And so, the truth disappears. 

Ultimately, when caught outright lying, the media will do some disingenuous retraction, of just one or two lines on page 10 so the retraction is never seen. By then it doesn’t matter because bombs have been dropped, truth-telling people have been destroyed, and readers hardly make it to page 10 anyway. So, no one ever really finds out about the lie.

It is fair to say that, through these very deliberate processes designed to distort, smear, defame and lie, in the minds of people who are absorbing the “news” uncritically, China increasingly comes to be perceived as the Evil Empire. And thus consent for war is manufactured. Right now, China is losing this information war.

Sadly, if we look around critically, we come to realize that this process of demonization is not simply directed at China. It is being directed at truth itself. 

As a case in point, certainly not the only case, the last year-and-a-half of global madness around COVID-19 has been created by the very same process of lies and deception perpetrated by the Western media, reinforced by mass de-platforming and smearing of knowledgeable people who are trying to communicate true facts about the situation. 

In this way, the majority of people only get to hear of the authoritative narrative when it’s too late. 

A war against truth and the people of the world, manufactured by means of media lies, is taking place in front of our eyes. The demonization of China is simply part of that larger war.

The author is a psychologist, linguist, educator, entrepreneur, dialogue facilitator and corporate advisor with over thirty years ’experience doing business in Asia. He is the creator of the Kungfu English mobile self-learning system, author of "The Third Ear" and "How to Learn Any Language in 6 Months" (in Chinese), and his TEDx talk on Language Learning is one of the top 10 TEDx videos of all time.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.