China’s media is complicit in torture

In early December, in Beijing, China Global Television Network (CGTN), the global arm of China’s state-owned television broadcaster CCTV, held a large and glitzy conference billed as an “Annual Global Media Summit” with the stated aim of promoting “conversations between Chinese and international media organisations”.

It was the end of a very bad year for CGTN, and its parent, which is owned by the Chinese State and its ruling Chinese Communist Party, a dictatorship. It was probably also the beginning of another one that could be even more disastrous for the broadcaster.

This was a year when a rash of complaints with legal force were filed with the UK regulator, Ofcom, by victims of forced and falsified “confessions” that CGTN has aired worldwide. CCTV helped China’s police and security agents to extract and film these confessions, made by prisoners held under duress or torture. Ofcom is investigating.

It was also a year-end when similar complaints were being prepared in North America and Europe. These concerned not only the broadcasting of forced confessions, but also a range of other lies and distortions carried in CGTN’s broadcasts about human rights and unrest in Hong Kong and the situation in the Chinese region of Xinjiang.

The Beijing conference was an effort by CCTV and its foreign language arm to persuade the world and the international media that it is a normal TV broadcaster — which it is not. CCTV and CGTN are part of a vast state propaganda apparatus — Beijing is in an information war with the free and open societies of the Anglosphere.

The CCTV complaint nightmare began just over a year ago, on November 23, 2018, when senior cadres in Chinese TV’s Beijing headquarters were preparing to launch a massive new European hub in London. That Friday, CCTV officials inside the sci-fi edifice along Beijing’s Third Ring Road, nicknamed “the Pants” because of its signature two-legged structure, looked forward to a nice weekend’s rest.

But that day in London, eight hours behind Beijing time, I had filed a complaint to Ofcom against CCTV, alleging violations of UK broadcasting law for extracting and airing forced and falsified confessions from prisoners in China. These “confessions” were broadcast worldwide, including on UK and US airwaves. The aim of this legal complaint is to bring penalties upon CCTV, such as revoking its UK broadcasting licences, or at least fining it, if found guilty.

The shocked bigwigs in charge at CCTV in Beijing that day included Mr Shen Haixiong, a lifelong Communist Party hack who only half a year earlier had become head of CCTV and a deputy minister, after his predecessor, Mr Nie Chenxi, departed in a scandal. There was also Mr Jiang Heping, a sports journalist with a military background who had climbed the greasy political pole of the CCTV propaganda machine to become the head of CCTV’s new international arm CGTN.

Also employed at CCTV was Ms Dong Qian, a senior anchor who had presented multiple “interviews” extracted from prisoners under conditions of duress and torture and aired as “confessions”. She is now likely to be individually targeted by complaints in the United States from victims of this practice.

Two other characters in the cast worth mentioning are Ms Ma Jing, who was head of CCTV/CGTN’s new America hub in Washington, and Ms Liu Ge, the Deputy Director of CCTV News, who was about to become leader of the planned new Europe hub in London, when the complaints landed in that Beijing office.

Then there was Jim Laurie, an American veteran of TV news who had worked mostly in Asia for Western organisations — including three decades at NBC and ABC — until he became a consultant for outfits such as the CCTV propaganda apparatus and Al Jazeera.

“When your complaint landed in their in-tray,” Jim was the man who the Chinese executives consulted, a source who was there that day has told me. Laurie is the most senior foreigner at CCTV. “I don’t know what they said but there was panic all round. They went into emergency meetings for the whole weekend,” my source said.

The following week China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman issued a pithy comment suggesting that the UK should respect “freedom of expression”.

A month later, CCTV had planned to launch its CGTN European hub in a spanking new business park in Chiswick, west London. They boasted it would have as many as 300 staff, which would have made it inexplicably bigger than any overseas-stationed foreign news bureau on Earth. The London media was already making noises at that time about the wisdom and ethics of hosting such a giant Communist Party propaganda outfit on UK soil.

My complaint cited detailed violations of the Broadcasting Code’s Fairness and Privacy provisions. It cited two films of me produced by CCTV and additionally aired in the UK by CGTN. Both were scripted and directed by the Chinese police, the PSB, while I was a prisoner, held under false charges in conditions of duress amounting to torture.

One, staged in August 2013, was filmed by a CCTV crew with me locked in an iron chair inside a steel cage, wearing handcuffs and an orange prison vest. This was before I had been indicted, tried or convicted of any crime.

The second one, in July 2014, was once again filmed by CCTV, not in a cage this time, but still in a prison vest and handcuffs, before I had been tried or convicted on the false charge of illegal information gathering.

After the first forced filming, the UK consulate in Shanghai and the Beijing embassy protested. They told Shanghai’s police chief, Yang Zeqiang, that the case against me would have been “thrown out” if this happened in a country under the rule of law. China chose to ignore this protest and continued to perform forced, falsified televised “confessions”. I have a Foreign Office record of the diplomatic complaint.

My Ofcom complaint was not the only one. It soon mushroomed into five cases, as other victims plucked up courage and followed my lead. During the two months or so after I filed, it was followed by four others with similar charges against CCTV and CGTN.

One came from Ms Angela Gui, daughter of the Swedish-Chinese dissident publisher Gui Minhai, who was forced to make several such appearances on Chinese TV. Another was from Hong Kong bookseller Mr Lam Wing Kee, who was abducted from Hong Kong by Chinese agents, spirited over the border into mainland China and forcibly filmed.

Yet another came from Swedish human rights activist Peter Dahlin, who had been detained and forcibly filmed in 2016 after providing training support to Chinese defence lawyers. Dahlin has now launched a campaign against such abuses. Finally, a joint complaint was signed by all four people and by Dahlin’s NGO Safeguard Defenders alleging violations of the Code’s Standards regulations, a separate area of governance.

“It was like a bomb went off when your compliant landed, and then more bombs followed,” said a person who witnessed mine arriving in the inboxes in CCTV’s “Pants” HQ. Ofcom, meanwhile, is still investigating.

The use of televised forced confessions intensified after President Xi Jinping came to power in late 2012. This was his doing — his policy. Forced TV confessions were once a thing they did only to Chinese people, not foreigners. Then in 2013, with China under Xi’s suffocating grip, they began to parade foreign citizens on CCTV, too. I was the first “real foreigner” to get this treatment, along with my wife, Yingzeng Yu, an American citizen. Others followed.

Now, Safeguard Defenders researchers estimate that CCTV and stations in China’s provinces have helped extract and have aired hundreds of such confession broadcasts, mostly in China, but many abroad, too.

Last month, I wrote an article in which I pointed out that since I filed my complaint, a year had gone by without another foreigner appearing on TV this way, suggesting that CCTV and its masters knew their global TV expansion plans were in jeopardy.

They certainly had some available victims, such as two Canadian consultants (one a former diplomat), arrested last December and detained incommunicado, accused of spying. They could have been forced to appear on CCTV, but have not. Yet.

In another blow of the past year, in the US, Chinese TV has been forced to register itself as a “foreign government agent” under a new law designed to curb enemy country activity.

My complaint also induced some foreign TV broadcasting specialists who were thinking of going to work for CCTV or CGTN to think twice, and some pulled their job applications. The UK’s National Union of Journalists also declared support for the complaint.

In London, a veteran TV executive who was hired by CGTN around the time I filed my complaint, Nick Pollard, quit this September as he saw the trouble that the broadcaster was getting into through its abusive coverage, citing CGTN’s distorted versions of the Hong Kong unrest this year and how it abused a veteran TV correspondent there. Ofcom is now also probing these issues on its own initiative.

On top of that, just as I was beginning to think our campaign had forced the Chinese authorities to rethink forced confessions, with none having been aired for a year, up popped another. Simon Cheng, an employee of the UK’s consulate in Hong Kong, had in August been rendered into the mainland by Chinese police. They tortured him and tried to force him to say the Hong Kong protests were orchestrated by Britain. Cheng was released after two weeks amid diplomatic protests.

In November, he spoke to the international media describing his ordeal in detail. The Chinese police state responded by getting its collaborators CCTV and CGTN to air a video of Cheng in captivity “confessing” to consorting with prostitutes. Within a week, Cheng had filed a new complaint to Ofcom.

Although the new Chiswick hub was meant to have launched in August, CCTV has still not completed this pet project. The delay is jeopardising President Xi’s signature policy of spreading Chinese State-owned media influence.

“CGTN has found it hard to hire the 300 plus journalists they want,” an inside source said. They had mustered 120 or so staff. “A lot of people look at the CGTN hiring adverts with scorn, knowing their background,” one London journalist confided. “It makes a bad CV.”

In May, Ofcom announced it had decided to formally investigate my complaint and that of Angela Gui. The complaints of Peter Dahlin and Lam Wing Kee failed to qualify, apparently because the CCTV channels involved were not UK-licenced channels. The multi-party standards complaint was not investigated either.

Under Ofcom rules, I am not allowed to disclose the contents of the investigation correspondence after the filing of the complaint, although the complaint itself was made public at the time of submission. That means I cannot disclose the contents of CCTV’s written response to Ofcom, which I received in July.

My timing for the complaint had nothing to do with the supposed launch date of the new hub. It had much to do with the fact that since my release from China in mid-2015, I had been battling cancer caused by the denial of medical treatment while falsely imprisoned in Shanghai in 2013-2015, as well as undergoing treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and bone, joint and nerve damage resulting from the ordeal.

Only after my release was I gradually able to find some of the CCTV and English-language CGTN footage aired by them after I was filmed. I had seen none of this film while in captivity and was now re-traumatised by seeing the lies that they had broadcast. I had to go back into treatment.

In 2018, I discovered the UK Broadcasting Code and its regulator Ofcom. I now realised for the first time that I could file a regulatory complaint, with legal force, on grounds of privacy and fairness violations, against Chinese TV for the broadcasts of me that it had aired in the UK.

A scandalous incident in September 2018 was a decisive trigger that finally convinced me to file the complaint. In Birmingham, CCTV’s chief correspondent in London, Ms Kong Linlin, heckled and disrupted a seminar on Hong Kong at the annual Conservative Party conference, and then slapped a young steward when he asked her to leave.

This behaviour landed her in court facing assault charges and a taste of the real rule of law. Seeing this violent act on film, I seized up in a PTSD attack. I was reminded vividly of the so-called TV journalists who colluded with China’s police — the ones who filmed me inside the cage as I made a false and forced “confession”.

So I decided to go ahead, and that was the bombshell that landed in Beijing on that November day. It was the first complaint of its sort that Ofcom had received about China. It was also the first time an individual anywhere in the world had taken legal action against an arm of the Chinese Communist Party. It struck at the heart of Xi’s signature policy of Chinese media expansion and the use of the media in forced confessions.

There have been some critics in China who have pointed out the illegality of televised forced confessions. Wang Qinglei, a prominent CCTV journalist in Beijing, was fired in autumn 2013, soon after my first fake TV “confession”, for attacking CCTV’s forced confessions. “Senior managers are aware that people with a similar mindset to me are by no means rare within CCTV. That’s why they resort to these measures, believing they can control everyone’s beliefs,” he wrote in an open letter after being sacked for posting criticisms on WeChat, the Chinese Twitter.

“The past two weeks have been disgraceful for our CCTV workers, standards for news have been raped repeatedly by those in power: we avoided legal principles… We use the pubic instruments of the media to ruthlessly bombard the misconduct of a single person… The integrity and professionalism in the news has vanished totally and completely.”

“Our foreign counterparts lose their jobs for not telling the truth. Chinese reporters lose their jobs for telling too much truth,” Liu Xiangnan, a journalist with China’s Economic Observer wrote about Wang’s sacking. “Those who lose their jobs for telling the truth are heroes in this trivial little world.”

Even some courageous Chinese judges have criticised this abuse. “Outside of a court, no one has the right to decide whether someone is guilty of a crime,” said Zhang Liyong, chief judge of the High People’s Court in central China’s Henan province. “The police aren’t qualified to say someone is guilty. Prosecutors aren’t qualified to declare someone guilty. News media are even less qualified to determine guilt.”

In 2016, Zhu Zhengfu, deputy chairman of the All-China Lawyers Association, also criticised the broadcast of forced confessions for undermining the justice system and influencing judges. Zhu warned that the practice would lead to trial by media and give the public the impression that the suspect was guilty. “It would be difficult for the court to find the suspect not guilty amid this kind of public opinion,” he said.

Activists are now looking at some of the individuals involved in forced confessions with a view to further legal action, they say. Their targets include CCTV personnel, both Chinese and non-Chinese, as well as Chinese police officers from the Public Security Bureau and the Ministry of Public Security, and some politicians.

Activists are also preparing to use American legal mechanisms to file complaints against CCTV and CGTN in the US, on similar grounds to my complaint. That would include filing under the global Magnitsky Act, with the aim of bringing American sanctions upon offenders involved in arbitrary detentions and torture.

Ofcom will next issue what it calls a “primary view”, and may then ask for representations. Its investigation is ongoing.