A few days ago, I noted that the Cambodian government had cited Donald Trump’s decision to bar news outlets from a White House briefing to justify its own crackdown on foreign news outlets, one of a number of recent examples of autocratic governments around the world using the president’s tactics and rhetoric to justify their own policies.
The latest example comes from China, where the Communist Party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, invoked Trump’s favorite term for media reports he doesn’t like to dismiss foreign media reports about the alleged torture of a human rights lawyer:
Xie Yang, a Hunan-based attorney who has represented the families of people killed by police and members of political opposition groups, said in transcripts of conversations with his lawyers released to the media last month that he was subjected to beatings, stress positions, and threats against his family during interrogation in a secret prison. Detained in July 2015, and facing charges of subversion and other crimes, Xie is still in custody.
But, according to the People’s Daily story, the reports were made up by another attorney:
An independent investigation team set up by the Hunan Provincial People’s Procurator also concluded that the allegations are fake, the report said. Xie Yang, who is now awaiting trial, also said that he slept nine hours a day, and medical checks show that he is in good health.
The term fake news originally described fabricated, viral stories published during the 2016 campaign, most often containing defamatory information about Hillary Clinton, many of them written by low-paid contract workers overseas. But since the election, the term has been applied more broadly and embraced with particular gusto by the president to describe allegations of wrongdoing against his administration.
The New York Times notes that “The Chinese government has long denounced Western news organizations as biased and dishonest—and in Mr. Trump, Beijing has found an American president who often does the same.”
