China accuses BBC of 'fake news' over floods reporting

Came across this today about the CCP-Chinese cover up of the floods https://youtu.be/7WzZhmUshUg - just the first 14 minutes. These guys lived in China for over a decade and both love the Chinese people. They are pro-Chinese for most things, except

91 train cars in the flooded metro were were carted away. The number "91" came from the insurance company, not the Govt.

All the windows of the cars were covered. What was inside to be hidden? The "official" count of dead was 16. Outside the train station, were hundreds of wreaths from families honoring their dead relatives. The Govt put up barriers to hide the flowers. Locals kept adding more and more flowers, then tore down the barriers. The govt put up new barriers that were 8-10x larger and claimed it was to protect people from work. Aerial footage shows that inside the barriers were just flowers and traditional food gifts.

Back to the 91 cars with the covered windows. These cars easily hold 40 people each, but suppose they were only 25% full .... that would be just 10 people per train car. 10 x 91 .... 900+ dead. Which is much more believable based on the stacks of flowers, wreaths, and offerings.

Alas, it is illegal in China to post counts of anything that don't match the official, govt, counts.

Dictators have to dictate.

BBC, keep reporting the truth.

There may be something going on that we aren't aware of. It looks rather like a political panic attack or crisis of confidence.

China's top leadership is supremely insecure and Xi Jinping especially so. Xi is a Maoist true believer. He fears anything that discredits Mao, the Cultural Revolution or any other aspect of the CCP history immediately and necessarily threatens the CCPs continued hold on power and thus all such criticisms however valid must be silenced. Xi is also like Mao in that he wants everyone in China to parrot his thoughts without question and will punish anyone of any stature who dares to even mildly challenge his party line. He is also afraid of "splittists" and thus punishes ethnic groups who dare speak a different language than Mandarin or adhere to customs other than those of the Han Chinese. He is waging all out war not just on Islam in Xinjiang but on Christians too to the point of even banning Christmas decorations.

Xi's great failure however is his consolidation of power. After Mao there was a concerted effort by the CCP to spread power among multiple leaders and term limits for President and General Secretary were established specifically to prevent the rise of another Mao. Leadership transitions were to be regular and orderly. XI has upended all of this by eliminating term limits and the former age limit on top party officials. The CCP is filled with factions competing for influence and funding for their regional projects. Xi has jailed the leaders of many factions and created enemies in the process. He will have to be increasingly repressive to stay in power as much of the remaining leadership of CCP hate Xi and live in fear for their lives and the lives of their families and their patronage armies resent that advancement has been cut off for many factions. Worse still perhaps is that Xi has no heir apparent. He may, like Mao, try to rule into old age leaving no one qualified to take over when he passes away. China could be thrown into a period of no leadership as competing factions jockey for power or worse open civil war among factions. Hard to say. Or if enough of the CCP gets tired of how Xi makes enemies everywhere he goes and sees this as harming China, he might find himself facing a show trial like the Gang of Four did. Xi in the long run is doing China no good.

The BBC is not as reliable and trustworthy as it was. In covering shortages of drivers, NHS staff and workers in other sectors, they do their best to avoid mentioning Brexit, as a sop to Johnson's regime, which will pull their funding if they don't play ball. They compare the economy to last year rather than to pre-pandemic figures and don't mention the tourist sector. Much programming has been replaced by news and it all has a rather propagandist feel to it. The Olympics have been a real relief. Having been a long time supporter of the BBC's public service status, I no longer trust their domestic news reporting.

There was nothing wrong with their coverage of the floods in China though. They interviewed locals (probably now in prison) and linked the story to climate change (the UK has had heatwaves, storms and flooding this year). It was sympathetic to the suffering of the people.

The Chinese regime are just getting ever more paranoid. They would probably like their own Brexit, kicking out foreigners. They seem to be adopting the North Korean requirement to portray an image of a perfect nation. Ironically, even NK are moving away from that due to Covid and poor harvests.

There is a danger in stirring up popular nationalism to fever pitch as much as they now do. If they keep turning it on, they may not be able to turn it off. It will get increasingly violent and they will lose control. Despite being a bunch of old desk jockeys, they see themselves as revolutionary leaders. But when the hatred engendered by nationalist rhetoric hits fever pitch, revolutionary leaders who are not extreme enough are replaced by more extreme ones.

At the same time as all this, they are taking down their own major companies and entrepreneurs, reducing the value of many Chinese citizens' stocks.

There may be something going on that we aren't aware of. It looks rather like a political panic attack or crisis of confidence.

BBC workers in China need to be careful with their computer use:

Spyware have been discovered inside an app named “Beijing One Pass” that foreign companies operating in China are forced to install on their systems in order to access a digital platform to manage employee state benefits.

Clearly, a 2nd PC that is used for nothing except running this program is needed. Or setup a virtual machine to run it.

Ref: https://therecord.media/spyware-features-found-in-chinese-state-benefits-app/

Bonus points for setting up automatic controls that visit CCP-sites and CCP-approved news locations every few minutes. Create lots of bogus data for the CCP-overlords to capture and review.

Everyone in the subway photos and videos you may have seen is dead.

That isn't true. Firefighters rescued most of the people in those subway cars by cutting through their roofs and lifting people out that way. Most survived.

Nationalism in China has gotten out of hand.

Lets take a look at the real situation.

At the moment, fire-flood-wind-quake disasters show big increase in intensity and frequency in many parts of the world, causing unspeakable sufferance to lots of people. especially the poor and the needy. 

Looks like we are paying back a gigantic price for having excessively indulging in consumerism, particularly in energy use and waste, via plundering earth's limited resources relentlessly in the past century.

Despite the earth's endless warning signs, we continue our insatiable appetite for more-and-more energy, just because we all crave for higher standard of living.

Worth it? Is it worthwhile? 

Think, think again, think hard, always..

BBC is a very malicious coporation and using very dirty tricks to achieve what they political wants! It was not just about their reports on China but their "Deeds" were despicable!

See what they have done to Lady Diana 26 years ago; The Martin Bashir Inquiry! Using fake transactions to intimidate Diana, put her in distress and blackmailing her to tell her private life! I mean how many people were very interesting with the tabloid stories about the Royal's but BBC was keen to do the deceitful Diana interview! They want to boost their popularity!

China is always being BBC's bashing bag due to China is a cold war adversary! Some people wants to hear bad news from China! BBC is not boardcasting news but propagandas!

China’s paranoid. It’s as bad as Trump.

Everyone in the subway photos and videos you may have seen is dead.

The CCP can go pound sand. The BBC is a very credible news source and will continue to report the facts where they find them.

Anti-China bias is code for "not reporting only what the CCP approves."

The Chinese govt loves to hide problems, since any problem is seen as a failure by someone in the govt. It isn't like the govt has any control over the rain. They do control engineering requirements for anti-flood designs, however.

The "mandate of heaven" concept is still quite real in China: that rulers rule via divine appointment, and that a series of natural disasters means their time is up. The 1976 Tangshan earthquake was followed shortly thereafter by the death of Mao, and another quake when I was living there in the '80s sent the leadership into a palpable panic. No wonder they do not want this news broadcast.

I don't completely understand the defensiveness of the Chinese on this matter. The amount of rain that fell was beyond unprecedented and major flooding would be expected under such circumstances. I did not view the BBC reporting but what I did from other media sources see seemed sympathetic to the plight of the people of Zhengzhou and didn't seem critical of any level of government there.

This was a human story. Maybe it is time for the BBC to show China that they are making an effort to be sympathetic and impartial rather than simply critical.