China plays the bully boy with foreign reporters

The always-touchy Communist Party of China is taking their condemnation of foreign press reports to new levels recently.

If anything even slightly less-than-exemplary is reported in a Western news report, howls of outrage blow up immediately, official complaints are lodged, and an army of social media minions back up the official line within hours. The BBC (perhaps the closest thing the world has to an unbiased news outlet) is a particularly common scapegoat, but many others from CNN to ABC to the New York Times are routinely lambasted as malicious and biased propaganda mouthpieces, spreading politically-motivated lies across the world. Their official press releases twist themselves into pretzels 8n an attempt to find malicious intent in even the most innocuous of factual reporting.

Whether it is floods in Henan province, local criticism of Olympic performances, or events in Hong Kong, China takes any portrayal as critical, and therefore biased, however factual the reporting. Many foreign reporters have been unceremoniously ejected from the country, and many more have been threatened and followed around, with their whereabouts publicly (and sometimes inaccurately) reported on social media.

It's all a bit of a bore, unless you are a foreign journalist, in which case it is downright scary. China's ultra-nationalist regime is happy to sink into the bully role it has already established.