‘Foreign forced labor’ another fake story to slander China

Source:Global Times Published: 2019/12/24 12:28:40

Photo: AFP

British media suddenly broke the news on Sunday saying that a 6-year-old girl from south London found a message for help from a Shanghai prisoner in a box of Christmas cards. The person who left the message said they were a group of foreigners in Shanghai Qingpu Prison who were forced into labor. They demanded help by notifying human rights organizations and contacting Peter Humphrey.

The news quickly exploded in the British press. Tesco, the UK retailer that sold the card, said it was shocked and suspended the relationship with a supplier in East China's Zhejiang Province.

Paradoxically, it was Humphrey himself who first reported the story. A Global Times reporter interviewed the Zhejiang manufacturer, a highly open printing company that did not have any strict security measures in place. The company flatly denied the allegations. On Monday, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs also denied the existence of forced labor by foreign criminals in Shanghai Qingpu Prison.

This story reads like the plot of a novel or movie, and the current Western public opinion context likes such a story. Humphrey served a sentence in Qingpu Prison from 2014 to 2015. According to the message's logic, his cell mates still remembered him and asked him for help. The card with the message actually flew to the UK and ended up in his hands, which required quite a lot of lucks to make a low-probability scenario become a sensational story.

The West is fiercely attacking China's human rights. It is at this moment that Humphrey threw out a story of asking for help through Christmas cards. Such stories are tailored for today's Western media. No one in the West is keen to verify the truth of the accusations. 

Not long ago, Australian media fabricated a story of a Chinese defecting spy named Wang Liqiang, who was hyped up by the Western media. When the story became too false to be true, the Australians came out and said the alleged spy may have exaggerated his role. But the Australian media that made up the fake news have not been censured by Western public opinion.

As is known to all, in Chinese prisons, the reeducation process of prisoners involves labor within one's capacity. This is in keeping with legal prison management, which enjoys the support of Chinese society and has never been a source of dispute. There has been no large-scale Western opposition to the idea of reeducating through labor in Chinese prisons.

Over the years, some Westerners have constantly tried to find fault, or even set up traps, in an attempt to extract stories from the tens of billions of items of Chinese exports, claiming some are Chinese prison products with a sentimental story attached. Their purpose is to prove what an inhuman country China is and how China's prisons are crushing human rights.

This is an extremely dirty public opinion campaign aimed at slandering China. It covers up the basic facts of improvement in the rule of law and civilized prison administration in China. Some Western media outlets allow people like Humphrey to expose nonsense, seemingly objective, but in fact they are using specious details to create an illusion about China. It must be said that this is shameful.

Posted in: EDITORIAL

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