By Kirsty Niedham
SYDNEY (Reuters) – The United States has accused China of using a digitally rigged image of an Australian soldier as a “new low”, a tweet that weighs heavily on the controversy between Canberra and Beijing.
China has denied allegations by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison that it apologized after a picture of an Australian soldier holding a bloody knife to the neck of an Afghan child was posted on Monday by its foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Legian.
The Chinese embassy said the “rage and outcry” by Australian politicians and the media over the image was an encroachment.
But other countries, including the United States, New Zealand and France, have expressed concern about the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s manipulation of images on its official Twitter account.
The U.S. State Department said Wednesday that despite China depicting images on Twitter, its citizens being detained, the U.S. State Department said Wednesday that the CCP’s recent attack on Australia is another example of its misguided and uncontrolled use of tremendous diplomacy. His pose is clear to all. Read twitter posts.
The department’s deputy spokeswoman Kale Brown said the fake image of the soldier was “a new low, also for the Chinese Communist Party”.
“By spreading anti-CCPA information, it covers its horrific human rights violations, including the detention of more than ten million Muslims in Xinjiang,” Brown wrote in a tweet.
A French foreign affairs spokesman said on Tuesday that the tweet was “particularly shocking” and that Zhao’s remarks were “insulting to all countries currently engaged in the armed forces in Afghanistan”.
Morris used the Chinese social media platform WeChat to criticize the “false image”.
Morris wrote in a message from Wecht on Tuesday night that the diplomatic controversy over the soldier’s image “does not diminish respect and admiration for the Chinese community in Australia”.
He defended Australia’s management in investigating war crimes over special forces operations in Afghanistan and said Australia was able to deal with thorny issues in a transparent manner.
Australia has previously said it would cite 19 soldiers for possible criminal prosecution for killing unarmed Afghan prisoners and civilians.
WeChat has 690,000 active daily users in Australia. Morrison’s message was read by 57,000 WeChat users as of Wednesday.
Zhao’s tweet, pinned to the top of his Twitter account, was “liked” by 55,000 followers, then labeled as sensitive content by Twitter, but the Australian government denied the request to remove the image.
Twitter is blocked in China, but has been used by Chinese diplomats who have adopted a joint “Wolf Warrior Diplomacy” strategy this year.
China on Friday imposed a dumping tariff of up to 200% on Australian Australian wine imports, effectively shutting down the largest export market for the Australian wine industry amid growing diplomatic controversy over serious trade change measures imposed by China.
(Reporting by Kirsty Needham; Editing by Tom Brown and Simon Cameron-Moore)
