Julien | Airtable Addict

This is easily one of the most egregious examples of anti-China propaganda that I’ve seen, and it is creating a lot of buzz in China. It was done by French national TV program Cash Investigation, famous even in France for its dishonesty, in order to frame French brand Decathlon and make it look like they were using “Uyghur forced labor” in their supply chain. You can find the original video of the reporting here (the part I’m referring to starts at 1:05:08): youtu.be/MlKxBTLrvCY?si=UC7F… Here’s what happened. French “journalists” @JustineJankows1 and @Marinezamb, both based in China, found a factory in Shandong that was a supplier of Decathlon for their clothes. As they explain in the piece they typically disguise themselves as food and travel bloggers in order to do their reporting, which I’m pretty sure is forbidden by law in China: as a journalist - especially a foreign journalist - you cannot misrepresent who you are in order to trick people into answering your questions. Specifically to enter the factory, they lied at the entrance gate, claiming they were “lost” and badly needed to use the toilets. The guard at the entrance let them in, oblivious to the fact they were in fact “journalists” carrying hidden cameras (which by the way is also forbidden by law in China, as it is in many other countries). What were they trying to do there? Looking for Uyghur workers because, as we know, the Western narrative (which is of course 100% false) is that any Uyghur employee is by definition forced labor. Which incidentally is creating a lot of issues for Uyghurs themselves, who have difficulties finding jobs as a result since employers in China who want to export their products don’t want the appearance of having “forced labor”. The UN actually did a report on this very matter, concluding that this "presumption of guilt [...] results in rising unemployment, particularly affecting the most vulnerable, [and] rises risks of poverty": teapawt.org/RnaudBertrand/status/1… In other words, according to the UN Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), those violating human rights on this matter are actually journalists like Justine Jankowski and Marine Zambrano who peddle the notion that employing Uyghurs makes you automatically guilty of forced labor. Which directly, and very unfairly, results in rising unemployment for Uyghurs and raises their risk of poverty. Anyhow, in this instance, tough luck: after walking around the factory with their hidden cameras, our 2 “journalists” couldn’t find “evidence” of their predetermined forced labor narrative as they didn’t see any Uyghur. Did that deter them? Not at all. As an alternative, they managed to find a 2022 recruitment video from this very factory where, so they claim, one of the factory’s managers is translated as saying: "I am addressing the inhabitants of Xinjiang and North Korea. The Chinese state subsidizes your hiring. We are waiting for you to come work. We will take care of all the administrative formalities." They then showed this video with their translation (this is important) to someone they claim is an “expert”, who turns out to be none other than the infamous Adrian Zenz, who works for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), an anti-communist propaganda shop based in Washington founded by an act of the US Congress. VOC is so extreme in their views that that they consider all Nazis killed by Soviets as "victims of communism", as well as all deaths resulting from Covid-19 (hamptonthink.org/read/red-sc…) and all babies that would have been born had China not introduced the 1-child policy. Zenz, in his characteristic dishonesty, claims after watching the video that the fact the company receives subsidies from the government to employ Uyghurs “means their production is linked to forced labor”. In their reporting, the journalists do not mention at all that Zenz works for an anti-communist propaganda shop, in fact they do not even mention his employer: they just present him as an “expert” and a “researcher”, which is insanely dishonest and disrespectful to their audience. Now, even on the face of it, contrary to what Zenz claims, this recruitment video of course wouldn’t mean this company has forced labor. First of all, it’s just a recruitment ad and the French "journalists" don’t demonstrate that the company actually employs any Uyghur. And even if they did, and if they did in fact receive subsidies to do so by the Chinese government, how would that even remotely be proof of forced labor? We’re back to the presumption of guilt that the OHCHR denounces. In fact the Chinese government, if and when they offer subsidies, probably do so for the very reason that companies do need extra incentives to hire Uyghurs given the risks involved, all because of propagandists like Zenz or these French journalists who equate employment of Uyghurs with "forced labor"… But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that the French journalists actually mistranslated the 2022 recruitment video: at no point does the factory manager actually mention people from Xinjiang and North Korea! What she actually says, as you can see in the attached video (which is an extract from youtube.com/watch?v=qiyogLpR…, a brilliant debunk of the French investigation by a Chinese Youtuber), is: "We also have full attendance bonuses, overtime bonuses, etc. Welcome everyone to join our factory. We have various government subsidies, and when you come to our factory, we can discuss the details with you." Specifically they mistranslated "full attendance bonus" (Man Qin Jiang, 满勤奖) as "Xinjiang" (Xin Jiang, 新疆) and "overtime bonus" (Chao Tian Shu Jiang, 超天数奖) as "North Korea" (Chao Xian, 朝鲜)! It sounds somewhat similar to untrained ears, especially when spoken with a very heavy Shandong accent as the lady in the video, but it's obviously a radically different meaning. So to summarize: We have two French "journalists" who illegally posed as travel bloggers, trespassed into a factory under false pretenses, carried hidden cameras (also illegal), found zero evidence of their predetermined forced labor narrative, then mistranslated basic HR terms as "Xinjiang" and "North Korea" to fabricate a scandal. They topped it off by presenting a man from the "Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation"—which counts dead Nazis and COVID victims as "victims of communism"—as their neutral expert. This isn't even remotely journalism; it's a propaganda exercise designed to demonize China (and Decathlon) based on deceptive claims, while actively harming the very Uyghur population they claim to champion (as the OHCHR warns about). Though it pales in comparison to the harm these journalists inflict on Uyghurs, as a French person who enjoys regularly traveling in China, I’m also personally furious about these “journalists” using travel blogging as a cover for their deception. It means that Chinese people may justifiably question the motives of French travelers from now on. While this is a distant secondary concern compared to the real economic harm this type of propaganda inflicts on Uyghurs, it illustrates how propaganda disguised as journalism plants seeds of suspicion between ordinary people and erodes goodwill, which is undoubtedly also part of these “journalists’” intent here. It’s manufactured consent to increase tensions on both sides, just purely destructive and disgusting stuff.

Often, especially for "investigation" articles in mainstream media that embarrass a specific country, the main story is not the story itself but why the story is a story. This 👇 looks like a typical example of this. So here we have a huge Washington Post article explaining in minute details how India attempted to subvert elections in the Maldives. According to the article, Indian intelligence services (RAW) were involved in detailed plans to prevent the election of Mohamed Muizzu and, when these efforts failed and Muizzu got elected president, RAW then allegedly pivoted to planning his removal through an elaborate scheme involving bribes to MPs, military officers, and criminal gangs. The article provides remarkably specific details: exact amounts of planned bribes (87 million rufiyaa), precise numbers of officials to be bribed (40 MPs, 10 military/police officers), and even surveillance records of meetings between RAW officers and intermediaries. Now I don't question the veracity of this - it's probably true - but what's striking is the level of detail and nature of the revelations disclosed in the article. For instance they cite surveillance records of RAW officers' meetings in the Indian embassy in Washington DC, details about Indian military flights with transponders turned off, and internal planning documents. How on earth would WaPo journalists have access to any of this? This was obviously leaked by intelligence services. Which intelligence services? It doesn't take a genius to figure it out: which intelligence services would have "surveillance records of phone calls and meetings held by [a] RAW official" who is posted in "New Delhi’s embassy in Washington"? Or the capability to track "an Indian military aircraft with its transponder turned off"? My bet is that this isn't the work of Maldivian intelligence (a small country with a 500k population) 😏 So now the question becomes: why would US intelligence leak this? Because that's the real story, the story behind the story. And for this we can only hypothesize and notice that it comes in the context of a striking deterioration of the relationship between the U.S. and India versus just a couple of years ago. You had the recent criminal indictment in the U.S. of Adani (a key Modi ally). You had the whole scandal around the assassinations and attempted assassinations of Khalistani separatists by India in Canada and the U.S. You just had the whole public debate around H-1B visa for Indian nationals. And you of course had the recent warming of relations between India and China (with notably the consensus to manage their border disputes) which ought to have profoundly displeased Washington. This particular Maldives story could have several motives. It could be aimed at creating friction between India and China because at heart this is a story about India's aggressive efforts to prevent a China-friendly leader (Muizzu) from taking power in the Maldives. This would make sense given the context of the warming of relations between India and China. Or it could simply be a warning shot to India by Washington, showing the depth of their penetration and surveillance capabilities of Indian operations with the implied message "we know everything you guys do and can expose much more so don't f*ck with us." Again, we don't know... But if I were a betting man, I'd wager that far from intimidating India and creating friction in the relationship with China, this will more likely have the exact opposite effect. Indian policymakers aren't naive; they can read between the lines of such stories and may conclude that an "ally" who surveils their diplomats and leaks sensitive intelligence to embarrass them isn't much of an "ally" at all... China isn't naive either, they're very used to U.S. mainstream media being used as tool for Washington psyops and are extremely unlikely to take such a story at face value. At the end what this story reveals isn't so much India's interference in the Maldives, but Washington's violation of other countries' sovereignty with its surveillance capabilities and its playbook of using its media outlet as geopolitical weapons. In a multipolar world where countries are increasingly wise to these tactics, such moves tend to backfire and push nations who resent them closer together in an “alliance of the aggrieved.” Archive link to the story: archive.ph/j5nSc