China’s Global Times plays a peculiar role

FEW countries have invested more man-hours in suppressing awkward facts than China. Internet censors employ more foot-soldiers than some armies. Propaganda officials are so strict that, lest instructions faxed to newsrooms leak, they issue some orders to squelch stories by telephone, to be recorded by hand.

Yet the rules do not bind all equally. The Global Times is a jingoistic tabloid that tackles topics shunned by rivals, even though it is a subsidiary of the Communist Party mouthpiece, the important-but-turgid People’s Daily. In July it reported that Liu Xia, the widow of the Nobel-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo, had left for Germany. Recently it has ignored orders to downplay tensions with America and has offered defiant candour about Xinjiang, a restive western region turned police state. There is mounting evidence that hundreds of thousands of Muslims from Xinjiang’s Uighur minority have been sent to re-education camps for such acts as public prayer or reading history books. Even as Chinese spokesmen denied the camps’ existence, the Global Times, in its English-language edition, acknowledged “counter-terrorism education” among Xinjiang residents and work to “rectify” the thinking of imprisoned extremists. Whether the way Xinjiang is run violates human rights “must be judged by whether its results safeguard the interests of the majority in the region”, said the Global Times in August. Its editor, Hu Xijin, tweeted that Xinjiang had been saved from becoming “another Chechnya, Syria or Libya”.