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In an already acrimonious year for Australia–China relations, an ‘utterly outrageous’ tweet from a mid-level official at China’s foreign affairs ministry shows the extent to which the Chinese-language media environment is being shaped by the Chinese Communist Party including in Australia.
On 30 November, a foreign ministry spokesperson posted on Twitter an artist’s impression of an Australian soldier beheading an Afghan child, a reference to the allegations of war crimes detailed in the Brereton inquiry. This led to a statement from a visibly angry Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who demanded the tweet be deleted.
However, as our colleague Fergus Ryan wrote, ‘the only post that was removed was [Morrison’s] own statement on the issue that his team had posted to the Chinese social media platform WeChat’. Ironically, WeChat replaced the prime minister’s post with a message explaining that it had been removed for allegedly violating the platform’s rules on content th