China's meltdown over WION's Taiwan report
Story highlights
In an attempt to intimidate the media, the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi on Sunday expressed firm opposition to WION's report that featured Taiwanese representative to India.
Last week WION had broadcast a special show on Taiwan highlighting the region's economic growth, politics and culture.
The report provided an overview of Taiwan, however, China disagreed as its embassy in New Delhi had a social media meltdown.
The Chinese embassy said: "We express firm opposition to some Indian media that provided a platform for "Taiwan independence" forces, urge them to adhere to One-China principle and avoid sending wrong messages to the public."
It was classic China - a lot of criticism but no names.
The was no mention in the report about "self-ruled island near the South China Sea".
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Clearly, the interview enraged Beijing. It is not the first time China has targeted WION.
WION had earlier run a report exposing China's faulty testing kits which had become a big controversy. The kits were so bad that the Chinese company lost its import license for India. The company responded to WION's report with a press release.
The same press release of a private company was circulated by the Chinese embassy in India complete with screen-shots from the show, after that WION received a letter in October 2020 after an interview with Taiwan's foreign minister Joseph Wu. China sent WION a five-page rant for a 30-minute interview.
It had the usual stuff - don't talk about Taiwan, uphold the One-China policy and so on. In short, one of the most powerful countries in the world took the time to write five pages of grievances against a foreign broadcaster for doing their job.
It is clearly difficult for the party officials in Beijing to understand since every Chinese media outlet comes with a prefix - "state-owned".
WION has consistently reported on Taiwan and invited many Taiwanese leaders on various shows. WION's coverage has nothing to do with the Indian government's position on Taiwan since it is purely based on facts. WION has reported extensively on incidents around the Taiwan Straits and Chinese jets entering Taiwan's air defence zone even though there has been no provocation from Taiwan.
On Monday, Baltic lawmakers met Taiwan's president. It was a big moment in the island's diplomatic history, WION reports on all such incidents. In fact, reports have also been aired on Beijing's piracy in the South China Sea and their belligerence along the Line of Actual Control(LAC) against India.
It may offend the Communist bigwigs based in China and may ruffle some important feathers but that's called independent journalism which is clearly an alien concept for the Chinese government.