The international media was full of reports earlier this month on the unrest in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. But not everything they said was correct. A new Chinese website has been exposing their mistakes.

Written by: Idil Abshir and Saskia van Huijgevoort

According to Chinese state owned media and several weblogs, the international media would have written very differently about the riots "if they knew what really happened". In the West, the Uighurs are often seen as victims of the Chinese violence, but china Central Television (CCTV) accuses them of spreading "terror and hatred".

Billion Budget
Perhaps that isn’t surprising. But what is new is that China is openly discussing these issues. Beijing plans to spend 6.6 billion dollars on the development of state-controlled media. The move is part of an ambitious programme of international expansion by the government to promote the image of China abroad.

"It would not surprise me if they employ Western media specialists to help," says historian and China expert Leo Douw from the University of Amsterdam. "If you look at CCTV's website, then you can see the results. It looks really Western."

CCTV answered the critical eyes of the West with its own criticism. Rebiya Kadeer, for example, - who, according to China, was the headmistress behind the unrest - showed Al-Jazeera a photograph of a roadblock of hundreds of policemen armed with sticks. "How would our people have been able to attack someone with such a force majeure?”She asked.

"Don’t twist the facts"
CCTV responded immediately. According to the website the photo was not of the riots in Xinjiang but of an incident in the city Shishou, nearly three miles away. And indeed, the picture had already been printed in the Chinese newspaper Nanfang Daily at the end of June.

It is not the only mistake. The British newspaper The Evening Standard posted a photo on its website of two bloodied women comforting each other. "Uighurs", said the Standard. But editor David Willis was soon forced to admit that this wasn’t true. "We misinterpreted a message from the newswire," he confessed.

The BBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Daily Telegraph also made mistakes. "Don’t twist the facts," warns the state press.

Openness
In the past China would have been content with simply correcting these errors. Their new strategy focuses on trying to offer a more substantive response to what they perceive as misrepresentation.

You can not be modern without being more open" says Leo Douw. "In these modern days, Chinese and foreigners speak a lot with each other. At a certain point, you can’t contain information which is already known by widespread rumours.”

However, when the riots were going on, Chinese authorities blocked the Internet in Urumqi. That made it difficult for the international media, and especially for the Uighurs to gain information about what was happening. Is it not easy for China to score points, when first you shut down the media?

No excuse
"Why would they not filter the information to their own side?" Douw responds. "But they must also be credible. And journalists who might thus be tempted to slackness or one-sided reporting? "Then I think you're just a bad journalist."

Watch the Al Jazeera video: