Please Explain podcast: Relations with China reach new low with war crimes tweet
On Monday, China’s Foreign Ministry said Australia should be ashamed of its war crimes in Afghanistan after Prime Minister Scott Morrison demanded an apology over an inflammatory social media post from an official Chinese account.
The doctored image purported to show a special forces soldier slitting the throat of an Afghan child with its head wrapped in an Australian flag as it cradled a lamb.
The Prime Minister has called for social media platform Twitter to take it down, labelling it “repugnant” and “truly offensive”.
The Chinese official responded by pinning the tweet to the top of his account.
In this episode, national editor Tory Maguire and North Asia correspondent Eryk Bagshaw discuss the state of the Sino-Australian relationship in the wake of the inflammatory social media post and increased tarrifs on Australian products.
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Tory is the national editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. She has held senior roles at a number of major Australian mastheads and was most recently editor-in-chief of HuffPost Australia for two-and-a-half years.