Beijing takes aim at SAS scandal and ABC kids’ show

China has added the alleged murder of Afghans by SAS troops and culturally insensitive ABC children’s programming to its list of grievances with Australia.

China’s internet has filled with commentary about the Australian Defence Force’s inquiry into alleged war crimes. Picture: Department of Defence

China has added the alleged murder of Afghans by SAS troops and culturally insensitive ABC children’s programming to its list of grievances with Australia.

Since late last week, China’s highly regulated internet has filled with commentary about the Australian Defence Force’s inquiry into alleged war crimes by special forces in Afghanistan.

“What has been revealed in the ADF report obviously violated International Law. They are deliberate war crimes,” Su Hao, the founding director of the Centre for Strategic and Peace Studies at the China Foreign Affairs University, writes in the state-controlled Global Times.

Mr Su says the “international community should join hands to criticise such crimes” and not allow the US to “cover up” the bad behaviour of its ally.

“The West claims they are maintaining the order, but what they actually do is to make order more chaotic,” he writes.

Demonstrating how febrile Australia-China relations have become, a rerun of a British comedy show screened on ABC Me, the public broadcaster’s children’s channel, has become another bilateral flash point.

More than 1400 people have signed an online petition set up by Chinese-language media outlet The Sydney Post to ask for an apology about last Friday’s rerun of an episode of the BBC-commissioned children’s comedy show Horrible Histories.

“You are speaking for institutionalised racism,” says the petition, which on Monday was picked up by state-controlled media in mainland China.

Scottish actress Sophie Wu, dressed as a Tang dynasty empress while eating cockroaches, in an episode of Horrible Histories.

“It’s uncanny how they are always talking about anti-racism and they are actually the meanest racists,” one Chinese social media user was quoted as saying in a separate piece in the Global Times.

Much of the episode — made in 2015 and titled Alfred the Great — ridiculed the Anglo-Saxons, who were presented as murderous, superstitious and backward.

The outrage centred on a skit set in 8th-century Tang dynasty China, in which an actor dressed as the Empress Wu Zetian ate cockroaches, hornet larvae and a bamboo rat.

“The tail’s the best bit!” says Scottish actress Sophie Wu, dressed as the Empress, in the two-minute parody of “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!”

An ABC spokesman said the broadcaster had received some complaints about the show.

“(They) will be considered by ABC Audience and Consumer Affairs as is our usual practice,” he told The Australian.

The new complaints came after China’s embassy in Canberra last week said China would be increasingly outspoken about Australia.

That was after the same embassy officials outlined 14 well-known grievances with Australia in a one-page briefing and warned: “China is angry”.

Trade Minister Simon Birmingham said the Chinese embassy’s behaviour was unhelpful.

Yun Jiang and Adam Ni, who closely follow the Australian-China relationship in their weekly newsletter China Neican, said there was a “giant perception gap” between the two countries.

“For Beijing, Australia has become increasingly ‘anti-China’. For Canberra, on the other hand, Australia has been on the receiving end of Beijing’s coercion for protecting Australia’s national interest,” they write in a briefing published on Monday.

“This perception gap has been widening in recent years, and it’s unclear how it can be bridged. Perhaps the first step — easier said than done — is to try and see things from the perspectives of those on the other side.”