Photo taken on March 16, 2020 shows the White House Visitor Center in Washington D.C., the United States.(Photo: Xinhua)

 
Refuting the US Department of State's malicious report claiming that China has invested billions of dollars spreading disinformation globally, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said the report itself is disinformation, and people of the world are not blind in seeing the US' ugly attempts that have proven time and again that it is an "empire of lies" through and through.

Titled "How the People's Republic of China Seeks to Reshape the Global Information Environment," the US report focuses on accusing China of information manipulation in an attempt to achieve global information dominance. It says that China's "global information manipulation" is a challenge to the integrity of the global information space. 

Responding to the report, a spokesperson from the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Saturday the report is in itself disinformation as it misrepresents facts and truth. In fact, it is the US that invented the weaponizing of the global information space. 

The relevant center of the US State Department which concocted the report is engaged in propaganda and infiltration in the name of "global engagement." It is a source of disinformation and the command center of "perception warfare." 

From Operation Mockingbird that involved bribing and manipulating news media for propaganda purposes in the Cold War era, to a vial of white powder and a staged video of the "White Helmets" cited as evidence to wage wars of aggression in Iraq and Syria earlier this century, and then to the enormous lie made up to smear China's Xinjiang policy, facts have proven time and again that the US is an "empire of lies" through and through, the spokesperson said.

Even some in the US, such as Senator Rand Paul, acknowledged that the US government is the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world.

Some in the US may think that they can prevail in the information war as long as they propagate enough lies, but the people of the world are not blind, the spokesperson said.

"No matter how the US tries to pin the label of 'disinformation' on other countries, more and more people in the world have already seen through the US' ugly attempt to perpetuate its supremacy by weaving lies into 'emperor's new clothes' and smearing others," the spokesperson noted.  

China's response has revealed the distorted narrative of the US and fully exposed the US' use of this report as a crucial element in trying to shape public opinion and international consensus in its strategic competition with China, Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Sunday. 

The spokesperson's remarks have unveiled the insidious intentions and deceptive nature of Washington, contributing to a clearer and more comprehensive understanding within the international community of the US' unscrupulous practices in its China policy, Li said. This includes the US's longstanding history of hypocrisy, deception, and inconsistency in its words and actions.

The US has been taking every measure to make the world hostile against Washington's rivals. Launching an information war against China is therefore a part of US containment strategy, with a goal to create an "evil" image of China in the international public opinion arena. The new report is simply a latest example in the US' long list of tactics to make the world vigilant toward China, Shen Yi, a professor at Fudan University, told the Global Times.

However, the more the US tries, the more its hypocrisy is exposed. The last thing the US cares about is public access to information, and it cares about its hegemony, including that in the information field, the expert added.