Anti-China conspiracy theorist has amplifiers in India’s media; a new low pertains to spreading false rumours regarding Nijjar’s murder
by Dr. Piyush Mathur
Earlier last week, you might have come across very similar reports in sections of India's (mainstream) media on an allegation that China had orchestrated the murder of Harjeet Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen. This murder, of course, had already become one of the most well-known in the world lately, given that Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had, without sharing any evidence, repeatedly accused India publicly of its involvement in it—causing a huge diplomatic rift with the latter.
As for the allegation regarding China's involvement in this murder, it was prominently reported, without any editorial distancing, by NDTV, Hindustan Times, Times Now, and The Times of India, among many other well-known Indian outlets. The Times of India, in fact, put out two separate videos on YouTube, one titled 'Were Chinese agents behind the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar?’, and the other titled 'Unveiling the Truth: Jennifer Zeng exposes Chinese involvement in Hardeep Singh Nijjar's Death'. The latter video’s subtitle, one should notice, frames Zeng’s inputs as an ‘exposé’—a term typically used in journalism to refer to an investigative report that uncovers some startling fact (a point surely stressed in the video’s title itself). As for the reality of all this, it is quite another matter.
The Tribune
I myself first came across a breaking report on Zeng’s allegation on the website of the Chandigarh-based newspaper The Tribune. This report's title was irresistible: 'Independent blogger alleges China hand in Hardeep Singh Nijjar's killing in Canada'. I had to click the link to that title—except that the report’s introductory note at the top had named and described Zeng as 'a Chinese-born rights activist, journalist who is currently living in the US'. Those minor differences in the verbiages of the report’s title versus its introductory note would not have raised suspicions about The Tribune's reporting itself, even though they should have given a bit of a pause to an alert reader regarding its editorial attentiveness: That’s because a ‘blogger' (especially an ‘independent’ one) has no institutional oversight unlike a 'journalist'—who, in turn, can easily be expected to be at cross-purposes with an 'activist' on a given issue (with the latter being far closer to being an advocate or a lobbyist rather than a reporter).
But with our times being notable for all sorts of fluidities and rush, The Tribune's copydesk could be excused for not clarifying how Zeng could be presented as a 'blogger', a 'journalist', and an 'activist' all at once within the context of one single report (anyway). Contrariwise, it has to be suggested that The Tribune should have qualified Zeng’s presumably multidimensional profile suitably for its readers if it cared about serving as an editorially serious journalistic outlet. This gets worse, of course.
The Tribune had simply borrowed the report from the Asian News International (ANI), a New Delhi, India-based news agency. Nothing wrong with that—except that when an agency report includes sensational claims, then it is expected of a serious news outlet republishing it to make nuanced disclaimers along these lines: ‘The Tribune has not independently verified these claims’, or ‘This is an ANI report that we have not yet been able to verify,’ etc. The Tribune did none of that in this case (and these are the types of omissions one can encounter in this newspaper any day, which is nothing to be proud of).
Other Indian outlets
Alas, The Tribune operates alongside other Indian journalistic outlets—which had also circulated the same ANI report initially, on the same day. Some of these other outlets even had random follow-ups that were not only as incompetent as their original ANI republication but were also additionally misleading. These follow-ups had even more sensationalized titles (such as the Times of India’s second YouTube video mentioned earlier)—and they were just knee-jerk, Indian-nationalistic attempts at giving importance to a China-born critic of China, Zeng, within the context of an India-Canada controversy (Refer, for instance, to NDTV’s ‘5 Facts About Blogger Who Alleged China Behind Hardeep Nijjar's Killing’.)
These powerful media houses’ YouTube videos on this issue are nothing more than noisy assortments of the following: images from Zeng’s own video; textual bits regarding her and her claim (culled from the ANI report); and superficial details about her collected from the Internet. Worse, this type of stuff has been presented in a fashion that is tacitly trusting, even supportive, of Zeng. (In some other cases, media outlets—such as the Hindi newspaper Amar Ujala—simply published summaries of Zeng’s accusations as shocking news to which reactions from India’s and China’s foreign ministries had not yet been available.)
Screenshots of YouTube reports by the ANI News, Hindustan Times, Times of India, and Times Now on Jennifer Zeng’s social-media post accusing China of orchestrating Harjeet Singh Nijjar’s assassination (Photo credits: Dr. Piyush Mathur)
That type of media performance is already shameful, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
How about the ANI report itself?
As for the ANI report, it is an assortment of the following: quotations from Zeng’s own video (which she crossposted on several social media platforms); tidbits about the Canada-India diplomatic rift; and the same (confusing) biographical descriptions of Zeng that are found in The Tribune’s republication of the ANI report. (Like the ANI report itself, those biographical descriptions are also reprinted, with minor adjustments, in other Indian republications of that report.)
The ANI report does make an interesting revelation: ‘The independent blogger attributed her allegations to Chinese writer and YouTuber Lao Deng, who according to her, lives in Canada now.’ That seems innocuous enough on the surface, but when you actually see Zeng’s video what you additionally find is that she appears to regurgitate Deng’s (alleged) allegations by translating them (or, rather, claiming to translate them) from the original Mandarin (or some form of Chinese) into English; moreover, she presents them as ‘shocking revelations’ to have emerged from within the CCP.’ Inasmuch as it omitted these precise details in its report, the ANI (which obviously did not see or read Deng’s own productions on the topic) reposed all its trust in Zeng, and presented her dubious video’s simplified version—which inherently discourages the average reader from exercising critical thinking.
In any case, the ANI should not have attributed the allegations themselves to Zeng in its report’s title—which is this: ‘Independent blogger alleges China hand in Nijjar killing in Canada’. A more accurate title might have been this: ‘In her video, an independent blogger cites another independent blogger’s allegation that China had a hand in Nijjar killing in Canada’. And to make even that title truly valid, the ANI should have added a subtitle like this: ‘No evidence is presented in the video in support of these allegations.’
Meanwhile, inasmuch as the ANI report simply lifted several statements of Zeng from her video without prescreening them for their validity at all, it did nothing in the name of due diligence as a journalistic agency; insofar as it placed those statements within the factual, albeit utterly rehashed, context of the Canada-India diplomatic rift, it gave them as well as Zeng respectability as a source of valid information.
In sum, ANI had done nothing to prescreen Zeng as a source of valid information—even if qua allegations.
But why should that be a problem? Is Zeng’s video not a source of valid information?
Even if one had not done any background check on Zeng, her video-in-question would have sufficed to indicate to a Humanities-educated or alert viewer that it is little more than an exercise in anti-China conspiracy theory. Zeng starts out her video with this statement:
‘Today, shocking revelations about the assassination of the Sikh religious leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada, have emerged from within the CCP.’
But in the very next statement, via the passive voice used in it, those ‘shocking revelations’ get unassumingly downgraded to an allegation lacking a clear source; moreover, the notion that those revelations had emerged from inside the Communist Party of China (CCP) gets morphed, without any explanation, into a direct blame on the CCP itself:
‘It is alleged that the assassination was carried out by CCP agents.’
Having turned CCP into a source of a leak into the target of that leak without even registering the difference between those two stances, Zeng then claims (presumably based upon that so-called allegation) that the CCP assassinated Nijjar because it wanted ‘to frame India’ for the purpose of ‘creating discord between India and the West.’
Now, suppose that were the case, then surely CCP had already failed even before Zeng would produce her video given that no ‘discord’ had in fact resulted between India and the West broadly because of this assassination—despite Trudeau’s repeated attempts to expand it to include any other country that might oblige him and side with Canada. Not only that, the most relevant section of the West had already acknowledged that Canada’s accusation had been partly based upon the intelligence inputs that its network of Five Eyes had given to Canada—which is significant given that neither the Five Eyes nor Canada specifically (or for that matter India itself) had pointed fingers at China in this regard. Indeed, there is no polity even today, more than a week after Zeng’s video, that has blamed China for Nijjar’s murder.
Moving on, Zeng says in the video that China had ordered this assassination as part of a CCP plan called ‘Ignition Plan’, which, she adds, is meant ‘to disrupt the world in line with Xi Jinping's military strategy regarding Taiwan.’ This claim is far-fetched, preposterous in how it attempts to connect a minor incident oceans away in Canada—an incident whose effects would have been unpredictable anyway—with the much larger, and yet extremely specific, issue of China’s ‘military strategy regarding Taiwan’. That claim is also fictitious in that no Chinese plan called ‘Ignition Plan’ exists—and references to it are found only in Zeng’s online productions. Other than that, of course it is well-know that the People’s Republic of China (PRC or China) believes that the Republic of China (ROC, better known as Taiwan) is its part—and that the former aims to formalize the latter’s ‘integration’ into it. As disagreeable as the foregoing fact may be for many, it is anything but a revelation.
Next, Zeng reveals (yes, you can legitimately call it a revelation) that the information that she has provided in the video comes from ‘Chinese writer and YouTuber Lao Deng, who lives in Canada now’—except that she gives no information whatsoever about how Deng himself received or gathered that information. She also does not mention whether Deng provided any evidence in his own video. She shows no evidence anyway of her own or of Deng’s for any of her claims whatsoever—and there are plenty other claims further in the video that are nothing if not laughable. Toward the very end of her video, Zeng pulls a masterclass in conspiracy theory by saying this: ‘Lao Deng also mentioned that Hamas's sudden attacks against Israel were also part of the CCP's Ignition Plan.’
And yet, despite all of the above, the ANI reported Zeng’s iterations as if they were worthy of a news report, and many Indian news outlets republished the ANI report and sensationalized it further in their videos!
Leave aside this video, what about Zeng otherwise as a source of information?
It is not that difficult, really, to learn about Zeng. You can take the long route and look at Zeng’s previous videos and other posts, and ‘discover’ that they are every bit as much the work of a conspiracy theorist as the video we have discussed above—or you can do fairly simple searches on the Internet and ‘discover’ her outstanding reputation within American journalistic circles anyway as a spreader of false rumours, lies, and conspiracy theories: all of which are rooted in her agenda to trash China, one way or another.
One very methodical, relatively recent essay—dated September 27, 2022—that noted Zeng’s prior reputation as a conspiracy theorist was authored by Zeyi Yang. In this essay, published in the MIT Technology Review, Yang’s immediate goal was to trace and examine how a rumour claiming a revolt in China and President Xi Jinping’s ‘house arrest’ had spread on Twitter (which is now X). Yang’s meta-analysis of several research investigations into that viral Twitter thread had led her to Zeng as the source.
Quite like the current rumour, that September 2022 rumour was also not exactly birthed by Zeng: She had merely spearheaded its mass dissemination among English speakers by translating it into English from its alleged original Chinese version, and by circulating it within her own media compositions. In her compositions involving that rumour, Zeng (Yang points out) had maintained a minimal personal distance from it. In her essay, Yang correctly describes Zeng as ‘an activist and self-proclaimed journalist, who has a track record of spreading rumors and misattributed videos.’ (Note that Yang’s reference to Zeng as a ‘self-proclaimed journalist’ is accurate unlike that of the ANI’s or The Tribune’s or other Indian media outlets—which omit the crucial ‘self-proclaimed’ part.)
One may wonder why Zeng’s social-media handles on various platforms are not blocked by the platforms—which otherwise claim to be committed to fighting disinformation (a claim that was certainly prominent with the pre-Musk Twitter anyway—knowing that Must would come to control Twitter on October 27, 2022). At least a partial answer to that question is provided by Yang’s essay, which notes that Zeng had ‘been careful to consistently present the coup story as a “rumor”’—except that she also ‘put out over a dozen tweets about it, continuing to drum up speculation.’ That would be another way to say that Zeng is not merely self-deluded (if she is at all self-deluded), but she is also agenda-driven and rather skillful in spreading falsities and muddled (yet sensational) claims against China in a way that allows her to skirt legal pitfalls as an influencer.
But in the case of her Nijjar video, Zeng does not even use the word ‘rumour’ at all: Her only safeguard there is a subtle shift of focus to Deng in an early part of her speech—from herself as the source of the claims made in the video. The problem is that visitors to her video are predisposed to approach the video in a particular way based upon the title she has given it on YouTube (and elsewhere); that predisposition is only consolidated through the first few minutes of the video before Zeng cleverly routes any accountability for the claims to Deng, whom the Anglophone visitor cannot access directly anyway, even as she moves forward with plenty more lies that altogether amount to a ludicrous conspiracy theory against PRC.
India’s media, particularly ANI, has assisted Zeng in amplifying her conspiracy theory
To come back to Yang’s essay, one concluding observation it makes based upon several prior analyses is that Zeng’s English translation and circulation on Twitter of the rumour regarding Chinese revolt and President Xi Jinping’s house arrest was ‘amplified by Indian Twitter accounts.’ Yang classifies this development as ‘Stage 3’ of the spread of that rumour. Although one of the Indian Twitter accounts she cites here is that of a TV channel (@Indiatvnews), she does not blame India’s media specifically for spreading Zeng’s translated rumour—putting it down, instead, to several factors that would have contributed to the average Indian Twitter user falling for the rumour.
As of October 2023, though, it would be safe to say that it is hardly just the average Indian user of social media who falls for and amplifies Zeng’s conspiracy theory; it is more like India’s establishment media, often following ANI’s lead, gives respectability to Zeng and circulates her falsities as some kind of news. Given the notoriously haphazard, low-quality institutional monitoring inside India’s media houses, even lessons learnt along the way are easily forgotten—and laxity in reporting remains the norm.
So, for example, The Tribune had come to know, in September 2022, about the falsity of Zeng’s 2022 rumour about China’s revolt and President Xi Jinping’s house arrest—as evidenced in its staff journalist Sandeep Dikshit’s report ‘Analysts puncture coup rumours against Chinese President Xi Jinping’. In this report, Dikshit refers to Zeng, apparently cynically, as a '“‘freelance journalist’,” blaming her for amplifying that rumour in English (on Twitter). That, however, did not prevent his newspaper from carrying an ANI report—which prominently retained the photo of one of Zeng’s tweets—on December 20 that same year on Covid-19-related predictions focusing on PRC. The Tribune’s refusal to learn from its own prior reports about the same person or issue has continued with its amplification of Zeng’s recent conspiracy theory about Nijjar’s murder.
Nor is the ANI the only Indian agency to blame; the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) had also carried a very similar report on the same day (June 9, 2023) that also presented Zeng’s false rumour regarding Nijjar’s murder as respectable accusations/claims. Somehow, it is the ANI report that got republished by so many Indian outlets. Other than that, Indian news outlets such as CNN-News18 and Times Now have intermittently interviewed Zeng as a source of valid information regarding China—which is the last thing one would expect of journalistic outlets.
At a time when India is being widely regarded as the biggest global source of disinformation, it should neither be a surprise nor a consolation that NDTV’s gushing essay on Zeng—‘5 Facts About Blogger Who Alleged China Behind Hardeep Nijjar's Killing’—crucially lacks the only fact that needed to have been stated by any news outlet: Jennifer Zeng is a conspiracy theorist, a liar, and a rumour monger.
A research scholar at the New Jersey-based Ronin Institute, Dr. Piyush Mathur is the author of the book Technological Forms and Ecological Communication: A Theoretical Heuristic (Lexington Books, 2017). If you wish to contact him, send us a message here.
References and background material
Amar Ujala (October 9, 2023) ‘भारत को फंसाने के लिए ड्रैगन की चाल!: ब्लॉगर का दावा- चीन ने करवाई खालिस्तानी आतंकी निज्जर की हत्या, वजह बताई’ (Downloaded from the following URL on October 20, 2023: https://www.amarujala.com/world/independent-blogger-jennifer-zeng-alleges-china-hand-in-hardeep-singh-nijjar-killing-in-canada-2023-10-09)
Asian News International (ANI) (December 20, 2023) ‘Epidemiologist predicts 60% of China, 10% of world population to be infected by covid in next 3 months, deaths in millions’ (Downloaded from the following URL on October 20, 2023: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/health/60-pc-of-china-10-pc-of-earths-population-to-be-infected-by-covid-in-next-90-days-deaths-likely-to-be-in-millions-epidemiologist-462733)
Asian News International (ANI) (October 9, 2023) ‘Independent blogger alleges China hand in Nijjar killing in Canada’ (Downloaded from the following URL on October 20, 2023: https://aninews.in/news/world/us/independent-blogger-alleges-china-hand-in-nijjar-killing-in-canada20231009063304/)
Dikshit, Sandeep (September 26, 2022) ‘Analysts puncture coup rumours against Chinese President Xi Jinping’ The Tribune (Downloaded from the following URL on October 20, 2023: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/nation/analysts-puncture-xi-coup-rumours-435321)
Hindustan Times (October 9, 2023) ‘China Behind Nijjar Killing', Claims Independent Blogger Jennifer Zeng’ (Downloaded from the following URL on October 20, 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1atgWGckHKQ)
Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) ‘China's hand in Nijjar's killing, claims NY-based activist-blogger’ (Downloaded from the following URL on October 20, 2023: https://ianslive.in/chinas-hand-in-nijjars-killing-claims-ny-based-activist-blogger--20231009161823)
Jones, Marc Owen (October 16, 2023) ‘Analysis: Why is so much anti-Palestinian disinformation coming from India?’ (Downloaded from the following URL on October 20, 2023: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/16/analysis-why-is-so-much-anti-palestinian-disinformation-coming-from-india)
NDTV (October 9, 2023) ‘5 Facts About Blogger Who Alleged China Behind Hardeep Nijjar's Killing’ (Downloaded from the following URL on October 20, 2023: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/5-facts-about-chinese-blogger-jennifer-zeng-who-alleged-china-behind-khalistani-terrorist-hardeep-singh-nijjars-killing-4463566)
The Times of India (October 9, 2023) ‘Were Chinese agents behind the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar? China-born blogger Jennifer Zeng claims so’ (Downloaded from the following URL on October 20, 2023: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/international/were-chinese-agents-behind-killing-of-hardeep-singh-nijjar-china-born-blogger-jennifer-zeng-claims-so/videoshow/104282219.cms)
The Times of India (October 9, 2023) ‘Unveiling the Truth: Jennifer Zeng Exposes Chinese Involvement in Hardeep Singh Nijjar's Death’ (Downloaded from the following URL on October 20, 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0JnakgTKbM)
The Tribune (October 9, 2023) ‘Independent blogger alleges China hand in Hardeep Singh Nijjar's killing in Canada’ (Downloaded from the following URL on October 20, 2023: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/diaspora/independent-blogger-alleges-china-hand-in-nijjar-killing-in-canada-551757)
Yang, Zeyi (September 27, 2022) ‘How the false rumor of a Chinese coup went viral’ MIT Technology Review (Downloaded from the following URL on October 19, 2023: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/27/1060131/twitter-misinformation-coup-china-india/)
Zeng, Jennifer (October 9, 2023) ‘Exclusive: CCP Kills Canadian Sikh Nijjar To Frame India, as Part of Ignition Plan to Disrupt World’ Inconvenient Truths [YouTube Channel] (Downloaded from the following URL on October 10, 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NyhClMBqMM)