Watch ‘The Aussie woman scaring the Western propaganda machine’

For a stunning insight into how Western propaganda works, especially the US-sponsored propaganda that has poisoned Australia’s relationship with its biggest trading partner, you must watch the latest Citizens Insight interview.

Australian socio-legal consultant Jacqueline James has given an exclusive interview to the Citizens Party’s Citizens Insight YouTube program, on her personal experience with political disinformation and her efforts to counter dangerous propaganda.

Click here to watch CITIZENS INSIGHT: The Aussie woman scaring the Western Propaganda Machine—Jaq James

Jaq James is the Aussie woman scaring the Western propaganda machine because earlier this year, she exposed the work of the taxpayer-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

It should be a political scandal that ASPI is also funded by foreign governments, most significantly the US State Department, and the world’s biggest weapons manufacturers, to use its credibility as an Australian Commonwealth corporation to make wild claims against China that are reported worldwide as if they are fact.

In a 2020 report called “Uyghurs for Sale”, ASPI claimed China was using its Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang for “forced labour”.

Ms James, who has degrees in law and public policy, subjected ASPI’s 2020 report to a legal analysis of its allegations and evidence in a paper titled, “The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Uyghurs for Sale report: Scholarly Analysis or Strategic Disinformation?”

She concluded: “ASPI lobbed eighteen specific accusations relating to forced labour at China, and, as this paper shows, not one of them survives close scrutiny. It is submitted that this is because the ASPI report was not a work of scholarly analysis, but rather a piece of strategic disinformation to exact harm.”

Jaq James’s report has gone around the world and damaged ASPI’s credibility; for example, the recent UN Office of the High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR) report on Xinjiang, which was produced under pressure from the USA, did not cite ASPI’s 2020 report in its section on forced labour, even though the ASPI report was promoted as the seminal work on the issue.

In August, when Ms James attended an ASPI event in Canberra to ask questions about ASPI’s claims based on the findings in her paper, ASPI personnel could only respond with denials—including shameless denials that China had suffered a serious terrorism problem in Xinjiang—but couldn’t back up their work.

A few days later, when Citizens Party Research Director Robert Barwick attended a similar event in Melbourne with copies of Ms James’s paper to question the principal author of the ASPI “Uyghurs for Sale” report, the ASPI author refused to answer and Mr Barwick was ordered to leave the public event.

In the Citizens Insight interview, Robert Barwick questions Jaq James about her personal experiences which have led her to take up her mission to counter Western propaganda, including:

• Her firsthand knowledge of China, having worked there as an English teacher for many years;
• How she came to work at a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) University, and why that was positive for her and for Australia;
• The difference between her assumptions of what China would be like, which most Australians who consume mainstream media would share, and the reality she discovered when she lived there;
• Her painful personal, family experience with Western propaganda in Australia going back to the Howard government’s “children overboard” lies in 2001 and the “weapons of mass destruction” lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, where her mother is from;
• In one of the more shocking parts of the interview, how she helped to expose the deliberately false claims made in a 2017 ABC Four Corners episode which ignited the political hysteria about Chinese foreign “interference” in Australia;
• Her meticulous approach to assessing ASPI’s forced labour claims;
• Her findings in a second CoWestPro paper on allegations made by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch: “Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch’s Forced Xinjiang Labour Claims: Junk research or Noble Cause Corruption?”
• Her intention to organise a lawsuit against ASPI by Uyghurs who’ve lost their jobs due to ASPI’s false claims.

Citizens Insight interviewed Jaq James to give Australians an insight, from a fellow citizen, into the disinformation that has led Australia to contemplate, and openly discuss, a war with China, which would be a war of annihilation for Australia.

To avert such a disaster, Australians must see through the lies, and a good place to start is by watching and sharing CITIZENS INSIGHT: The Aussie woman scaring the Western Propaganda Machine—Jaq James