Distorted report can't sour China-Russia ties

This is an editorial from China Daily.

The fuss some US media outlets have made over Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to China, during which he will also attend the third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, exposes their bias against Beijing and Moscow and their proclivity for distorting facts.

"The two countries have forged an informal alliance against the United States and other democratic nations," a US media organization claimed in its report on Tuesday on Putin's two-day visit to China.

That is a gross distortion of the relationship between the two neighbors. The US media sees the ghost of "alliance" in Sino-Russian relations because neither Beijing nor Moscow yields to Washington's hegemony. Instead, the two countries follow international laws, respect the United Nations-centered world order, and support multipolar global governance.

The US side has been claiming the good-neighborly and friendly relationship between China and Russia is a type of alliance because it is desperate to project them as enemies of "democratic nations". The tragedy is that the US media uses Washington's yardstick to measure Sino-Russian ties.

Sino-Russian relations are based on mutual respect and win-win cooperation; they neither target any third party nor are they at the mercy of any third party. Not to mention the two countries, both permanent members of the UN Security Council, play important roles in promoting global security and stability.

In the same report, the US media, in all its absurdity, has tried to drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing by distorting what Putin told a Chinese media outlet about the Belt and Road Initiative on Friday.

Putin supported the initiative, saying "We don't have any contradictions here, on the contrary, there is a certain synergy" referring to the relationship between the Belt and Road Initiative and the Eurasian Economic Union program. But the US media misinterpreted it to claim Moscow has downplayed the "impact of China's economic influence in a region that Russia has long considered its backyard". The report went so far as to vilify the initiative as a "debt trap" as well.

Ironically, the aforementioned US media, as well as other US media outlets, has maintained a studied silence on the Joe Biden administration's "Build Back Better World" program, floated two years ago. After the "B3W" proved to be empty talk, the Biden administration put forward the "India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor" at the G20 Summit in New Delhi last month. But it, too, lacks practicality.

The US has never lacked such "practicality" to incite "color revolutions" or launch wars around the world. But it's always short of that when it comes to promoting common development. The US media's prejudice is self-evident in such reports, and by selling the US' agenda, such media outlets are harming their own credibility.