After Chinese national flags were raised at a festival in Malaysia, prompting a backlash from Malay nationalists, an image of a doctored news article circulated online that falsely claimed China was considering retracting investments in the Southeast Asian country’s northern Kedah state. AFP found the article was manipulated to imitate the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong-based newspaper. As of November 11, 2024, there were no official reports that China was set to retract investment in Kedah.
The fabricated article — shared in a Facebook post on October 28, 2024 — was created under the banner of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP) newspaper.
The Malay-language post said people in Malaysia’s northern Kedah state and eastern Kelantan state were not “desperate for investment from communist China”.
Kedah announced in March that it was poised to receive 50 billion ringgit ($1.1 billion) worth of investment from eight Chinese companies (archived link).
“China is considering to pull out their investment in Kedah”, read the purported article’s headline, above an image of Chinese President Xi Jinping and officials inspecting military equipment.
The text below the image read: “Beijing: Following an altercation involving the incident of China flag in Malaysia, Xi Jinping is reportedly calling several companies for a meeting.”
The same image was also shared on Facebook here, here, and here, as well as on X and WhatsApp.
It surfaced after Chinese nationals attending a festival in Malaysia’s northwest Perak state on October 24 waved China’s national flag at the event, triggering a backlash from Malay nationalists who are opposed to what they see as growing Chinese influence in the Southeast Asian country (archived links here and here).
China has been Malaysia’s biggest trading partner for the past 15 years, and Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has sought a close and constructive relationship with Beijing (archived link). Anwar visited China in early November to further boost economic ties, his third trip since taking office in 2022.
However, SCMP told AFP on October 31 that the circulating image was a “fake news story imitating” the publication.
It had not published any such article about China pulling investments from Malaysia as of November 11, 2024.
Doctored article
A reverse image search on Google led to the same image of Xi published in other SCMP articles (here and here), which credited it to state broadcaster CCTV (archived links here and here).
However, the layout of these articles differed from the purported report that circulated online.
The font, placement and alignment of the headline and standfirst in the doctored report did not match the layout of the articles on the SCMP website.
Below is a screenshot comparison between the falsely shared report (left) and an article on the SCMP’s homepage (right):
