China’s government ordered the British Broadcasting Corp. off the airwaves in Chinese territory for news reports it called unfair, an outage that will be matched in Hong Kong by the local public radio network.
The action comes days after Beijing’s primary international news channel lost its license in the U.K.
The tit-for-tat move shows how media organizations are getting increasingly embroiled in China’s deteriorating relations with the West. Both London and Beijing have criticized each other’s action as hurting media freedom, depicting the news organizations involved as extensions of each government’s agenda.
The announcement from China’s National Radio and Television Administration at just past midnight Friday local time, at the start of the Lunar New Year holiday, appeared mostly symbolic for the mainland since international broadcasters such as the BBC already have limited reach there. The programming typically can only be…