A newspaper under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the supervisor of the two state-owned telecoms giants at the centre of a duopoly scandal, has fired back at accusations aired by China Central Television this week.
In a sharply worded front-page article yesterday, the People's Posts and Telecommunications News criticised Wednesday's CCTV report - which led to a plunge in the two companies' share prices - for misleading the public and upsetting tens of thousands of staff at China Telecom and China Unicom.
The unusual article revealed a fight between the MIIT and the National Development and Reform Commission and cast doubt on where an NDRC anti-duopoly investigation was heading.
The article denounced the CCTV report as unprofessional in the way it explained how the companies were suspected of duopolistic practices; as groundless for not including enough statistical evidence; inaccurate in comparing the prices for telecoms services with other countries'; and lacking in journalistic ethics.
'The four-minute report had interviews with the NDRC alone. It didn't give a chance to the other parties involved in the case at all,' the article said. The CCTV report 'was filled with errors and seriously contradicted the facts', it said.
It also accused CCTV of 'asking a toddler to race with an adult' by comparing broadband internet service charges on the mainland with those in developed countries. CCTV said that last year the mainland's average broadband speed ranked 71st globally, but the average charge was more than triple that in developed countries.
Professor Sheng Jiemin, an anti-monopoly expert at Peking University, said that as an enforcer of the Anti-monopoly Law, the NDRC would be assumed to understand the law better than the MIIT.