Sky News host Chris Smith says “the sheer hypocrisy” of China’s gross and insulting fake image on Twitter in the past week “is breathtaking”.

China published to Twitter horrific and doctored propaganda images of an Australian soldier holding a knife to the throat of a child, in an attempt to seize on the release of ADF war crimes allegations.

The images – which were not censored by Twitter despite being faked – were published by China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian who said he was “shocked by murder of Afghan civilians & prisoners by Australian soldiers”.

“You don’t need to flick back into the history books more than century, to find a litany of modern day massacres, of their (China’s) own innocent people,” Mr Smith said.

Mr Smith pointed to 1989 where tanks rolled through Tiananmen Square crushing the bodies of student protestors and the Johnson South Reef Skirmish in 1988 where China shot 60 Vietnamese men for refusing to leave Vietnamese-owned territory.

“Let’s not forget the ghastly imprisonment of the Uighur people in Northwest China either, bound, gagged and treated violently in detention camps, as we speak,” he said.

“What classic hypocrites. What a regressive, cruel regime it still is, now prepared to ruin the lives of workers in other countries, like Australia, because we don’t toe their communist line.

“Some things though, are just not negotiable.”