Did they fake it? Or were they mistaken?

Apparently they still stand by the story, hard as that is to believe at this point.

Are you asking if there is evidence that it was intentionally wrong reporting?

No, AFAIK there was no such evidence.

Are you asking how, in good faith, such a factually wrong story could have made it to publication?

We also don’t know.

Are you asking why BB has not retracted it after being called out multiple times?

Maybe hubris, maybe profit motive.

At the end of the day, why would we trust anything BB publishes about China? They have Terminal licenses to sell and they don’t want to jeopardize their market.

Yeah that's pretty much what I was asking.

It was a weird story with weird reactions from the companies involved ... but at least I never ran across anything that explained how the reporting played out / if there was anything 'faked" or anything like that.

The whole thing seems to not have many answers.

One of them has since been promoted.