This week, the reliably pro-communist New York Times found itself in more hot water after it published a Sunday column from an official with a Chinese Communist Party outfit without proper disclosure as well as failing to note that said author appeared last year with longtime columnist and pro-China defender Thomas Friedman at an event for a think tank tied to Chinese state-run media.
National Review media and enterprise reporter Isaac Schorr had the details about Dr. Wang Huiyao — who works for the CCP’s United Front Work Department — and his Times piece calling for China to help with peace talks between Russia and Ukraine:
A Sunday guest essay in the New York Times from a Dr. Wang Huiyao submits that the People’s Republic of China can play a key role in brokering a peace agreement in the ongoing war Russia is waging against Ukraine. Wang is a Chinese Communist Party propagandist, but the Times failed to disclose his affiliation despite its obvious relevance to his making an argument that would increase Beijing’s prestige on the world stage.
“Securing a multilateral resolution to the crisis in Ukraine will be a tough and risky challenge, but there is no country better placed to do so than China,” writes Wang, who admits to the increasingly close relationship between his country and Vladimir Putin’s, but also asserts that “China deeply values the principle of state sovereignty and has long opposed outside interference in what it considers internal affairs such as Taiwan.”
(....)
The United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an independent agency of the American Government, stated in a 2018 report that “the challenges posed by the CCP’s United Front operations to the United States are significant.”
Instead, all The Times did was list him as “the founder and president of the Center for China and Globalization, a nongovernmental think tank based in Beijing” who “advises the Chinese government.”
Noting that Chinese dictator Xi Jinping as said United Front is his “magic weapon,” he went to Hudson Institute expert Jonas Parello-Pesner, who said the official state propagandists were able to, in Schorr’s words, “infiltrat[e] and influenc[e] the political, academic, and media spheres of countries like Australia and New Zealand.”
Rewind to March 2021 and Huiyao spoke with Friedman at an event that was spread far and wide across Chinese state-run media outlets, including the English-language paper, China Daily.
The Free Beacon broke that story on April 13, 2021 (click “expand”):
When Friedman, a longtime columnist for the Times, participated in a March 29 "fireside chat" with the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing think tank with close ties to the regime, the state-owned China Global Television Network (CGTN) broadcast the entire 90-minute interview. Once the interview was over, the network disseminated the interview as an example of a Western intellectual calling for improved relations between the two superpowers.
"Friedman said 1979-2019 was a golden era of global prosperity and peace with the US and China at the core, and the two countries need to find ways to work together for the sake of the world’s development," a writeup of the interview by the state-owned China Daily read.
Chinese propagandists touted the Friedman interview across the world, including in the United States. China Daily paid to run advertorials highlighting the interview on the website of Foreign Policy, a global affairs magazine read by American foreign policy elites. Foreign Policy did not respond to a request for comment.
So much for transparency and standing up for the free press and basic human rights.
