Yesterday, the New York Times published an opinion piece from Wang Wen, a literal CCP propagandist. That’s not an exaggeration — here’s Wen’s biography, as described in the Times article: “Mr. Wang researches global governance and has studied China’s re-emergence as a world power. He is a Communist Party member and a former chief opinion editor of The Global Times, an arm of the official Communist Party newspaper, The People’s Daily.”
Wang’s article, titled “Why China’s People No Longer Look Up to America,” is breathtaking. “When I was a university student in northwestern China in the late 1990s, my friends and I tuned in to shortwave broadcasts of Voice of America, polishing our English while soaking up American and world news,” Wang writes. “We flocked to packed lecture halls whenever a visiting American professor was on campus.” But now that America has ostensibly sacrificed its moral standing — and, perhaps just coincidentally, Wang has accepted a full-time job as a CCP apologist — things have changed:
But after years of watching America’s wars overseas, reckless economic policies and destructive partisanship — culminating in last year’s disgraceful assault on the U.S. Capitol — many Chinese, including me, can barely make out that shining beacon anymore.
Yet as relations between our countries deteriorate, the United States blames us. Secretary of State Antony Blinken did so in May, saying that China was “undermining” the rules-based world order and could not be relied upon to “change its trajectory.”
I have misgivings about some of my country’s policies. And I recognize that some criticisms of my government’s policies are justified. But Americans must also recognize that U.S. behavior is hardly setting a good example.
Last I checked, America is not conducting a full-scale ethnic genocide of one of its religious minorities, replete with concentration camps and forced abortions. Any rational, unbiased observer would surely scoff at the idea that the January 6 riot at the Capitol was morally analogous to Uyghur concentration camps. But then again, Wang is not an unbiased observer. What’s that famous Upton Sinclair line? “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Whether or not the New York Times is obligated to publish salaried CCP organs, I’ll leave up to the readers to decide.