China running propaganda articles in N.Y. Times

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An official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party published hundreds of propaganda articles designed to look like ordinary news stories in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other newspapers without disclosing its purchases, as required by federal law.

China Daily's repeated violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act was reported in an analysis by the Washington Free Beacon.

Registered as a foreign agent, China Daily is allowed to place ads in the United States, but it must fully disclose its purchases.

The Free Beacon relied on experts who reviewed years of China Daily's FARA filings with the Justice Department.

Over the last seven years, the Free Beacon said, China Daily has run more than 700 online ads designed to look like news articles and purchased 500 print pages in six American newspapers.

The propaganda articles, running alongside actual news stories, frame state oppression in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong in a positive light.

The articles contain the legally required disclaimer that a Chinese entity prepared the ads. But they do not say that China Daily is owned by the Chinese Communist Party.

A spokesman for the Washington Post acknowledged to the Free Beacon that the newspaper has run China Daily ads for "more than 30 years."

The Chinese propaganda organ registered as a foreign agent in 1983 but did not disclose its relationship with U.S. newspapers in its biannual reports for 29 years.

Spokesmen for the Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal declined to say how much they have taken from China Daily over the years.

The Free Beacon, citing public relations professionals, said the spending could easily run into the millions.

'Harmony rules'

More than half of the Washington Post's China Daily ad inserts since 2012 have featured propaganda articles depicting the communist regime's presence in Tibet in a positive light.

"Harmony rules in Tibet's Catholic town," a 2013 China Daily article in the Post says. "Through mediation by the local government [Buddhism and Catholicism] entered an era of coexistence."

Shortly before the 2018 election, China Daily ran ads critical of the trade war in the Washington, D.C., publication Roll Call and in the Des Moines Register.

An ad in the Register ad labeled the trade war a "fruit of a president's folly," prompting a tweet from President Trump.

"China is actually placing propaganda ads in the Des Moines Register and other papers, made to look like news," Trump tweeted. "That's because we are beating them on Trade, opening markets, and the farmers will make a fortune when this is over!"