Why is the New York Times carrying water for the CCP?



In a prior article, I exposed the tangled web of the New York Times’ obsessive propaganda series, which attempted to discredit Shen Yun Performing Arts.

As it turned out, the lead author of the series, Nicole Hong, is only a degree of separation away from the Chinese Communist Party, which has launched a global propaganda campaign against the group and Falun Gong, the spiritual movement that founded Shen Yun. The CCP has targeted Falun Gong for extermination since 1999. Hong’s father has worked at two CCP-backed universities and was an honorary overseas director for a group with ties to high-ranking CCP officials.

The New York Times began a spree of desperate articles attempting to defend communism.

Though this may explain why Hong was motivated to do the CCP’s bidding, why did the New York Times allow it?

A walk through the paper’s history with communism leaves no doubt that its recent attacks on Shen Yun are consistent with its past willingness to carry water for authoritarian regimes.

Whitewashing communism

Perhaps the most infamous example of the Times doing the bidding for a communist regime was its coverage of Josef Stalin, who was responsible for more deaths through mass killings than Nazi Germany.

Walter Duranty, the Times’ Moscow bureau chief, wrote 13 propaganda articles, winning him a Pulitzer Prize in 1932. The articles gave a favorable view of Soviet communist policies, downplayed Stalin’s brutality, and claimed that the wealthy weren’t being physically exterminated but instead “liquidated as a class.”

In short, Duranty was doing the 1930s equivalent of clicking “copy and paste” on the very same Soviet propaganda he was being presented — without performing the due diligence expected of a journalist.

In 1933, Duranty outright denied the famine that was visible before his very eyes. He called reports of starvation “exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” despite evidence to the contrary from other journalists.

Hollywood got it right — for once

The Times’ reporting was so misleading that even liberal Hollywood pushed back. The 2019 film “Mr. Jones” tells the true story of Gareth Jones, the journalist who first reported on the Soviet famine of 1930 to 1933. That famine killed as many as 8.7 million people, including up to 5 million during the Holodomor in Ukraine and 2.5 million during the Asharshylyk in Kazakhstan.

In 2017, the Times began a spree of desperate articles attempting to defend communism. Its “Red Century” series, launched to mark the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, included several opinion pieces accused of romanticizing or downplaying the horrors of communism.

In one example, the Times ran an article headlined “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism,” written by Kristen R. Ghodsee, who later published a book with the same title. The piece typified the paper’s vain effort to find redeeming qualities in socialist and communist systems.

From the headline alone, the piece became one of history’s most mercilessly mocked New York Times articles. But those who read past the headline found even more to laugh at.

Among the “evidence” Ghodsee presented was an interview she conducted with a 65-year-old Bulgarian woman who had lived under communism for 43 years. The woman claimed that the free market — rather than aging out of her 20s — hampered her “ability to develop healthy amorous relationships.”

The millions of women who starved under the communist regime could not be reached for comment.

Bias laid bare

That was just one of the absurd articles the Times published that year defending communism. Other doozies included an article portraying Vladimir Lenin as an environmentalist whose love for nature led to conservation efforts in Russia — while ignoring the environmental destruction under his successors.

Another piece argued that the American Communist Party in the mid-20th century gave people a sense of moral authority and purpose in fighting social injustice while downplaying its complicity in covering up or supporting Soviet atrocities. Yet another article argued that Bolsheviks raised their children with “world literature” and communal values, suggesting a sophisticated cultural upbringing under communism — an ideology that destroys culture.

A number of reasons could explain why the New York Times might amplify an anti-Shen Yun narrative beyond a supposed journalistic duty. For one, the paper has a well-documented anti-religious bias. It may also be waging a proxy battle due to Shen Yun’s ties to the Epoch Times — a competitor that heavily criticizes the Times.

The reality is that Shen Yun is growing, and a juicy exposé on a “mysterious” financially successful dance troupe will drive clicks and subscriptions, especially amid the Times’ desperate bid to maintain the relevance it deservedly lost.

The New York Times wages war on Shen Yun — but is Beijing pulling the strings?



Since August 2024, the New York Times has ramped up attacks on Shen Yun Performing Arts, a renowned organization dedicated to reviving the traditional Chinese culture that the Chinese Communist Party uprooted and violently silenced during Mao’s Cultural Revolution — and continues to do so today.

The frequency of the hit pieces borders on obsession, with the Times publishing 10 articles on the topic within the past six months.

The timing and focus of the New York Times’ articles coincide with the CCP’s broader strategy of transnational repression.

These stories, authored by “investigative reporter” Nicole Hong and co-author Michael Rothfeld, allege mistreatment of performers and financial improprieties within Shen Yun. Over 60% of Hong’s articles since August have been focused solely on discrediting Shen Yun. Why the obsession? A closer examination of Hong’s background and potential connections to the CCP raises questions about the impartiality and motivations behind her reporting.

Hong’s CCP connections

Hong has been with the New York Times since 2019. She previously worked at the Wall Street Journal, where she once told an interviewer:

We have a massive platform at the Journal. We have millions of readers. The editing process is very tough. When these big pieces come out — things we’ve been investigating for weeks — they’re bulletproof. People are going to talk about it.

That standard appears to be absent at the Times, which has become known for embarrassing itself in the Trump era.

Despite her professional credentials, Hong’s familial connections merit scrutiny over her ability to remain impartial.

Her father, George Hong, is a professor at Fordham University in New York and holds several significant positions within organizations closely linked to the CCP.

For example, he serves as a visiting professor at Zhejiang University and Jiangxi Normal University, both linked to the CCP. The former is a public university affiliated with China’s Ministry of Education, while the latter is co-sponsored by the Ministry of Education and the communist Jiangxi provincial government.

More notably, he was an honorary overseas director of the Western Returned Scholars Association, part of the CCP’s United Front Work Department. This agency gathers intelligence on individuals and organizations inside and outside of China to attack opposition and has been described as “the most powerful association” by Chinese media. In 2023, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping called on WRSA to rally talent worldwide to bolster its efforts.

Given George Hong’s prominent role within the WRSA, questions arise about potential biases and influences that may extend to his daughter. An overwhelming majority of children share their parents’ political affiliation, which would help explain why Nicole Hong is pushing false, CCP-friendly narratives.

And she’s not the only one with a potential conflict of interest.

CCP ties beyond Hong

Hong’s articles are co-written with Michael Rothfeld. Before 1979, the United States and the People's Republic of China had never established formal diplomatic relations. In 1979, Rothfeld was a member of the first cultural delegation from the United States to China, raising further questions about possible biases.

So shoddy is Hong and Rothfeld’s reporting that even the supposed victims they cite contradict their claims.

In their debut August article alleging that Shen Yun mistreats its performers, Hong and Rothfeld highlight untreated injuries and emotional abuse. They claim performers were discouraged from seeking medical care and were financially exploited, subjecting young performers to extensive rehearsal schedules with minimal pay.

However, the performers mentioned in Hong and Rothfeld’s reporting outright contradicted their claims.

One performer, Eugene Liu, was portrayed as a victim — a characterization he flatly denies. Liu, who performed from 2015 to 2017, publicly refuted their claims, stating that his experience with Shen Yun was overwhelmingly positive. He credited his time with the dance company for his subsequent artistic successes and for helping him avoid common pitfalls among his peers, such as internet addiction and substance abuse. Liu said he spoke out due to fear that Hong’s second-rate reporting would undermine Shen Yun’s mission to highlight the persecution of Falun Gong adherents in China.

The only expert quoted in Hong and Rothfeld’s debut report is Nicholas Bequelin from Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center — which the U.S. Department of Education previously investigated for taking money from the CCP.

Shen Yun’s violent opponents

Most damning of all, a Chinese American YouTuber, who calls Falun Gong his enemy, claimed on social media to have been the catalyst for the Times’ reporting — and personally assisted them.

After Hong and Rothfeld’s debut article, he posted on X, “I was the one who introduced people to the New York Times, especially for the initial interviews [to discredit Shen Yun].” He was later arrested and charged after being discovered carrying an illegal firearm near a Shen Yun event. Even if he was lying about his involvement in the reporting, his statements still illustrate that Shen Yun’s critics are more than willing to resort to violence.

The timing and focus of the New York Times articles coincide with the CCP’s broader strategy of transnational repression. According to Freedom House, a nonprofit that advocates democracy, political freedom, and human rights, China conducts a “sophisticated” and “comprehensive” campaign of transnational repression, aiming to control and influence narratives about its policies and practices abroad. The CCP has targeted Falun Gong in particular since 1999 with its campaign to “eradicate” the religion to maintain state atheism.

China has detained Falun Gong practitioners for “reeducation through labor,” tortured 2,000 to death as of 2009, and killed 65,000 to harvest their organs between 2000 and 2008. Even in the absence of more up-to-date statistics, the numbers remain shocking.

And this is the party “America’s newspaper of record” has chosen to side with.

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Is America turning into North Korea?



When Yeonmi Park fled North Korea, she came to what she believed was the freest country on earth.

However, one of the first questions she was asked upon becoming a citizen was whether or not she would ever use hate speech against another person. If she had said yes, she would not have been allowed to become a citizen.

This was jarring to her, as she knows better than anyone that if you are not allowed to engage in free speech, you are not in a free country.

Dave Rubin sat down with Park "The Rubin Report," where she tells him just how worried she is about the state of America. She says, “Most people would get really shocked that, you know, how dare you compare North Korea to America?”

She argues that she’s not “comparing the living standards,” but rather “the tactics that North Korea used to control people and brainwash us were the same tactics [she’s] seeing right now in current America.”

Park warns that she “sees this country getting destroyed.”

She goes on to explain that she was demonetized, censored, and shadow-banned on all the social media platforms for attempting to discuss how North Korean women are being raped and their organs harvested in China under the communist party. What happened to freedom of speech in America?

Not only that, but during the pandemic, her 2-year-old son was forced to wear a mask for up to eight hours a day while people were opening strip clubs and dog parks next door to the day care.

She says she remembers thinking that “somehow the dogs have more rights than my child in America right now.”

She continues, “I am scared every day for my son, because if America falls, I cannot imagine the world without America. Where would my son escape to for freedom? There’s no place left.”


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