David Rohde, then an editor at The New Yorker, flew to China on someone else's dime and came back with a fascinating conclusion for his Reuters blog: "Americans, meanwhile, should accept that large-scale manufacturing will never return to the United States."
The someone paying for the trip was the China-United States Exchange Foundation — a Hong Kong-based outfit founded by Tung Chee-hwa, former vice chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. Which, for those keeping score, is a key organ of the Chinese Communist Party's United Front system.
Investigative journalist Natalie Winters cross-referenced CUSEF's foreign-agent FARA filings with archived newsletters and annual reports from 2009 through 2012 and found something remarkable: more than twenty prominent American journalists accepted CUSEF-funded trips to China. Reporters and editors from The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, NPR, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, MSNBC, and Newsweek all took the ride.
The names aren't mid-level stringers. Ezra Klein, co-founder of Vox and current New York Times columnist. Ronald Brownstein, CNN senior political analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic. Marjorie Miller, former vice president and editor at the Associated Press. David Sweeney, former managing editor at NPR. Jon Healey, deputy editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times. Jonathan Alter at MSNBC. Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post.
CUSEF's own FARA filings described the purpose of these junkets in refreshingly direct language: generating "favorable coverage" and plans to "effectively disseminate positive messages to the media, key influencers and opinion leaders, and the general public" regarding China.
And disseminate they did.
Rohde didn't just accept the trip. He wrote that "unlike the United States where free-market advocates deride the role of government, the Chinese state has played a central role in creating, supporting and expanding businesses here." He praised Chinese companies finding profits and told Americans to stop expecting manufacturing jobs to come home. This from a journalist whose outlet never disclosed who funded the travel.
Steve Chapman, former Chicago Tribune columnist and editorial writer, offered this gem after his CUSEF trip: "China may have a bad human rights record, but you don't have to take off your shoes for airport security." A human rights record that includes concentration camps, forced organ harvesting, and the surveillance state that makes the TSA look like mall cops. But sure — the shoe thing.
Rampell, to her limited credit, at least disclosed it. At the bottom of her Washington Post coverage she wrote: "Disclosure: My trip is being paid for by the China-United States Exchange Foundation, a Hong Kong-based nonprofit that aims to improve Americans' understanding of China."
Then there's Steve Clemons, former editor-at-large of The Hill, who took the CUSEF trip and subsequently wrote that "Biden gets China" while championing the emergence of "a new global order" with China as its "anchor." Clemons and Joe Biden apparently had a cozy enough relationship that when Biden traveled to China in 2013, he introduced Clemons to Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao as "a very important man" and added, "He's the one you really want to speak to." Hunter Biden was also on that trip.
One detail Winters flagged deserves its own paragraph. Bruce Stokes, former National Journal correspondent, took a CUSEF-funded trip. His spouse is Wendy Sherman — who went on to serve as Biden's deputy secretary of state, the number-two diplomat in the country. The journalist married to the deputy secretary of state took a free trip from a CCP front group. Neither of those facts disqualified anyone from anything.
Congressional reports have described the United Front — the CCP system CUSEF operates within — as seeking to "co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority" of the Chinese Communist Party. Co-opt and neutralize. That's not a trade delegation. That's an intelligence framework with a hospitality budget.
Matthew Yglesias, Vox co-founder and Klein's former partner, seemed to understand the dynamic just fine. He noted that CUSEF trips were designed to "give Party flunkies notes" on propaganda messaging. He also once mused that "Moody's, S&P, and the People's Bank of China should just run the government." Even the people who see the game can't help playing it.
The pattern is clean. CUSEF identified America's most influential journalists. It flew them to China on managed, curated trips. Its own legal filings stated the goal was favorable media coverage. And in the months and years that followed, those same journalists produced exactly that — articles arguing Americans should accept Chinese economic dominance, defending Beijing's model of state capitalism, and downplaying human rights concerns with jokes about airport security.
Every one of these outlets spent 2016 through 2020 warning us about foreign influence in American media.
They just never mentioned who was on the plane.