Not a full two months after firing former opinion page editor James Bennet for publishing a mainstream opinion from a sitting U.S. senator, the New York Times published a full-scale coronavirus propaganda piece by an employee of the Chinese Communist Party-controlled Peking University.
Chair professor Yi Rao of Peking University, whose president is CCP official Ho Ping, as appointed by the state, took to the New York Times to claim that his Queens-based uncle would not have died of the coronavirus if he had been in China instead of the United States. One would expect that Rao, a well-connected neurobiologist who renounced his American citizenship and returned to China after Dick Cheney heralded what he calls the country’s “axis of evil,” would at least provide detail-oriented insight into how he thinks the Chinese medical system better handled the novel coronavirus that it unleashed on the world. But the bulk of the piece is spent describing how most of Rao’s family capitalized on American education only to come back to China because of their political hatred for the U.S. (Rao’s recently deceased uncle Eric was the only one never to return to China.)
The entirety of Rao’s explicit argument that China handled the coronavirus better goes as follows:
Our family has 12 members in Wuhan, mostly on my mother’s side, and six in New York, mostly on my father’s side. All my relatives in Wuhan are safe. Uncle Eric died in New York after the pandemic had moved to the United States — the world’s strongest country militarily, the richest economically and the most advanced medically.
The United States had two months or more to learn from China’s experience with this coronavirus, and it could have done much more to lower infection rates and fatalities. My father is struggling to accept his brother’s death partly, too, because he believes that he could have treated Uncle Eric — that in China Uncle Eric would have been saved.
As the pandemic rages on in the United States and throughout the world, with some smaller outbreaks in China, the United States and China are not collaborating, but competing, in the search for a successful vaccine for the virus and treatment measures for the disease.
That’s it. That is the entire argument backing up the entire thesis of the piece. That is what the paper of record thought suitable for publication. And mind you, just a few weeks ago, this newspaper overhauled the staff of its op-ed page because of supposed lapses in quality control, which is to say, they published a mainstream opinion piece by Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas.
Rao’s argument is risible. If a high school student handed a freshman year English teacher such a facile argument backed by a single anecdote, he would be laughed out of the room with an F. To print such an argument in any newspaper, let alone the most famous one on the planet, with transparent Chinese propaganda — written by an employee of a state-controlled enterprise and apparent agent of the Chinese Communist Party — is unconscionable, especially given the Cotton debacle.
The Arkansas senator, an Army veteran, argued that military ought to back up local law enforcement in the emerging violent rioting taking over cities after the cop killing of George Floyd, an opinion shared by 58% of the nation, including 46% of people who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. For the sin of publishing a senator sharing an opinion held by the majority of the nation, other New York Times staffers accused their editors of inciting violence and putting an entire race of people in physical danger. This supposed anti-racism crusade culminated in Bennet getting fired, Jewish opinion editor Bari Weiss getting bullied and threatened until she quit, and fellow editor Jim Dao, yet another person of color, getting demoted.
Somehow, the New York Times just published overt anti-American propaganda based on not one scientific fact, by a man paid by Communist Party officials, without batting an eye. You can probably tell that Bennet is already missed.
