Like hundreds of other media outlets, Vox.com sent reporters to cover President Donald Trump’s summit with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un in Singapore. On June 13, Vox’s foreign editor Yochi Dreazen wrote a piece headlined, “The big winner of the Trump-Kim summit? China.” Dreazen’s analysis was unremarkable—except for the presence of a disclaimer at the bottom of the piece:
The author of this article wrote it while on a trip to China sponsored by the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), a privately funded nonprofit organization based in Hong Kong that is dedicated to “facilitating open and constructive exchange among policy-makers, business leaders, academics, think-tanks, cultural figures, and educators from the United States and China.” Vox.com’s reporting, as always, is independent.
If you believe that CUSEF is some benign “privately funded nonprofit organization,” you are, shall we say, mistaken. “Tung Chee-hwa, CUSEF’s chair, is vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, which is connected to the United Front Work Department, the Communist Party agency designed to advance party objectives with outside actors,” the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin noted in response to the story.
Vox, it turns out, has a long relationship with CUSEF. A 2013 Weekly Standard story on China’s influence peddling, “The Media Kowtow,” noted that Vox founder Ezra Klein went on a CUSEF-sponsored junket to China in 2010 (he was a Washington Post reporter at the time) with a bevy of other left-wing journalists. They were taken to a 21st-century version of a Potemkin village, and Klein uncritically reported what was said to him about the people living in this new government-planned housing development: “They got four free apartments, three of which they were now renting out. And medical coverage. And money for furnishings. And a food stipend. And—I’m not kidding, by the way—birthday cakes on their birthdays. Sweet deal.”
This about a country in which a billion people live in grinding poverty and untold numbers are sent to labor camps for tweets the government doesn’t like. Klein’s apparently sincere belief that China is a utopia handing out free real estate and birthday cakes to its citizens, reminiscent of British and American intellectuals of the 1930s charmed into denying famines and writing paeans to the Bolsheviks, didn’t much affect his reputation. But apparently it kept the CUSEF spigot open. Sweet deal.
