“The real target of the US assassination of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani — China.” Yes, that’s a real headline, published in January atop an opinion piece in the South China Morning Post.
It got my attention for two reasons. The first is the dubious and frankly weird assertion in the headline, especially given that the author uses it to justify Chinese government repression in both Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
Second, its author claims to be an adviser to the presidential campaign of Andrew Yang.
Ann Lee, a former college professor and pundit who appears on television, has been promoting herself as a foreign policy adviser to Yang’s campaign for at least a couple of months now. When she spoke at an event in December put on by the same South China Morning Post, the event’s organizers confirmed to me, she personally submitted a bio that prominently states her affiliation with Yang. And when I contacted her seeking clarification about it, Lee quickly responded: “Yes, I am his foreign policy adviser for the past 13 months.”
But Yang’s campaign was also quick to answer a request for verification. It unequivocally denied Lee’s claims. “She is not an adviser to the campaign,” wrote Yang’s national press secretary.
If true, that’s a relief. Here in Taiwan, people were already speculating that Lee had influenced Yang, the son of Taiwanese immigrants to the United States, to keep silent regarding Taiwanese voters’ overwhelming rejection of Beijing in their recent presidential election.
But this motivated me to look further into Lee’s biography, and it turns out that her alleged role as a Yang adviser is not the only thing that’s difficult to verify.
Lee markets herself as a New York University professor — or at the very least, she is constantly allowing others to market her that way on-air, often in her presence. Yet when I contacted New York University, the school told me she hadn’t taught anything there since 2014. Lee, who had quickly answered my initial question about Yang, has been silent ever since I first asked about this and about the Yang campaign’s disavowal of her.
The written biography accompanying most (but not all) of Lee’s written punditry uses the past tense for her career at NYU. Yet on television, she is usually introduced as an NYU professor. In January, for example, she was described as “NYU’s Lee” in the headline for a video of her appearance on Bloomberg television. She was repeatedly identified in the chyron as a “New York University Adjunct Professor,” even though this doesn’t appear to have been the case in six years.
If this is just a simple error on Bloomberg’s part, then her retweet of the “NYU’s Lee” headline and the entire interview is a strange way of correcting the record. But don’t base your conclusion just on one television appearance. When she appeared on BBC’s World Business Report on Dec. 16 to discuss the China-U.S. trade war, Lee was introduced as “Professor Ann Lee from New York University.” Also in December, Lee tweeted out her appearance on Turkey’s English-language TRT World, during which she was introduced while present on-screen with the anchor as “an economist and a professor at New York University.” Lee was given the identical introduction on TRT in October when she came on via Skype to discuss the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.
In an April 2019 column that she wrote for Project Syndicate, Lee’s bio at the end referred to her as “Ann Lee, a professor at New York University.” In February 2019, on the Opinion Has It podcast with Elmira Bayrasli, Lee was introduced as “a professor of economics at New York University.” In February 2018, when she discussed one of her books at an event for the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, someone actually tweaked her usual written bio to make the claim that she was “currently an adjunct professor at New York University where she teaches macroeconomics and financial derivatives.”
A 2016 interview with the low-budget SinoVision network appeared to be trying to give the impression that Lee still taught not only at NYU, but at its Stern School of Business at that time. Lee posed on campus for a B-roll about preparing for the school year that shows her striding confidently into Stern. Lee never taught at Stern, even when she was at NYU.
There are enough additional examples of Lee publicly trading on NYU’s reputation in this manner that it’s hard to write it off as someone else’s mistake.
This would all be less disturbing if Lee weren’t constantly regurgitating pro-Beijing talking points. She has praised Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power as a needed step for economic reforms and even as a precursor to his turning China into a Northern European-style democracy. She has defended Beijing’s theft and forced transfer of intellectual property, telling Bloomberg in 2018 that “China is a sovereign country … and no one’s forced the U.S. companies to go do business in China or to set up manufacturing operations.”
Lee draws ludicrous moral equivalencies — claiming, for example, that the regime’s suppression of free speech is good because it prevents racism in China. (It doesn’t, by the way.) She asserts that the U.S. is not only pulling the strings of the Hong Kong protesters, but that it also pulled the strings of the Tiananmen Square protesters of 1989 before the regime massacred them. When a bipartisan congressional majority passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, she raged on Twitter that Congress “chose to single out Hong Kong to punish” in doing so, motivated by “rascism and hypocrisy” (sic).
Her most famous publication is the book What the U.S. Can Learn from China. It casts the regime in a predictably positive light.
So what are we to make of Lee’s claim to be part of the Yang Gang, in the face of denials from the campaign itself? Is she an actual “expert on China” based on academic credentials, or is she simply a radical apologist for the communist regime?
Dr. Guy Redmer is an English professor and author currently teaching in Taipei, Taiwan.
