At critical moments over the past 25 years, The New York Times has aided the interests of a power faction within the Chinese Communist Party responsible for atrocities against practitioners of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong.

On top of implicating itself ethically, the paper has also, as a result, distorted its China coverage and misled its readers, as revealed by an analysis of The New York Times’ China coverage as well as interviews with half a dozen experts on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) politics and geopolitics.

Due to the paper’s disproportionate influence on policy, its skewed coverage has likely led to a loss of life and treasure that is difficult to quantify, some experts said.

The New York Times has for decades positioned itself as a global newspaper, insisting on a necessity of access to China, according to former staffers. That meant convincing the communist regime that the paper’s presence would benefit it.

The paper has never explained what price it has paid for access to the country.

“There’s always the issue of, if you want to be a global newspaper, what do you have to do to keep China happy and stay in business there?” Tom Kuntz, a former editor at the paper, told The Epoch Times.

“There’s always been tensions, and I know they’ve, like a lot of companies, tried to maintain access to China.”

Bradley Thayer, a former senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, expert on strategic assessment of China, and a contributor to The Epoch Times, was more blunt.

“If they don’t cover the regime the way the regime wants to be covered, they’re going to be blackballed. They’re not going to be able to return,” he told The Epoch Times.

“So all of these individuals have a vested interest, if you will, in toeing the Party line.”

Covering Chinese politics, The New York Times has ascribed sincerity where deception is expected and glossed over where it should have dug deeper, all in a pattern of affinity with the interests of a CCP clique aligned with former Party leader Jiang Zemin, multiple experts affirmed.

Jiang’s influence has waned since 2012, when incoming CCP leader Xi Jinping exhibited an unexpected dexterity in eliminating his opponents. Only a minority of Jiang’s acolytes have maintained influence since his death in 2022. Despite the shift in power, however, The New York Times has maintained the pro-Jiang pattern.

The New York Times did not respond to a detailed list of questions sent via email.

The paper ran a flattering interview headlined “In Jiang’s Words: ‘I Hope the Western World Can Understand China Better.’”

Within days, the CCP unblocked access to The New York Times’ website in China.

A month later, the CCP unblocked several other Western news sites, including those of The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the BBC. The sites were blocked again within a week.

The interview came at a sensitive time for Jiang. He had only a little more than a year left before he was supposed to hand over Party control to Hu Jintao, fulfilling the succession line stipulated by Deng Xiaoping, his predecessor.

But things weren’t going well for Jiang. His persecution of the spiritual practice Falun Gong, a political campaign that was supposed to whip the Party and the nation into conformity under his control, was failing to reach its goals. Even worse, foreign media, including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, were taking apart the CCP’s anti-Falun Gong propaganda and highlighting accounts of wrongful detention and torture.

The New York Times, by contrast, appeared most helpful to Jiang’s campaign. By the time of the 2001 interview, the paper ran several dozen articles on Falun Gong, almost all of them profusely parroting the propaganda portraying the practice as a “cult” or a “sect.”

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline consisting of slow-moving exercises and teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. It was introduced to the public in China in 1992, and by the end of the decade, an estimated 70 million to 100 million people were practicing it.

By 2001, the New York Times had run several dozen articles parroting CCP propaganda portraying Falun Gong as a “cult” or a “sect.” (Screenshots via The Epoch Times, New York Times)

When in January 2001 CCP state media claimed that several people who set themselves on fire on Tiananmen Square in Beijing were Falun Gong practitioners, The Washington Post dispatched a reporter to fact-check the story. The New York Times, on the other hand, immediately took the CCP line as fact.

If the paper employed its much-touted investigative acumen, it would have discovered, as others have, that the incident was staged. After the first man allegedly set himself alight in the middle of the square, four policemen somehow managed to obtain several fire extinguishers, rush to the scene, and put out the fire, all in less than one minute.

Given the distances involved on the giant square, that wouldn’t have been physically possible—unless the officers already had the fire extinguishers ready and knew in advance where on the square they would be needed that day, several independent investigations concluded, pointing out dozens of other inconsistencies.

Even without any investigation, the incident made little sense. The victims supposedly followed a belief that burning themselves alive would bring them to heaven. But Falun Gong includes no such belief. In fact, its literature treats suicide as killing a human life, which it explicitly prohibits.

The New York Times didn’t even find it strange that since Falun Gong’s public introduction in 1992, of the tens of millions of people practicing it, none of them had publicly set themselves on fire until that day, and none had done so since.

Even after The Washington Post investigation traced several of the alleged victims back to their hometown and found that none had ever been seen practicing Falun Gong, The New York Times continued to parrot the CCP’s propaganda.

Jiang was apparently pleased with The New York Times, calling it during the 2001 interview “a very good paper.”

When Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, looked for somebody to helm the CCP after him in 1989, he picked Jiang Zemin, the Shanghai Party secretary who supported the CCP’s deployment of military to crush the 1989 student protests.

These officials, tied by shared complicity in the atrocities, were at the core of Jiang’s power faction, sometimes called the “Shanghai gang.”

In exchange for their support, Jiang let the gang abuse their offices and plunder state-owned assets, setting the tone for a nationwide culture of corruption.

That culture served a dual purpose for Jiang. On one hand, it allowed him to buy supporters, especially in the 1990s, when he struggled to form a power base among CCP cadres, who generally saw him as incompetent, according to an unofficial biography of Jiang published by The Epoch Times.

On the other hand, he could eliminate his rivals in the name of “anti-corruption.”

But the sword of anti-corruption cuts both ways. As Xi later demonstrated, it could be applied selectively against the Jiang faction, too.

The bond through culpability in the Falun Gong repression was more solid. The crimes became so extensive that none of the culprits would have risked their revelation, some China experts said.

There was a problem, though: Jiang’s designated replacement, Hu Jintao, showed little enthusiasm for the Falun Gong campaign.

“Jiang tried to push Hu to persecute Falun Gong and found he was quite reluctant,” said Li Linyi, a China commentator, expert on CCP internal politics, and Epoch Times contributor.

“Their relationship started to deteriorate after that. Jiang just felt more and more concerned about Hu.”

Just as the CCP under Deng redressed some victims of the Cultural Revolution, Hu could, at least theoretically, redress Falun Gong, blame Jiang, and purge his faction.

(Left) Chinese police tackle and arrest Falun Gong adherents on Tiananmen Square in Beijing on Feb. 14, 2002. (Top Right) A man blocks a line of tanks heading east on Beijing’s Avenue of Eternal Peace during the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 5, 1989. (Bottom Right) A poster depicts how to deal with so-called “enemies of the people” during the Cultural Revolution, in Beijing in late 1966. (Frederic Brown/AFP via Getty Images, Jeff Widener/AP Photo, Jean Vincent/AFP via Getty Images)

In reality, this was unlikely to happen, Li said.

“There was a huge price for redressing the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “Not only did some top CCP leaders get purged, but the CCP admitted they made a big mistake. That is not good for them in order to hold power in China in the long term. The CCP is still criticized for what they did during the Cultural Revolution.”

CCP leaders would only backtrack on Falun Gong as a last resort, if they felt it would save the regime, he said.

That didn’t mean, however, that Hu and his supporters couldn’t use the Falun Gong issue to endanger Jiang and his faction in other ways. Indeed, there’s evidence that they have.

“All [Jiang’s] policies could have continued to be carried out by Hu Jintao, except this one. ... The only thing Jiang Zemin worried about was the policy of persecuting Falun Gong,” said Heng He, a veteran China commentator with NTD, a sister outlet of The Epoch Times.

Jiang was thus extremely motivated to constrain Hu and prop up his own image, several experts confirmed.

Citing CCP sources, it suggested that Falun Gong was already passé and that it only ever had 2 million practitioners. It went as far as claiming that the figure cited by Falun Gong sources, 100 million, was baseless.

Yet a few years earlier, before the persecution began, multiple Western and Chinese media, including The Associated Press and The New York Times, provided figures of 70 million or 100 million, generally attributing them to estimates by the Chinese State Sports Administration, which had the best insight due to a massive survey of Falun Gong practitioners it conducted in the late 1990s.

The New York Times, citing CCP sources, reported that Falun Gong only ever had 2 million followers. However, multiple Western and Chinese media had reported a figure of 70 million or 100 million before the persecution against Falun Gong began in 1999. In 1998, China’s state-controlled Shanghai TV promoted Falun Gong, declaring that “100 million people around the world are learning Falun Dafa.” (Screenshots via The Epoch Times, New York Times, Falun Dafa Information Center)

Meanwhile, the paper was conjuring Jiang’s legacy as a friendly reformer who ushered China onto the world stage.

“Mr. Jiang is, in Chinese terms, deeply pro-American,” declared a 2002 op-ed by one of the paper’s regular contributors.

Despite its past transgressions, China was “becoming more open, tolerant and important,” it said.

Jiang’s decision to hold onto the top post in the CCP military past his 2002 retirement was portrayed by the paper as a somewhat controversial sign of strength.

The paper failed to catch the full significance of Jiang’s expansion of the Politburo Standing Committee, the body that officially rules the country, from seven to nine members. The move allowed him to add his propaganda chief, Li Changchun, as well as his head of the Political and Legal Affairs Commission, Luo Gan.

In reality, the Hu–Wen reign proved ineffectual, Li and other analysts agreed.

In the first few years, Hu was always seen following Jiang at official functions, a tightly scripted sign of subordination. Even after Jiang retired as military leader in 2004, Hu and Wen’s attempts at reform went nowhere.

An infographic explaining the relationships among top Chinese Communist Party leaders over the past 25 years. (Illustration by The Epoch Times, Getty Images)

“Part of the reason is because they found whenever they tried to reform and loosen some controls, the corresponding power was grabbed by the Jiang faction. And it further gave the Jiang faction advantages in the factional fight,” Li said.

Shanghai Party chair Chen Liangyu, eyed by Jiang to succeed Hu in 2012, was so sure of himself that he openly defied Hu’s policy of tapering state financing to curb malinvestment.

An investigation into Chen for corruption in 2006 was widely interpreted as Hu’s retaliation.

But even when the Jiang faction was on the losing end of the CCP internal power struggle, The New York Times still made it look like Jiang’s people were firmly in control.

When the paper covered the issue, it gave credit to Vice President Zeng Qinghong, the de facto No. 2 in the Jiang faction, for spearheading the probe.

The article even claimed that Zeng was trying to push out two Jiang cronies on the Politburo Standing Committee, Huang Ju and Jia Qinglin.

The author, Joseph Kahn, proved a significant force in the paper’s miscoverage of China, even as he later moved on to head the paper’s international coverage and, in 2022, became its executive editor.

New York Times executive editor Joseph Kahn. (Goh Chai Hin/AFP via Getty Images)

Li said he suspects The New York Times was getting its information from people in the Jiang faction who were “trying to partially distort the facts.”

It’s plausible that Zeng would go after Chen due to personal antipathies as well as to strengthen his own position within the Jiang faction, he said.

But it would have been unthinkable for Zeng to cripple Jiang’s influence by pushing Huang and Jia out of the Politburo, Li said.

Zeng’s tactics were more subtle, according to Zhang Tianliang, history professor at Fei Tian College and expert on China.

Zeng is a man of “many faces” who “likes to place bets on both sides,” he told The Epoch Times.

At this point, in late 2006, Huang was already seriously ill, and Jia was slated for retirement the next year. Both were heavily implicated in corruption, Li said. If Hu somehow managed to get Huang and Jia investigated, Zeng seemed to be positioning himself to take credit to show that “Jiang’s faction was still in the lead,” Li said.

It’s implausible, however, that Zeng would genuinely consolidate power in Hu’s hands, as Zeng was deeply involved in the Falun Gong repression and would have seen in Hu the same potential danger feared by Jiang, he said.

“The article seems to distort the facts to let Zeng and Jiang look fairer in the factional fight,” he said.

Some analysts argued that Zeng was indeed trying to knock down some Jiang people for his own benefit and as a result made enemies in his own camp. During the Politburo reshuffle in 2007, Zeng was left out of the Standing Committee, falling prey to an age rule Jiang previously established to sideline one of his rivals.

The New York Times building in New York City on Feb. 5, 2024. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

One of the reasons was a rule put in place by Jiang stipulating that each cadre on the Standing Committee would reign over his portfolio without interference from the others. Because the majority of the members were Jiang’s allies, Hu couldn’t push his policies through, despite technically holding the highest rank, explained Heng, the NTD China commentator.

The rule proved particularly pernicious by empowering Political and Legal Affairs Commission (PLAC) head Luo. The commission was set up in the 1980s as a small department overseeing the country’s nascent legal system, including the courts and police.

Under Jiang, however, the PLAC grew into an all-powerful behemoth controlling the entire national security apparatus. A major part of the reason was, again, the Falun Gong persecution campaign. Because Falun Gong was never officially outlawed in China, Jiang set up an extralegal police organization, called the 610 Office, to carry out the persecution. He put Luo in charge, giving him carte blanche to use whatever resources of the security apparatus needed to “eradicate” Falun Gong.

But Falun Gong was unlike any other group the regime had sought to crush. The usual tactics of rounding up leaders proved ineffective. Save for the practice’s founder, who was already exiled in the United States, Falun Gong lacked formal leaders or a hierarchy. Its local “coordinators” facilitated simple activities such as group exercises. When arrested, others easily picked up their roles.

As the persecution escalated, Falun Gong practitioners ceased to organize public activities in China and focused instead on “clarifying the truth”—explaining the facts about Falun Gong and the persecution individually from person to person. To disrupt their activities, the CCP’s security apparatus had to identify them, surveil them, and arrest them one by one—an immensely resource-intensive process.

The persecution required a massive expansion of the country’s police and surveillance apparatus, which was undertaken by Luo and his successor, Zhou Yongkang, who was also a close associate of Jiang, several analysts said.

China’s legal system, still in its infancy, was strangled in the cradle by the Falun Gong persecution, according to Heng.

“They had to make an exception: Every established law must be [applied as if including] ‘except [for] Falun Gong,’” he said.

Typically, Falun Gong practitioners would be put on trial for “undermining the implementation of the law,” with the statute interpreted so broadly as to capture anything the regime found worthy of suppression, he said.

“The legal system got used to it. And they wouldn’t stop there. They would use this technique to extend their power to other people,” Heng said.

“That’s why China has never been able to establish a real legal system.”

Falun Gong practitioners take part in a parade to celebrate World Falun Dafa Day and call for an end to the persecution in China, in New York City on May 10, 2024. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

None of this information graced the pages of The New York Times.

When Kahn produced a series of stories on China’s justice system that pointed out its politically predetermined outcomes and torture-induced confessions, but barely mentioned Falun Gong, he collected a Pulitzer.

But regardless of Hu’s own intentions, it was the Jiang faction spearheading these developments.

According to Bo’s driver, who spilled the beans on his boss to a Chinese journalist, Bo was urged early on by Jiang to use the Falun Gong issue as a career ladder.

Though the persecution campaign officially started on July 20, 1999, the first wave of arrests took place the day before. The arrests prompted a surge of complaints on July 20, 1999, across China. In Dalian, several thousand people gathered outside the city government building, asking to file complaints against the arrests. Bo dispatched police to beat up and arrest those people.

Bo was personally on the scene endorsing the beatings, though he never left his limousine, according to Chinese journalist Jiang Weiping, who was later sent to prison for his writings on Bo.

While some localities dragged their feet on implementing the persecution, Dalian was at the forefront, leading to a constant stream of accounts of arrests, beatings, and deaths in custody.

In 2004, Bo was appointed minister of commerce in the cabinet of Premier Wen. The promotion put Bo in play for one of the CCP’s top posts.

After the fall of Shanghai’s Chen Liangyu in 2006, Bo became Jiang’s favorite in the runup for Hu’s successor, multiple commentators said. During the 2007 Party Congress, Bo was eyeing the post of vice premier and a spot on the Politburo Standing Committee.

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During the negotiations, his boss, Wen, opposed the promotion. He argued that Bo wasn’t suited for a role of such prominence because he was the target of many lawsuits in other countries, according to a U.S. State Department cable published by Wikileaks.

Hu concurred. Bo was thus denied a Standing Committee seat and was instead put in charge of the remote, problem-ridden Chongqing megapolis in western China.

Bo wasn’t particularly popular among CCP elders. His aggressiveness made him unpredictable, Heng said.

But the argument Wen used to derail Bo’s promotion unearthed the worst fears of the Jiang gang, Li said.

The foreign lawsuits in question were filed by Falun Gong practitioners—survivors of Bo’s reign of terror in Liaoning.

To Jiang, Wen’s move must have indicated that Hu was willing to use the Falun Gong issue against him, Li said.

Jiang’s attacks on Hu intensified.

In 2009 and 2010, Bo and Zhou used their influence to allow Chinese netizens to access propaganda pieces against Hu, a well-placed source later told The Epoch Times.

In 2010, Chinese search engine Baidu showed users content that would have normally been censored. “Hu Jintao’s Son Terribly Corrupt, Jiang Zemin Wants to Get to the Bottom of It,” one headline read.

Bo and Zhou’s efforts culminated in the dramatic escapades of 2012 that led to their ultimate downfall.

The New York Times never explored these issues, consistently ignoring Bo’s involvement in the persecution of Falun Gong. By 2009, Falun Gong practitioners had filed more than 70 lawsuits in more than 30 courts around the world against Jiang and other culprits in the persecution—a dozen of them against Bo.

Court documents of lawsuits against Jiang Zemin and his associates related to the CCP's persecution campaign against Falun Gong. (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, U.S. District Court Northern District of Illinois, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit)

Several U.S. courts granted default judgments against individuals personally involved in torture. In 2009, a Spanish court indicted five current and former CCP officials for torture, including Jiang, Luo, Bo, and Jia. That same year, an Argentinian court issued international arrest warrants for Jiang and Luo.

The article portrayed the judges as “overzealous” and “provocateurs.”

Kahn, extensively covering the Party’s 2007 power reshuffle for the newspaper, portrayed Xi as favored by the Jiang faction while also acceptable to Hu as a successor.

Xi was elevated to the Politburo Standing Committee that year.

But, as Li pointed out, the relationship between Xi and the Shanghai gang was more complicated. After the sidelining of Bo, the Jiang faction needed to ensure it had a horse in the race for the 2012 transition. But it had to be somebody of the right age and pedigree to outcompete Hu’s favorite, Li Keqiang. Xi seemed to be the only choice because, like Li, he was a princeling.

Moreover, Xi “was seen as harmless,” Zhang said.

An insider told The Epoch Times that the Jiang faction planned for Bo to succeed Zhou as the head of the PLAC in 2012 and then force Xi to hand over power, in part by using leaks of damaging information.

Already in 2010, searches for “Xi Jinping” on Baidu returned articles such as “Xi Jinping is a Lecher, Plays with Women in Zhejiang Behind His Second Wife’s Back.”

But Xi proved much harder to control. For one thing, he hadn’t directly taken part in the persecution of Falun Gong, thus his loyalty to the Jiang gang couldn’t be guaranteed.

He launched public housing and greening projects that ballooned the city’s debt. He started the “Smash the Black” anti-crime campaign to win himself public accolades for dealing with the Chongqing organized crime issues.

Seemingly modeled after Jiang’s corrupt use of anti-corruption, regular businesses were targeted along the criminal enterprises, eliminating Bo’s opponents and benefiting his allies ready to plunder confiscated assets. Confessions were extracted by torture much like the methods used to “transform” Falun Gong practitioners.

Bo also launched a campaign of “Singing Red,” organizing people to sing Maoist revolutionary songs and wear red clothing.

A screen shows former Chinese politician Bo Xilai (C) standing at a press conference in Jihua Hotel in Jinan, China, on Aug. 22, 2013. Bo is standing trial on charges of bribery, corruption, and abuse of power. He made global headlines last year when his wife, Gu Kailai, was charged and convicted of murdering British businessman Neil Heywood. (Feng Li/Getty Images)

This was a miscalculation, several experts said. The CCP’s political campaigns were always launched from the top. Localities weren’t allowed to start their own. Moreover, since Deng, the Party made clear that the Maoist era was over.

In 2011, Bo staged military exercises in Chongqing while Hu was abroad, a sign that he was trying to show off a personal following within the military, multiple observers said. There were indications that he was trying to gain sway over military units stationed in the southwest, where it’s more difficult for Beijing to exercise control.

Combined with Zhou’s rule over the police, the move prompted some commentators to wonder whether the two were preparing a coup.

The official version of the story was that Heywood demanded $22 million from Gu and threatened her son. She had a nervous breakdown and hatched a plot to poison him.

The less-than-official story published by Western media said that Heywood was arranging for Gu and Bo’s fortune to be transferred overseas and wanted a larger cut than agreed. When she refused, he threatened to reveal the transfers. She then poisoned him.

Neither story added up, some Epoch Times commentators pointed out.

“The official reason for Neil Heywood’s death doesn’t make any sense,” Li said.

For starters, the Bos would have no problem paying Heywood generously for whatever services he might have provided.

“Money is not an issue at all for an official at Bo Xilai’s level,” he said.

In addition, it would have been hard to imagine that Heywood, who by all accounts lacked an intimidating presence, threatened Gu, the high-powered wife of one of the most powerful and ruthless officials in China. Crossing her husband was known to land people in prison, on a stretcher, or even in a coffin, Li said.

Media scrutiny of his background revealed that Heywood was exceedingly secretive about the nature of his relationship with the Bos, but it apparently dated back to the 1990s. If he was privy to their secrets, the relationship likely involved much more than money transfers, according to Li.

(Left) Newspapers cover the story of Bo Xilai being stripped of his elite Communist Party post, as well as the investigation into his wife for the murder of a British businessman, in Beijing on April 11, 2012. (Top Right) Gu Kailai, wife of former Chinese politician Bo Xilai. (Bottom Right) British businessman Neil Heywood was poisoned by Gu Kailai, wife of former Chinese politician Bo Xilai. (Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images, Public Domain)

Rather than Gu suffering a mental breakdown, it would have been more likely that Heywood buckled under pressure, putting Bo’s secrets at risk, he said.

The New York Times criticized the eventual trial of Gu as performative and her supposed motive as unpersuasive, but it came across as defending Gu, and the coverage never explored what the real murder motive could have been.

Wang, perhaps unhappy about Bo’s failure to shield him from the investigation, confronted Bo with his findings about Heywood’s murder, according to various insider accounts, including those published contemporaneously by The Epoch Times and Chinese pro-Democracy media.

Bo was furious, and he retaliated by launching his own investigation into Wang, having a number of Wang’s underlings arrested and some allegedly beaten to death.

On Feb. 2, 2012, Wang was demoted, and four days later, he slipped by police surveilling his home—supposedly while disguised as an old woman—got into an inconspicuous car, and rolled away. The car took him to the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu, in the neighboring Sichuan Province.

Wang arrived at the consulate in the evening and asked for asylum. The diplomats contacted the U.S. State Department, which contacted the Obama White House. Early the next morning, Wang was informed that his request was denied. He then proposed that he would surrender himself to the authorities in Beijing rather than to Bo’s henchmen. The consular officials agreed and contacted Beijing, which dispatched the Ministry of State Security to pick up Wang from the consulate.

It appears Bo learned what had happened, on the morning of Feb. 7, 2012. He dispatched dozens of police cars to Chengdu to surround the consulate.

Beijing allegedly mobilized Sichuan authorities to secure the consulate. Ministry of State Security officials then met with Wang.

(Left) A screen shows former police chief Wang Lijun as he gives evidence on the third day of the trial of former Chinese politician Bo Xilai at the Jinan Intermediate People's Court in Jinan, China, on Aug. 24, 2013. (Right) Chinese policemen stand guard outside the Chengdu People's Intermediate court, where Wang Lijun, an ex-police chief who triggered the Bo Xilai scandal, waits for the verdict in his trial in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China, on Sept. 24, 2012. (Feng Li/Getty Images, Mark Ralston/AFP/GettyImages)

Before leaving the consulate later on Feb. 7, 2012, Wang provided consular officials with unspecified information.

To this day, it’s unclear what the U.S. government learned. Neither the Obama administration nor the State Department, headed by Hillary Clinton, provided any information.

Wang revealed to the consular officials a plot by Bo and Zhou to obstruct Xi’s ascent to power, according to Boxun, a pro-Democracy Chinese news site that apparently received a series of leaks rumored to come from Bo’s opponents at the time.

“Zhou could arrange the usurpation of Xi and upset the smooth transition from current President Hu Jintao to Xi,” the article said.

In his acceptance speech, Wang mentioned that the “research” involved “several thousand intensive on-site transplants.”

It was around the same time, in 2006, that the first information started to emerge from China about a new form of state-sponsored crime: killing prisoners of conscience for organs on demand.

The case was blown open after overseas researchers started to call Chinese hospitals posing as patients or relatives of patients in need of transplants. In the recorded conversations, doctors openly confirmed that organs were available virtually on demand, within just a week or two. Some even affirmed that they could provide organs “from Falun Gong” when the investigators said they'd heard those were the healthiest.

Liaoning Province, with its apparently booming transplant market, featured prominently in the investigations.

The New York Times explored no such details about Wang’s background. By the time The Epoch Times reported these details on Feb. 14, 2012, The New York Times’ most up-to-date coverage was still trying to sort out whether Wang tried to defect.

In the end, The New York Times helped the CCP sweep the killing for organs issue under the rug.

In 2014, the CCP announced it would end the use of death row prisoners for transplants. When one New York Times reporter, Didi Kirsten Tatlow, received a lead that the practice hadn’t stopped and that prisoners of conscience were still being used, the paper blocked her investigation, she said. She left the paper shortly after.

Recently, when confronted with its record on the issue, a New York Times spokesperson told The Epoch Times that the paper did cover the issue of “forced organ donations” in China, referencing a single 2016 article by Tatlow that brought up the allegations but didn’t discuss the underlying evidence.

On Aug. 16, The New York Times published an article again ignoring the volume of evidence of the CCP’s practice of killing Falun Gong prisoners for organs. Instead, it relied on a single named China researcher, who said the evidence didn’t exist.

The Falun Dafa Information Center (FDIC), a nonprofit monitoring the persecution of Falun Gong, took issue with the expression “forced organ donation.” It was oxymoronic and “bizarre” to use “the words ‘forced’ and ‘donation’ in the same phrase,” FDIC said.

“The impact of the Times’ distorted reporting and irresponsible treatment of Falun Gong practitioners as ‘unworthy victims’ has contributed to the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators and robbed their victims of vital international support, undoubtedly resulting in greater suffering and loss of life throughout Mainland China,” it stated.

From the perspective of the paper’s vested interests in China, criticizing human rights abuses in the far-away Tibet or Xinjiang was seen as relatively “safe,” according to Trevor Loudon, an expert on communist regimes and an Epoch Times contributor.

“That’s virtue signaling—‘See we stand for human rights.’ But they would never do that with Falun Gong because that would really offend the CCP. The CCP would throw a fit over that,” he told The Epoch Times.

While exposing abuses against Tibetans or Uyghurs sparks outrage overseas, it causes little instability domestically, Loudon said, because the ethnic minorities carry limited influence in China’s heartland.

Falun Gong, on the other hand, is “rooted in Chinese culture,” giving it an immediate appeal, he said.

“Chinese are not going to adopt Islam tomorrow. The Chinese are not going to adopt Tibetan Buddhism. But millions of Chinese have some sympathy for Falun Gong,” he said.

It’s also easier for the CCP to slap political labels on ethnic minorities—“separatists” on Tibetans and “terrorists” on Uyghurs.

Falun Gong practitioners, however, are mostly ordinary Chinese, scattered across the societal strata. Their only political demand has been for the regime to stop the persecution, Loudon said.

“The Chinese can’t say that Falun Gong are separatists. They can’t say they’re terrorists. They can’t say they’re political, really. All they can say is that they’re weird or crazy,” he said.

And that’s exactly the line of attack The New York Times aided, based on the FDIC report.

The New York Times has ignored, downplayed, or misrepresented human rights abuses in China, according to a report by the Falun Dafa Information Center, a nonprofit dedicated to monitoring the persecution in China. (Falun Dafa Information Center)

Already in late February and into March 2012, Epoch Times commentators were correctly predicting that the Wang affair would lead to the downfall of not just Bo, but also Zhou.

Right around this time, the Politburo Standing Committee met to discuss the situation. Zhou argued that the investigation should stop at Wang. That meant Bo would be spared. At this point, Xi jumped in, proposing the investigation should include whoever was implicated. Wen seconded and then Hu agreed.

“That’s how the tide shifted,” wrote Desmond Shum, a former business partner of Wen Jiabao’s wife, in his memoir “Red Roulette.”

Official investigation signaled that Bo was fair game. Censors even let ordinary Chinese criticize Bo online.

The New York Times appeared reluctant to acknowledge Bo Xilai's fall from grace in 2012, only doing so after an official document accusing Bo of corruption leaked online. (Screenshots via The Epoch Times, New York Times)

The New York Times suddenly gained access to reams of evidence of Bo’s wrongdoing in the “Smash the Black” campaign in Chongqing.

“Once hailed as a pioneering effort to wipe out corruption, critics now say it depicts a security apparatus run amok: framing victims, extracting confessions through torture, extorting business empires and visiting retribution on the political rivals of Mr. Bo and his friends while protecting those with better connections,” the paper said, obliquely omitting its own praises of Bo just weeks before.

Zhou, however, appeared to be off limits to The New York Times. It wouldn’t touch the allegation that Bo and Zhou were plotting together to sideline Xi.

But, as Beijing insiders told The Epoch Times around the same time, the internal investigation into Bo concluded that he and Zhou indeed plotted to push Xi out in a de facto coup and that Wen successfully argued for having Zhou investigated. Zhou thus wasn’t really in control of the PLAC anymore. He was allowed to keep up appearances until his scheduled retirement later that year. Also, an agreement was reached that the PLAC’s power would be scaled back.

The article was unusual in several respects. Up until that point, The New York Times had barely scratched the surface of exposing the riches of the CCP elite. For one thing, it could have been dangerous for a reporter operating from China to go after a high-ranking CCP official personally. For another, it would have been virtually impossible to gather hard evidence.

“High-ranking CCP officials hide their treasure very well,” Li said.

If the paper decided to bear the risk and expense of such an investigation, it’s unclear why it picked Wen as the target. The unassuming premier was among a precious few in the CCP higher echelons willing to entertain political reform. If anything, he was known as the least corrupt. And he was about to retire.

The author of the exposé, David Barboza, acknowledged that he found nothing illegal in the Wen family financials, though the article argued that some investments may have benefited from Wen’s policies. The uncovered fortune, estimated at $2.7 billion, paled in comparison to the empires built by relatives of other CCP bigwigs.

The New York Times ran a massive expose on Premier Wen Jiabao's family wealth, estimated at $2,7 billion, but didn't go after Jiang and his associates who amassed wealth easily in tens of billions of dollars. (Screenshots via The Epoch Times, New York Times, Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

As the Shanghai bureau chief at the time, Barboza would have been well-positioned to probe the fortunes of the Jiang faction. Relatives of Jiang and his associates, including former Vice Premier Zeng Qinghong, amassed wealth easily in the tens of billions of dollars. There was also much less ambiguity about their corruption—it was an open secret that they scored lucrative investments for pennies on the dollar and landed lofty appointments upon unscrupulous pressure from Jiang’s henchmen.

“The Party’s top dog, Jiang Zemin, dispatched emissaries to exert influence on behalf of his children and grandkids” and “his representatives demanded obedience,” Shum wrote.

But The New York Times hasn’t produced such exposés, except when the official in question has already fallen out of the CCP’s favor.

Relying on inside sources, Wen’s wife claimed The New York Times was in fact utilized by Bo and Zhou to attack Wen, Shum wrote. Overseas pro-Democracy media reported as much, too.

In addition, several months before Barboza’s article ran, some overseas Chinese media claimed that Bo and Zhou had had their people spread information that would be damaging to Wen.

Heng opined that perhaps what Barboza and his colleagues were hearing—and from whom—was no accident. He suspected that “somebody gave them a hint or led their way to the investigation.”

Both he and Li were skeptical that any research into the Wen family’s financials would have been fruitful without someone high up in the Party enabling it.

Barboza even acknowledged in the piece that “revelations about the Wen family’s wealth could weaken him politically” during the final jousting over the power transfer.

Upon the article’s publication, the CCP immediately blocked The New York Times’ website, including the fledgling Chinese-language one.

The paper doubled down, publishing additional articles on the Wen family. Behind the scenes, however, it intensively lobbied the CCP to unblock its site.

Then-executive editor Jill Abramson later complained in her book that the publisher, Sulzberger, went behind her back, and “with input from the Chinese Embassy, was drafting a letter from the Times to the Chinese government all but apologizing for our original story.”

Going by the paper’s own analysis of CCP politics, attacking Wen should have ceased to be a problem after Xi took over. Because Wen was a potent opponent of the Jiang faction and Xi was supposedly an ally of Jiang, Xi should have been happy to see Wen weakened ahead of the Party Congress.

But the Jiang faction never considered Xi one of its own, Heng said.

If the events of 2012 taught Xi anything, it was that the people Jiang vouched for, like Bo and Zhou, were not his friends. If Xi couldn’t find a way to beat back the Jiang faction, he would have ended up its “puppet,” Heng said.

Hu, Wen, and their circle of supporters would have been crucial allies in pushing Jiang back, as they already had proved to be in defeating Bo, Li said.

Instead, with The New York Times’ help, the Jiang faction steamrolled both Hu and Xi, loading the new Politburo Standing Committee with its people. Hu’s only ally on the roster was the new premier, Li Keqiang. Xi’s only ally was the head of Party discipline, Wang Qishan.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping (L) looks on as former leader Hu Jintao is ecorted to leave early from the closing session of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, at The Great Hall of People in Beijing on Oct. 22, 2022. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

“Long Retired, Ex-Leader of China Asserts Sway Over Top Posts,” read the headline of a Nov. 7, 2012, New York Times article.

Aside from pushing his people onto the Standing Committee, Jiang was “voicing frustration with the record of his successor, Hu Jintao” and proposing policy changes to “put China back on a path toward market-oriented economic policies that he and his allies argue stagnated under a decade of cautious leadership by Hu,” the article read.

“Many see Mr. Jiang, who brought China into the World Trade Organization and rebuilt ties to the United States after a breakdown in 1989, as favoring deeper ties to the West and more opportunities for China’s private sector,” it said.

This was a misrepresentation of history, according to several analysts who said Jiang was dragged to support economic reforms against his will by Deng. Economic issues were handled by Premier Zhu Rongji during Jiang’s time, and the real behind-the-scenes work of getting China into the WTO was, ironically, handled by Wen during his time as vice premier.

As for Jiang’s pro-Western stance, it was always tactical and temporary, according to Thayer.

“He is an individual who was put in charge by Deng in terms of formulating the strategy to influence Congress, our politicians, and the U.S. elite, and did so very effectively,” he said.

The inability or unwillingness of The New York Times and others to recognize Jiang’s duplicity contributed to one of the most harmful blunders of U.S. foreign policy, Thayer said in a recent book, “Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure,” coauthored with James Fanell, former naval intelligence officer and China expert.

The Nov. 7 New York Times article went further, claiming that Jiang’s influence was supposed to encourage the new leadership “to establish a credible legal system that operates with a degree of autonomy from the party.”

This was inconceivable, analysts agreed, noting it was the Jiang faction that crippled previous attempts at greater judiciary independence.

Buried at the end of the article was a confused admission that “Mr. Jiang’s motives are not entirely clear,” because the officials he pushed onto the Standing Committee were unlikely to effect any economic reform. They were largely hardliners.

As Zhang summarized in the headline of an Epoch Times op-end at the time, “New Leadership in Beijing Spells End of Reform.”

In an ironic twist, New York Times emissaries even reached out to News Corp and utilized some of its CCP contacts, which Kahn criticized in a 2007 exposé of then-News Corp head Rupert Murdoch’s CCP connections.

Xi, apparently, wasn’t impressed.

This was understandable, according to Thayer and Fanell.

Since about 2009, the CCP had been shifting to a new era. The rapid military expansion spearheaded by Jiang, as well as the country’s growing GDP, gave the Party confidence to project China’s power more aggressively.

The tactic established by Deng, to “hide our strength and bide our time,” was fading in favor of an increasingly confrontational posture toward the United States.

The more confident the Party felt about China’s might, the less need there was to feign openness and humility, multiple experts said.

Meanwhile, Xi proved far more aggressive than his bland stature telegraphed. His one strong ally on the Standing Committee, Wang, meted out “Party discipline” to officials considered insufficiently loyal, spreading fear through the CCP’s ranks.

If the Jiang faction expected a pushover in Xi, they were in for a rude awakening. Xi moved to dismantle the alternative power center Jiang had established at the PLAC, launching a wide-ranging investigation into Zhou and his cronies. He also started to purge Jiang’s loyalists from the military.

Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin (L) walks past Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (R) after the closing session of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Nov. 14, 2012. (Feng Li/Getty Images)

In 2015, People’s Daily ran an opinion piece criticizing former officials for clinging to power past retirement—a not-so-subtle swipe at Jiang, analysts agreed.

The paper correctly detected that the regime was no longer hiding its strength and biding its time, but it failed to pinpoint why the CCP had been biding its time, Thayer and Fanell said.

“They know that they have to be intellectually honest at some level, but what they cannot do is ever connect the dots to talk about strategic trendlines,” Fanell told The Epoch Times.

The CCP intentionally kept its ultimate goals vague, presenting it as a “peaceful rise” of a “responsible” power. But the trajectory of the development wasn’t difficult to chart, the authors said.

Rather than a quest for emancipation, the Party’s goal of surpassing the United States economically and militarily reflects a pursuit of domination, they said.

The CCP’s talk about a “peaceful rise” and a “multipolar” world, where the United States, China, and other nations would share responsibility for maintaining order, amounts to little more than “smoke and chaff,” Fanell said.

“They know there’s only going to be one top dog,” he said. “They want to be the top power in the world. They’ve said that in many, many ways.”

Upstaging the United States as the leading world power would give the CCP the ability to dictate political and trade rules globally, the authors said. Pax Americana, for all its faults, has allowed for a measure of universal values, press freedom, religious freedom, and economic freedom. Pax Sinica under the CCP promises no such generosity, they warned.

“We know what it’s going to look like,” Fanell said. “We see it every day in China. Total control. Social credit system. State control of every facet of your life. That’s what it is.”

There’s no disabusing the CCP of its hegemonic ambitions, Thayer said.

“Xi Jinping could die tomorrow. He could die this afternoon, and the individual who replaces him is not going to go back to the happy time,” he said.

“The individual who replaces him is going to maintain the same policies, the same aggression, because the individual, at the end of the day, is far less important than the ideology of communism and the fact that their power has grown. And that ideology wedded to power explains their increasingly aggressive behavior internationally.”

Especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been significant bipartisan agreement in the United States that the CCP’s ambitions need to be met head on—a strategy Thayer and Fanell endorsed.

The New York Times, however, has discouraged treating the CCP as an enemy. Instead, it has argued for continued engagement.

The engagement policy, which hollowed America’s manufacturing base and helped to turn China into a daunting military adversary, “has yielded less than its proponents hoped and prophesied,” the board wrote. It argued, however, that a relationship with China “continues to deliver substantial economic benefits to the residents of both countries and to the rest of the world.”

Thayer called such a framing “appalling.”

He said the engagement doctrine has allowed the regime to pull through moments of crisis and has blocked efforts to bring about its collapse.

“What the engagers did was prevent us from getting rid of this odious regime,” he said.

The New York Times published a section called “China Rules” in its Nov. 25, 2018, edition. The section included giant Chinese characters on a red background and a glowing report on the Chinese Communist Party, while simultaneously criticizing the United States. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Thayer blamed the paper for “ideological obtuseness where they refuse to see the nature of communist regimes as they are.”

“They have no trouble at all when it comes to condemning odious regimes. It’s only communist odious regimes where they have an ideological blindness,” he said.

Fannell pointed out that The New York Times has a vested interest in avoiding confrontation with China because it wants to maintain access to its market.

“I think it’s that obvious,” he said.

After prolonged devotion to the engagement doctrine, it’s also difficult for its proponents to admit they were wrong, he said.

“They just seem to be so obsessed with looking for anything to support their thesis.”

There’s also a sense of longing among some for China under Jiang’s rule—a time when The New York Times was allowed to do business in China and even criticize the regime to some degree, as long as it aped the Party line, particularly on Falun Gong.

“We were privileged to live in China during a remarkably free and open period of time, to learn the language, make friends, find spouses, and some for a while could even own property,” said Ian Johnson, who won a Pulitzer in 2001 for an incisive series on the Falun Gong persecution for The Wall Street Journal—a focus he didn’t replicate in his later contributions to The New York Times.

Stockman tacitly admitted the supposed “brain trust for the country’s foreign policy establishment” was blindsided by developments in China, which “was turning into something they hadn’t expected” and caused them to lose “visibility, access and insight.”

But the supposed golden age of China’s openness was always an illusion, multiple experts said.

Jiang’s apparent invitation to capitalists, lauded on the pages of The New York Times, turned out to be a sleight of hand, Shum said.

“I concluded that the Party’s honeymoon with entrepreneurs ... was a little more than a Leninist tactic, born in the Bolshevik Revolution, to divide the enemy in order to annihilate it,” he wrote.

“Alliances with businessmen were temporary as part of the Party’s goal of total societal control. Once we were no longer needed ... we, too, would become the enemy.”

According to Fanell, the “golden age” rhetoric traces back to the CCP’s own propaganda, which lacked “a sense of reality.” The regime’s atrocities have never let up, and neither has its direction changed.

“It’s not a surprise that the aperture was very wide and that the regime, the CCP, invited in and rewarded amply individuals who were interacting, because the regime wanted, if you will, to profit from them, to use them, to use their skills, to use their abilities, to use their connections so that a positive image of the [People’s Republic of China] was projected and ... knowledge transfer could occur,” Thayer said.

In an unusual move, the paper’s executive editor, Kahn, personally contributed to the article—the only time he had done so since taking the top job at the paper earlier that year.

The nearly 3,000-word obituary represented an exercise in “willful ignorance,” whitewashing the communist dictator’s legacy of gore and deception, according to Thayer.

The article left out key aspects of Jiang’s story that “would allow him to be seen as the thug that he was,” he said.

Upon Jiang's death in 2022, New York Times executive editor Joseph Kahn personally contributed to a syrupy obituary. (Screenshot via The Epoch Times, New York Times, Minghui)

Jiang’s responsibility for the persecution of Falun Gong was euphemized in the piece as mere “intolerance of dissent” and palmed off with a single sentence:

“After members of the Falun Gong spiritual sect surrounded the Communist Party headquarters in protest in April 1999, he pressed for mass detentions, which set the pattern for later rounds of repression and for an increasingly powerful security state.”

The dusting off of the “sect” label was significant, in the FDIC’s view. More than two decades ago, it implored the paper to drop it, not just because of the term’s pejorative implications, but also for technical inaccuracy. Falun Gong didn’t come up as an offshoot of another religion, but instead traced its origins to a practice transmitted along a private lineage, a similar trajectory to many practices that were popularized starting in the 1970s under the “qigong” moniker.

In addition, the paper’s description of the 1999 protest at the top CCP leadership compound was inaccurate. If it had inquired with participants in the protest, it would have learned that they were seeking the government appeals office, and it was the police that led the crowd to the streets surrounding Zhongnanhai.

Yet somehow, this was par for the course at The New York Times, which has, since 2019, openly targeted the Falun Gong diaspora in the United States with a series of hit pieces that unearthed some of the worst excesses of its prior reporting, according to FDIC.

“Terms like ‘secretive’ or ‘dangerous’ repeat multiple times. ... Falun Gong beliefs are described as ‘extreme,’” the FDIC report reads.

CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong is usually glossed over in the articles as mere “accusations” or “claims tinged with hysteria,” it said.

The millions thrown in prisons and labor camps in China over the past quarter of a century suddenly became “tens of thousands ... in the early years of the crackdown.”

Mirroring CCP propaganda, the articles equated businesses started by Falun Gong followers, such as The Epoch Times, with Falun Gong itself, even after Epoch Times representatives explained that the company cannot and does not represent the practice.

The distinction would have been easy to grasp for The New York Times. The Sulzberger family that leads it is Jewish, but that doesn’t mean the paper speaks for the religion of Judaism.

Despite all the paper’s efforts aligned with CCP interests, however, the CCP has shown little appreciation for The New York Times.

In February 2020, The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by Walter Russell Mead headlined “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia.” It panned China for mishandling the COVID-19 epidemic and questioned Beijing’s power and stability.

The CCP protested the headline as “racist” and responded by kicking out three of the paper’s China correspondents.

The next month, the Trump administration capped U.S.-based personnel for Chinese state media, de facto expelling 60.

The CCP then expelled most of the correspondents of The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

In late 2021, the Biden administration relaxed restrictions on Chinese media in the United States in exchange for the CCP giving The New York Times and others their visas back. But the CCP has been slow to do so. The paper seemed to have only two correspondents in China as of May 3.

There are indications, however, that The New York Times is doubling down. On Aug. 16, it ran a hit piece on Shen Yun Performing Arts, a massively popular classical Chinese dance company started by Falun Gong practitioners in the United States.

Shen Yun has been a prime target of the CCP, facing various forms of interference and sabotage. Its performances, under the tag line “China before communism,” seek to portray authentic Chinese culture. Some of its dance pieces also depict the persecution of Falun Gong.

It’s not clear whether the push against Shen Yun will win the paper more favorable treatment by the CCP.

“This is the nature of a communist regime. As they’ve grown in power, they’re going to start becoming a lot colder, they’re going to become a lot more repressive and treat foreigners, even individuals who used to be old friends of China, in a very different way,” Thayer said.

Facing economic headwinds caused by mistreatment of foreign businesses as well as the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Xi’s regime is once again trying to court foreign investment.

But The New York Times is already a willing partner in that effort, giving Xi little incentive to allow the paper a longer leash, Fanell and Thayer agreed.

“Xi Jinping doesn’t give a rat about The New York Times. He knows where they’re coming from,” Fanell said.

“He doesn’t even have to pay them off.”