Communist China has been using American newspapers as a vehicle for its misleading narratives on organ harvesting in U.S. newspapers, according to China expert Gordon Chang.
In a Nov. 29 “China Watch” supplement carried by The Los Angeles Times, one of many that Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-controlled newspaper China Daily has paid to U.S. media, one of its articles was headlined “More people sign up as organ donors.”
In it, there were claims of registered organ donors more than doubling in the last 20 months by the state-run China Red Cross.
Since 2015, the Chinese regime has alleged that organ transplants in the country come from willing donors despite the “substantial evidence — growing evidence — that defenseless people are being killed for their organs,” Chang said in an interview with The Epoch Times host Jan Jekielek on his program, American Thought Leaders.
One independent tribunal conducted a year-long investigation and in 2019 it concluded that there has and still are prisoners of conscience being killed in China for organs to sell on the transplant market “on a substantial scale,” the majority of whom are adherents of Falun Gong, a traditional Chinese spiritual practice. One of its many findings included the number of organ transplants performed in China not matching their listed voluntary organ donation figures.
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According to Chang, by reading between the lines, the point of the China Watch article was to promote “that all of these organs are available in China because they come from willing donors” and that through this, “the L.A. supplement tries to counter” the narrative on organ harvesting in China.
By paying millions of dollars, China Daily has managed to place inserts like these for years in U.S. media. For example, recent filings from the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) found that in the past year alone, China Daily paid the L.A. Times $340,000 to advertise between June and October, and $111,000 for printing costs between May and October.
China Daily was also shown in the FARA filings to have paid between $85,000 and $223,000 to The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy magazine, the UK-based Financial Times, and Canada’s Globe & Mail to advertise between May and October.
Many lawmakers and experts have criticized these partnerships between China Daily and U.S. media outlets, commenting on how this allows China to spread its propaganda through reputable Western outlets. Chang also condemned The Los Angeles Times for accepting “a lot of money to propagate China’s narrative on this,” as well as other “major U.S. publications that have run similar interests.”
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