Anti-communist Chinese, source of major journalistic portals, is unmasked

Young Chinese exposed as a fake; NPR investigation reveals scam that fooled global media and raised questions about human rights

In recent years, dozens of news organizations around the world have quoted or covered a young Chinese man named Wang Jingyu who portrayed himself as a courageous dissident facing repression by the Communist Party. But an NPR investigation this year uncovered evidence linking Wang to an elaborate scam involving impersonation of government officials, credit card fraud and stretching from a detention center in Bangkok to a villa in the Netherlands.

NPR’s reporting prompted at least 10 news organizations to review their stories with Wang and retract or change them. These news organizations include the Associated Press, Al Jazeera, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, major newspapers in the Netherlands and Norway, as well as Radio Free Asia, which is funded by the US government.

People who study journalism said they don’t remember so many news organizations retracting or changing stories because of doubts about the reliability of a single source.

“In the 25 years or so that I’ve been carefully observing this and writing about it, I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Ed Wasserman, former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. “In literature, I can’t think of another example.”

Is a famous critic of the Chinese Communist Party a con artist?

After reading the NPR investigation, Wasserman described Wang like this: “An exceptionally successful media manipulator who has managed to develop a reputation and gain real importance in the overseas Chinese community thanks to the willingness of influential media to tell his story, which put him in the role of basically a hero and a freedom fighter.”

Lea Hellmueller, a journalism professor who teaches ethics at City St. George’s, University of London, says Wang’s story reminds her of one in which news organizations gave a lot of publicity to someone they later discovered to be unreliable: Elizabeth Holmes. She’s the Stanford University dropout who tricked reporters — and investors — into believing that her company, Theranos, had created a groundbreaking blood-testing machine.

“It was really the media that helped her shape this public image,” Hellmueller says. “Ironically — and this is why I remembered Wang’s case — journalism was also the main driver of Theranos’ downfall.”

As Hellmueller points out, it was the Wall Street Journal that exposed Holmes and Theranos. “They launched this full investigation,” she says, “bringing out the best in journalism.”

Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors and is expected to be released from prison in 2032.

Wang Jingyu first came to the attention of news organizations in 2020. Writing online at the time, Wang disputed China’s official account that none of its troops had died in a border clash with Indian soldiers.

Following Wang’s comments, Chinese police announced they would pursue him, but Wang was traveling abroad at the time and was out of their reach.

In the following years, Wang, now 23, repeatedly told reporters that the Chinese Communist Party attacked him wherever he went.

When transiting through Dubai in 2021, Wang was detained by local authorities. He claimed that Chinese authorities met with him in detention and tried to get him to return to China, according to Safeguard Defenders, a human rights group.

However, the Dubai Media Office said Wang was detained for criticizing Islam and failing to pay hotel bills. They also said Chinese diplomats never asked about him.

After Wang arrived in the Netherlands, someone used his name to make bomb threats against Chinese hotels and embassies in Western Europe, according to police. Wang also alleged that a supposed secret Chinese police station in Rotterdam had harassed and threatened him. The Dutch broadcaster, RTL Nieuws, broke the story, which triggered similar coverage from news organizations in the United States, Germany, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Australia. Even the New York Times, BBC and CNN referenced Wang’s account.

In his many interviews, Wang has cut a defiant image, refusing to back down from criticizing the Chinese government. He has highlighted his many press clippings on his page X, where he has around 44,000 followers.

In the summer of 2023, Wang tipped NPR to yet another story of what he portrayed as Communist Party repression. He told NPR that the Chinese government had targeted the family of his friend, a fellow dissident named Gao Zhi. Gao’s family was on the run in Thailand trying to obtain visas for the Netherlands.

In Wang’s account, Communist Party agents called the Chinese embassy in Bangkok and several hotels with bomb threats, leaving the family’s name for Thai police to arrest. The only documents verifying the case were two emails that appeared to be from the Dutch immigration service.

Wang assured NPR that the emails were genuine.

But when NPR called to authenticate them, Dutch authorities revealed they were forgeries.

After Wang and Gao had a disagreement, Gao sent NPR more than 700 emails purporting to be from Dutch and Thai government accounts that he thought were legitimate. In fact, they also turned out to be forgeries from fake accounts.

Taken together, the emails provide a roadmap for a long scam that Gao said bankrupted his family. The culprit, Gao said, was journalistic uber-source Wang Jingyu.

Wang acknowledges that Gao was deceived, but says that he had nothing to do with the scheme and that, in fact, it is Gao who owes him money.

“It’s ridiculous,” Wang said in a telephone interview about the allegations by Gao and his family. “I will sue them all.”

The Associated Press published a story about the Gao family in Thailand but treated the emails as authentic. When NPR told the AP they were forgeries, the news service retracted its article. After NPR aired its investigation, other news organizations followed suit.

For example, Radio Bremen, part of ARD, Germany’s main public broadcaster, removed a documentary featuring Wang that had been streamed more than 2 million times on YouTube.

Other news organizations that covered Wang stood by their stories.

RTL Nieuws says NPR’s findings did not prejudice the results of its investigation into Wang’s allegations of harassing calls from a Chinese police station.

“We still have faith in the first story we did,” RTL reporter Koen de Regt told NPR.

But de Regt said subsequent reporting on Wang’s additional allegations persuaded reporters that he could not be trusted. For example, Wang had claimed that a man had come to his house brandishing a knife.

” We spoke to the neighbors of the building. We spoke to the police,” says de Regt. “There is no evidence that this incident ever happened. We no longer trust him (Wang).”

Wasserman, the Berkeley journalism professor, says reporters may have been too willing to believe Wang because their stories fit neatly into a general narrative that is true: China routinely attacks critics abroad, even if the government denies it. Wasserman also notes that – to a certain extent – ​​the Chinese government is defamation-proof.

“If you make a mistake, what’s the problem?” Wasserman says some reporters may have imagined it. “If they didn’t do it to this guy, they probably did it to someone else.”

Some dissidents have been skeptical of Wang’s claims for years. On the one hand, they say they have never seen the Chinese Communist Party unleash such a barrage of repression tactics against someone so obscure. Some also tried to warn reporters about the risks of featuring Wang.

Among them was Badiucao, a Chinese-Australian cartoonist. When Badiucao learned that he and Wang would appear on the same investigative TV show, he expressed his doubts to the producers, but to no avail.

Some in the human rights community were not happy that NPR exposed Wang. Yaqiu Wang, director of China Research at Freedom House, the Washington-based think tank, said some questioned whether the story was merely providing the Communist Party with ammunition to portray its foreign critics as crooks. Still, many activists supported it.

“Most people said their suspicions about Wang were validated,” says Yaqiu Wang, no relation to Wang Jingyu. “They were happy [por ele] have been exposed.”

Badiucao says NPR’s investigation helped keep the Chinese human rights movement honest.

“It’s a relief that – basically – journalism has proven itself: it has the ability to self-correct,” says Badiucao. “I think this restores my confidence in this line of work.”

With information from NPR*