The US tried to teach China a lesson about the media. It backfired

“Given the fact that it’s vital to have good information out of China right now because of coronavirus, the US decision was pretty disastrous timing,” said Megha Rajagopalan, a correspondent for BuzzFeed News whose visa was not renewed in 2018 after she reported about the mass internment of Muslims in China. Rajagopalan and other expelled reporters stressed, however, that the US crackdown in no way compares with the brazen Chinese efforts to undermine a free media.

“The Chinese government is at fault, far and above the US government,” she said.

A senior administration official told me that the US move had been on the wish list of US counterintelligence officials and China hawks, and was pursued “on a totally different track from coronavirus.” The official argued that even in early March, the virus was “not the all-consuming epidemic that it was now.”

But the ill-timed US action underscores how slow the Trump administration was to recognise that the coronavirus would effectively be the most consuming issue this year. The United States made its point — but paid a big price for it. China lost reporters for low-impact state media outlets, while US citizens and leaders lost access to rare up-close reporting in an increasingly closed state.

The administration “didn’t really accomplish much,” said Marcus Brauchli, a former Wall Street Journal editor and former China correspondent. He said that he doubted the US government had “better sources on the ground than the journalists who were expelled. So they just sacrificed one eye — for what?”

These questions are not easy ones. The rise of Xi Jinping’s authoritarianism in China is the story of a generation. The battle now is over who controls that story, and that battle has only intensified as citizens around the world try to understand the coronavirus crisis — and governments around the world try to deflect blame for the deep losses it has caused.

This time around, the Trump administration has a broader goal of strengthening the US position against China on all fronts, abandoning the once broadly held theory that China’s embrace of open markets and engagement with the West would ultimately lead it to adopt democratic values.

Now, the administration is considering its next step, which could be to expel specific Chinese journalists it views as spies, Edward Wong and Julian E Barnes reported. Other ideas are also being discussed, said Michael Pillsbury, a Trump adviser and director of the Hudson Institute’s Centre on Chinese Strategy, including whether Chinese access to the big American platforms of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook could be limited. (The platforms are blocked in China, but are powerful vehicles for Chinese propaganda globally.)

To read the coverage of the expelled reporters is to understand what is lost. Revelatory investigations in the Times, Post, and Journal exposed Chinese government mistakes and cover-ups as the coronavirus spread.

Other articles simply let American readers “identify with Chinese pain,” as The Washington Post’s Emily Rauhala put it. There was The Wall Street Journal’s look at the chaos in a Wuhan hospital, Anna Fifield’s reporting in The Post on the suspicions of grieving families, Amy Qin’s portrait of a devastated family in The Times and the empathetic tweets by Chris Buckley of The Times.

Now, the US and Chinese governments seem to be shifting their focus to the blame game. Pottinger has been pushing the plausible, but unproven theory that the pandemic started with an accident in a Chinese lab. The claim has entered the Washington spin cycle, with echoes of the run-up to the Iraq War. And the fewer independent American reporters there are working in Beijing, the more the China story may be shaped by US officials.

The Chinese government “is going to discover that the cost of not having a significant presence of reporters on the ground,” said Buckley, an Australian-born reporter for The Times, who was under quarantine in Wuhan when he was told he was being expelled. “The China story as a whole becomes even more hostage to these lurid representations and misrepresentations of the country that you would think the Chinese government would have some interests in allowing people to rebut.”

Meanwhile, a Chinese journalist in Washington told me that China Global Television Network already has a plan to replace the staff it sent home: They’ll hire some American journalists on contract to help with the propaganda broadcasts.

In this job market, they probably won’t be hard to find.

c.2020 The New York Times Company