A response to baseless allegations

We have been made the target of racist, populist, anti-China sentiment in the U.S.

New media startup Semafor just published an article quoting Marco Rubio and a complaint filed with Congress that alleges The China Project is an unregistered agent of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Mr. Rubio cites a so-called whistleblower report filed by Shannon Van Sant, a disgruntled former employee of The China Project who worked for us for less than three months back in 2020.

Update: This is a PDF of a letter sent by our lawyers on our behalf to Semafor.

If Mr. Rubio had spent even one minute on our website, he would have realized that this is all obviously untrue.

For starters, we have been banned and blocked in China for most of our company’s existence and regularly publish content that is anathema to Beijing. All mentions of Taiwan independence, Uyghur internment camps, criticism of Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, human rights, and so much more are censored on China’s internet, and cause for imprisonment for people in China — and we write about them almost daily. Indeed, powerful CCP organizations like the Cyberspace Administration of China and state media Global Times have promoted allegations labeling us as U.S. government-supported, “anti-China forces” intent on destabilizing China.

Ms. Van Sant’s complaint does not allege a source, vehicle, vector, or mechanism for the claimed CCP influence. It rests entirely upon her subjective observations from the less than 90 days she spent working at our company. If she were to make such allegations of CCP loyalty about her current employer, Politico, based on similar circumstantial observations, it would be absurd on its face. The fact that Van Sant felt the complaint worth producing and the reason that Marco Rubio feels it worth pursuing is simple — because our founder and then-CEO, and half of our employees, are of Asian ethnicity. That’s racism.

The only thing we know of that could possibly come across as being “pro China” about The China Project is that we do expend great energy to provide balanced and fair coverage of China — without stereotyping or reducing the country and its people to a monolithic “other.” Van Sant, Rubio, and others like them would prefer to see one-sided reporting that validates only their worldview and furthers only their personal agendas. That’s anti-free-speech and un-American.

For what it’s worth — we provided the reporter at Semafor, Ben Smith, with a sworn statement from me that directly and factually contradicted the allegations of the Van Sant / Rubio complaint, but Semafor chose to only disclose and share theirs, not ours. (Also for the record, we provided Ben with countless pieces of concrete evidence disproving most of the specifics of the Van Sant complaints, which he also chose to mostly ignore.)

If you are still not convinced we don’t work for the CCP, read on to hear all about how absurd this claim really is.

We’re not agents of the CCP or any government, period. 

I am the Editor-in-Chief of The China Project, and the buck stops with me. I have a long history of independent reporting and publishing about China.

No investor, board member, or executive at the company – or anyone else for that matter – has ever tried to direct my editorial coverage at The China Project for political purposes or to promote the Chinese Communist Party. If they did, I would leave immediately. 

We have never taken any direction from any CCP member, organization, or agent. Period.

From our own Manifesto page, you can read:

We receive no financial support or influence from any individual or organization affiliated with any government, although we are proud to count numerous government employees and offices from many countries around the world as paying subscribers of our content.

We have been so consistently critical of China that we are banned there, and often attacked by Communist Party mouthpieces

Our website has been blocked in China since since July 2018. (For context about me as editor, my previous website was blocked in China in 2007). 

Although we strive to be fair and balanced in our reporting, we have never pulled our punches. A quick look at our website will tell you that, and we have removed the paywall this week to let anyone poke around as much as they like to see our publishing history.

Here is a sample of our critical coverage of the Chinese Communist Party: 

• In 2018, we published one of the first comprehensive guides to the Uyghur internment camps in Xinjiang, and even though much of the Western media has moved on from this story, we continue to document it on a regular basis, e.g., this podcast from September 2022.
• Ironically, we have written at length about Chinese disinformation campaigns targeting the West and Chinese overseas influence efforts. 
• Right at the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote a critical opinion piece predicting that the Communist Party would use COVID to dramatically increase the reach of the surveillance state. 
• We often feature Uyghur, Hong Kong, and Taiwan voices who are highly critical of the Communist Party.
• We frequently publish opinion pieces and interviews that are highly critical of Beijing. For some examples from the last two weeks: Get ready for a less stable and less friendly China, After the 20th Party Congress, will Xi stay in power indefinitely?, and After the 20th Party Congress, private business is running scared.

If you dive deeper into our full archives, you will see that we have written literally hundreds of articles about all the topics that are most sensitive, and some absolutely forbidden, in China.

Our reporting is 100% antithetical to being in any way even loosely affiliated with the CCP, let alone somehow collaborating with them, let alone working for them.

• Xi Jinping
• Taiwan
• Xinjiang
• Censorship
• COVID origins
• LGBTQ
• Sexual harassment/assualt
• Feminism
• Military issues
• Tibet
• Human trafficking 

Earlier this year, the Cyber Administration of China, which is the country’s chief internet censorship and control organization, attacked The China Project (then known as The China Project, before our rebrand) for being agents of the U.S. government, intent on destabilizing China and enabling Uyghur, Taiwan and Hong Kong independence activists, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy and George Soros. These accusations were repeated in various forms by dozens of other Chinese state and Communist Party mouthpieces (you can see two examples here in Chinese, English or just search for “SupChina” on a Chinese search engine). 

The allegations are nonsensical and provably false

The allegations in the congressional complaint (that we have seen so far) are so circumstantial and subjective that even if they were true, they would still not indicate, let alone prove, any CCP influence. But the good news is all of the allegations we have seen so far are provably false based on emails, Slack message records, and the contents of our website itself. 

Obvious racial stereotyping and a “dual loyalty” smear

Can you imagine reading the same allegations from a former employee of the New York Times, or Politico, where our former employee Shannon Van Sant works now? 

Why did Marco Rubio and Shannon Van Sant target The China Project? How would the same nonsensical, completely unfounded allegations of loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party look if aimed at another media company whose founder did not have a Chinese surname and whose team was not more than 50% of Asian ethnicity? 

Mr. Rubio said it pretty well last year:

A disgruntled employee seeking revenge 

Shannon Van Sant worked for us for less than three months. She was fired for poor performance and refusing to complete the work she was hired to do. 

As I have already made clear above, the claims in Shannon Van Sant’s complaint are factually and provably incorrect. Ironically, the closest thing we’ve ever had to a Chinese Communist Party connection was when Ms Van Sant herself worked for us: She was an employee of state-owned Party mouthpiece China Central TV (now CGTN) from 2006 to 2008. 

She was hired by The China Project to write about business, not human rights. We already had plenty of other reporters writing about human rights issues. Nonetheless, during her very brief tenure, we did let her write about human rights. And during the same period, we continue to publish other writers’ work that was highly critical of China, e.g.: Preserving Uyghur art and culture amid cultural genocide. 

What we have here is a disgruntled former employee — who was fired for incompetence and not completing the basic day to day work she was assigned — exploiting the political atmosphere in Washington D.C. to seek revenge. 

And about those allegations

We will be expanding this part of this response page in the next 24 hours to more comprehensively respond to the allegations, but we wanted to provide a brief response for now.

Allegation: Van Sant wanted to write more about human rights issues, and we wouldn’t let her.

• Fact: We hired Van Sant to be Business Editor. Her sole job responsibility and job description throughout the recruiting and hiring process was to write business stories. We had many other people writing human rights pieces at the time, and indeed we published many human rights-focused pieces during Van Sant’s brief tenure with us. It was a managerial decision to ask her to focus on business — because that was her job. That said, we did let her write about human rights issues, anyway! And, we have Slack chat correspondence records between her and our now-CEO Bob Guterma where he enthusiastically endorses and encourages her ideas to create a special “tracker” for all Xinjiang-related disinformation data and reports, so long as it didn’t displace her primary responsibility as Business Editor. 

Allegation: Then-CEO Anla Cheng forced Van Sant to promote a book written by a man named Peter Walker, who is a “favorite” of the Chinese state media.

• Fact: We have an email from Cheng to Van Sant and myself as Editor in Chief stating clearly that we should do the interview with Walker because we were hoping to collaborate with him in various ways — but if we didn’t want to publish it, we didn’t have to. We never published any interview or undertook any other activity to help promote Walker’s book. (We also never collaborated with him in any other way ever again.)

Allegation: Then-CEO Anla Cheng told staff that she had spoken to the China Association for Science and Technology in Beijing, and gotten a tip that a Chinese scientist was being wrongly investigated in the U.S., and then told her staff, “We have to protect him.”

• Fact: If the New York Times reports on the wrongful accusation of Chinese scientists for acts of espionage that never took place, does that make the New York Times an operative of the CCP, too? (Examples here, here, and here.)