The New York Times’ Love Affair with China

By Becket Adams

Sunday, March 22, 2026

 

What is it with the New York Times and communists?

 

They really love those guys.

 

Just consider the paper’s high regard for communist China, especially when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party’s supposed efforts to combat climate change. Never mind that nothing China says or does in this area involves altruism or global well-being; China is simply exploiting the progressive creed, which it knows resonates with the international community, to expand its sphere of influence. Never mind also that China is the world’s leading emitter of carbon.

 

Sure, nothing China says lines up with what it does, but it says it so well, and that’s what counts, right?

 

“Asia Turns Back to Coal as War Chokes Off Natural Gas,” declared a March 18 Times headline.

 

More notable than what the piece says is what it does not say. In a 1,100-plus-word article about Asia returning to coal, it’s never mentioned that China is the region’s largest consumer of . . . coal. Not once. The only mention of China is incidental, as a producer of low-cost solar panels.

 

We shouldn’t be surprised by this omission. Hiding the ball is typical of the Times’ coverage of communist regimes.

 

Instead of recognizing the obvious — that China is a cunning economic powerhouse and that it’s laughing itself silly as its rivals in Europe and North America willingly dismantle their energy capabilities — the Times’ news and opinion sections portray China as the world’s caretaker — the undisputed leader in humanity’s fight for survival.

 

“‘China Is the Engine’ Driving Nations Away From Fossil Fuels, Report Says,” reported the Times in September 2025.

 

Another article in the paper declared in August of that same year: “In the Quest for Clean Energy, China Went From Copycat to Creator.”

 

“China Poised to Take Lead on Climate After Trump’s Move to Undo Policies,” the paper declared a couple of years before that.

 

There’s also this: “There’s a Race to Power the Future. China Is Pulling Away.” And this: “What Happens if China Stops Trying to Save the World?” And this: “China Is the Adult in the Room on Climate Now.”

 

How about as far back as 2009: “On Climate Change Efforts, China Is Key.”

 

Or how about this gem: The “fight against climate change” is an “effort now mostly led by China.”

 

Har, har.

 

This isn’t just a fascination with China specifically. It’s a love and admiration for collectivism itself, a love bound by no race or border.

 

Recall that the Times spent decades reporting positively on the Soviet Union. Its infamous Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, used his position specifically to hide the empire’s brutality from the international community, including even the Holodomor famine. The Times didn’t disavow his reporting until 30 years after he had died.

 

The Times also published favorable coverage of the North Vietnamese Army in the 1960s, often minimizing or ignoring its excesses and brutality. Correspondent Harrison Salisbury’s field dispatches frequently relied heavily on information provided by NVA officials. The paper also extensively reported on the My Lai massacre, as it should have, while giving the short shrift to NVA atrocities such as the Huế Massacre, where an estimated 2,800–5,000 civilians were murdered and dumped into mass graves.

 

Then, of course, there’s the Times’ adoration of the Castro regime, which is well known to anyone who has read its coverage over the past 40 years.

 

Perhaps most shameful of all is that the paper was quick to dismiss U.S. intelligence reports that accurately predicted life under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

 

In April 1975, just before the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg (yes, the Killing Fields Schanberg) wrote a dispatch titled, “Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life.”

 

“It is difficult,” he argued in the article, “to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.”

 

Later, in the immediate aftermath of the communist takeover of Cambodia, Schanberg reported that executions under the new Khmer Rouge regime “will apparently bear no resemblance to the mass executions that had been predicted by Westerners.”

 

This on-the-ground coverage earned him a Pulitzer.

 

To Schanberg’s great credit, he later owned up to his shocking gullibility and made a sharp about-face, committing himself fully to the even more difficult and dangerous task of exposing the regime’s evils; this work would be immortalized eventually in Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields, which was released nearly a decade after the fall of Phnom Penh.

 

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

 

As for the Times, it painted a rosier picture in the early days of the Khmer Rouge. In July 1975, for example, it published work by a contributor who claimed that reports of mass starvation and killings in Cambodia were “self‐serving exaggerations planted [by the U.S. government] to discredit the new government.”

 

Enjoy this key passage:

 

These same sources gave birth to a flurry of sensational “bloodbath” stories, nourished with “eyewitness accounts,” that made headlines in the days immediately following the surrender of Phnom Penh. The “eyewitness accounts” turned out to be second‐ or third‐hand rumors, and the stories quickly disappeared in the press in the absence of any substantiating evidence.

 

Now that the war has at last come to an end, there is reason to believe that after initial difficulties are surmounted the new Government’s all-out effort to increase food production will transform Cambodia into a land self‐sufficient in food, and within a few years, into a rice‐exporting nation, as it was before it was ravished by war.

 

Even as the death toll steadily rose and the number of refugees fleeing Cambodia reached crisis proportions, the Times remained skeptical. Eventually, however, the paper shifted away from its hesitant framing. Yet despite humiliating itself once on the issue, the paper still published a contribution in 1990 titled, “Pol Pot: Not the Killer We Think He Is.” The article, which its own author disavowed in 2015, minimized the mass murders, doubted and contradicted the survivors, and even suggested that details of the Khmer Rouge’s worst excesses were actually part of a U.S. disinformation scheme.

 

Pol Pot, who would die peacefully eight years later, must’ve gotten a kick out of it.

 

What’s telling is that the paper never seems to learn or adjust its thinking, even after repeatedly getting it wrong.

 

Throughout these nearly identical episodes, which span an entire century, the pattern is the same: the Times provides favorable coverage of communist regimes until the wrongdoing becomes undeniable, leading to public embarrassment for the paper. This keeps happening. It’s still happening.

 

This tendency to “misjudge” and “misreport” on these regimes, despite the abundance of trend data, shows that the Times’ default approach to covering communist governments is not one of curiosity or journalistic inquiry but one of reflexive, almost instinctive support.

 

How else to explain the consistently sloppy coverage?

 

If a newspaper consistently grants communist regimes favorable coverage and continues to do so even after each regime proves to be just as evil as the rest of us suspected, and even after multiple professional humiliations, we must conclude that the paper isn’t just ignorant or forgetful — we must conclude that this keeps happening because the paper supports communist regimes.