New York Times Criticized for Running Op/Ed Favoring China’s Treatment of Hong Kong

In early June, the New York Times ran a controversial op/ed from Senator Tom Cotton that advocated for sending the military into American cities to quell the protests that were overwhelming the police. Following the extensive backlash, the op/ed page editor James Bennet resigned from his post. This all feels like forever ago but it’s been less than four months.

With that as context, it’s mind boggling that the Times ran an op/ed today by Regina Ip, a member of the Executive Council in Hong Kong, justifying the use of China military force to quell Hong Kong protests.

Here are two segments of the op/ed:

Hong Kongers who wanted the city promptly to return to peace thought the authorities’ handling of the situation, which dragged on for months and grew more and more violent, was incompetent. For other locals, many outsiders and apparently much of the global media, a people’s legitimate quest for more democracy was being suppressed. Something had to be done, and the Chinese authorities did it.

and

To some, the new national security law is especially chilling because it seems simultaneously vague and very severe. But many laws are vague, constructively so. And this one only seems severe precisely because it fills longstanding loopholes — about subversion, secession, local terrorism, collusion with external forces. One person’s “severe” is someone else’s intended effect.

The backlash to this is just starting to percolate, but here are two responses to the op/ed so far:

Get a load of this headline. @nytimes publishing a piece of shameless #China propaganda defending Beijing’s violent & lawless crackdown in #HongKong. What next from NYT, “Like it or not, Uighurs are prisoners”? pic.twitter.com/E68iydnQ7G

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) October 1, 2020

The boss of the NYT op-ed page was fired because he ran a controversial op-ed by a sitting U.S. Senator.

But a few months later, a propagandist for an authoritarian regime gets to argue that a violent putdown of peaceful protests was needed in the same pages.

This is just nuts. pic.twitter.com/qDW1jLNSnm

— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) October 1, 2020

It is also one of the best examples of, um, systemic racism in American journalism:

Want to advocate for brutal measures that might affect American lives? No way.

Want to advocate for brutal measures that destroy lives in Asia or Africa? Welcome to our pages!

— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) October 1, 2020

How did no one have the foresight to recognize what a glaring hypocrisy this was before it was published?