New York Times accused of running Chinese ‘propaganda’ puff piece for Xi Jinping ahead of Winter Olympics

The New York Times raised eyebrows with a report critics say offers over-the-top praise for China and its leader ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics.

On Saturday, Times Beijing bureau chief Steven Lee Myers, Shanghai bureau chief Keith Bradsher and global sports reporter Tariq Panja co-authored an article titled “China’s Games: How Xi Jinping Is Staging the Olympics on His Terms,” bolstering how China “managed to fulfill its promises and cow its critics.”

The report began with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s heavy push seven years ago for the International Olympic Committee to select Beijing for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games despite China’s limited snowfall and lack of experience in winter sports.

“Mr. Xi pledged to resolve all of this, putting his personal prestige on what seemed then like an audacious bid. ‘We will deliver every promise we made,’ he told the Olympic delegates meeting in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur,” the Times wrote. “With the Games only days away, China has delivered. It has plowed through the obstacles that once made Beijing’s bid seem a long shot, and faced down new ones, including an unending pandemic and mounting international concern over its authoritarian behavior.”

“China no longer needs to prove its standing on the world stage; instead, it wants to proclaim the sweeping vision of a more prosperous, more confident nation under Mr. Xi, the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. Where the government once sought to mollify its critics to make the Games a success, today it defies them,” the Times later wrote. “Mr. Xi’s government has brushed off criticism from human rights activists and world leaders as the bias of those — including President Biden — who would keep China down. It has implicitly warned Olympic broadcasters and sponsors not to bend to calls for protests or boycotts over the country’s political crackdown in Hong Kong or its campaign of repression in Xinjiang, the largely Muslim region in the northwest.” – READ MORE