Thread by @RnaudBertrand

That's an extraordinary story by @NPR and an all-too-rare example of good diligent journalism from U.S. media:

At the origin of the story is NPR investigating a highly mediatized instance of China allegedly harassing "dissidents" abroad, namely Wang Jingyu @WANGJINGYU2001 as well as Gao Zhi and his family (his son Gao Peng, daughter Gao Han and his wife Liu Fengling).

These allegations had given rise to scores of articles in the media globally such as AP, the Washington Post, ABC News, the Independent, Japanese media like The Asahi Shimbum, etc. All uncritically sharing the "dissidents'" story that they were being harassed by the "CCP". All in all, as NRP notes, "through his many interviews and claims, Wang Jingyu became one of the most public victims of Chinese government repression in Europe. More than 50 news organizations have quoted, mentioned or featured him. Witnesses have also referenced Wang’s story in U.S. congressional testimony."

NPR however decided to dig further and to actually - believe it or not - verify if the alleged harassment claims were true or not before publishing them, which is very much NOT the norm when it comes to negative stories on China.

And what they found out was that it was actually all a con! Wang Jingyu had actually faked everything and had pulled a very sophisticated con on Gao Zhi and his family to steal their life savings.

Basically what happened is that Wang and Gao were both residing in the Netherlands. Wang, claiming that the "CCP harassment" was so intense he could no longer stay in his apartment, started living in an empty room in Gao's apartment. Gao meanwhile was trying to get his family - who at that time were in Thailand - to join him in the Netherlands.

In Thailand however Gao's wife got contacted by a man who said he was a Chinese diplomat and told her that Chinese authorities believed her son had threatened to blow up the Chinese Embassy in Bangkok. She also received an email that appeared to come from the Dutch immigration service and said airports in Europe had received bomb threats claiming to be from her and her son, and that “therefore [your] travel to the EU is legally restricted”.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands Gao also received a message from the same Dutch immigration email account, which said his wife and daughter had confessed to making additional bomb threats against EU embassies in Thailand and that “they apologized for this and volunteered to return to China”.

At the time they all believed that these fake bomb threats - which they hadn't made - was a form of "CCP harassment" to put pressure on them, a form of power play to show they could get to them.

What they didn't know, and what NPR found out, was that there was actually no bomb threats and that the calls and emails they'd received from the "Chinese diplomat" and "Dutch immigration" were actually all fakes, made by Wang Jingyu.

How did they find out? As per the story "NPR contacted the press office for Dutch immigration and sent a screenshot of one of the messages Gao said he'd received from it. At first, Dutch immigration refused to discuss the case, citing privacy laws. When pressed, an official said the agency had 'no record' of the email. Then, she confirmed — the email was a forgery."

NPR also "called police in Europe about the alleged bomb threats", but "the police had never heard of them."

Worst yet, the "Dutch immigration" emails tricked Gao's wife and daughter into overstaying their visa in Thailand and they ended in immigration detention. Meanwhile the same Dutch immigration account told Gao that his family has arrived in Germany, making him travel there only to be welcomed by German police who arrested him on the basis of allegations made by a close associate of Wang who told German police that "Gao is part of a Chinese Communist Party cell and has threatened his life".

And meanwhile Wang tricked Gao into spending $17,000 - his life savings, including loans from relatives - on various fraudulent pretexts, with schemes such as "a fake Thai Airways email account telling the Gao family to obtain and turn over credit cards to facilitate flights to Europe".

That's actually how NPR confirmed that it was all a con by Wang - the good old journalistic principle of following the money: looking through the Gao's credit card records they noticed that "at least one charge went to a PayPal account that includes Wang’s name." NPR also found Wang's insistence to them that "the Dutch immigration email account was authentic" very suspect, given that when they looked into it, "the emails came from a Proton Mail account".

Even more dystopian, after Gao's arrest in Germany (which again was due to Wang and his associate lying to the German police), Wang told Gao's son Peng that "his father has been arrested for threatening to kill someone" followed by "the fake Dutch immigration account instructing Peng to record a video denouncing his father" and Wang subsequently "posting the video to X".

All in all the picture that emerges is that of Wang as a master-manipulator benefitting from the paranoia of the "CCP", conning people out of their life savings and trying to then get rid of them by either getting them arrested or discrediting them publicly (e.g. the video Peng got tricked into making by Wang where he denounces his father).

Thankfully in this particular instance the Gao family ended up reunited in the Netherlands after Gao's wife and daughter spending nearly four months in detention in Thailand. Gao himself only spent a few days in detention in Germany. Still, they lost all their life savings in the process...

Wang however still seems to be at large. As a matter of fact he's still here on Twitter - @WANGJINGYU2001 - posting regular paranoid and hateful posts about the "CCP" in Chinese, describing himself in his bio as someone "wanted by CCP for exercising my right to freedom of speech"...

The only beef I have with the NPR story is that they make a point of writing that what happened with Gao and Wang is a shame because it can discredit other stories on China and its alleged "harassment of dissidents".

When actually a much more logical conclusion should be: "wait a minute, if that story is false and was originally believed uncritically by all the world's media until an unusually diligent outlet looked into it, so could other similar stories. Aren't Western media way too eager to believe negative stories on China, so much so that they end up becoming useful idiots for all sorts of conmen?"

It's far from the first time this happens. Another extremely famous case is that of exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui who also was originally presented everywhere as a "Chinese dissident" and his now behind bars in the U.S. for... just being a conman (he pulled off a $1bn scam: ). Or of course you have all the claims, often shared uncritically, by the Falun Gong cult and its followers, who remain by far the biggest spreaders of fake news on China.

So this story is very much a microcosm of a larger, more insidious problem: the confluence of confirmation bias, lazy reporting, and the insatiable appetite for sensational stories about China by the media. How many other "truths" have they accepted without question? How often have they allowed their biases to cloud their judgment? Will the media continue accepting convenient narratives at face value, or will they emulate this rare instance of actual journalism by NPR, with the skepticism and thoroughness that should normally characterize all stories? Only the latter can begin to restore the considerable amount of trust they've already lost from the public.npr.org/2024/08/03/g-s…
bbc.com/news/articles/…

Screenshots of the "harassed dissident" story in the Washington Post, ABC News, the Independent, and The Asahi Shimbum, published before the NPR story proving it was all fake and a con.

As far as I can see, most of these outlets have now unpublished it.

For proof that Wang Jingyu is still very much at large and active on Twitter, he just blocked me. Which wasn't the case one hour ago before I wrote my post.