New York Times Pushes Chinese Communist Party Line

On high-speed rail and academic research output, skepticism is absent

Has the Chinese Communist Party taken over editorial responsibilities at the New York Times? It sure looks that way on the basis of two recent examples that uncritically amplify supposed Chinese successes without making note of problematic downsides.

Example number one comes as part of a series, “American Inertia,” that skates close to the line between constructively pointing out problems with America—typical newspaper work—and, more problematically, buying into and amplifying the Chinese Communist narrative that America is on the decline and destined to be overtaken in world dominance by China. “Why Can’t New York Fix Penn Station?,” the Times headline asks, declaring, “The nation’s busiest transit hub stands as a symbol of a condition that afflicts so many attempts to get big things done in America: inertia.”

High up in the interminably long article is a comparison to China that is framed simplistically to make America look bad by comparison. The Times article says that while New York has not fully rebuilt Penn Station, over the past quarter century, “China has constructed nearly 30,000 miles of high-speed rail tracks and built more than a thousand new stations.”

What the Times article leaves out is that those China rail investments have been so costly and inefficient that even the Chinese Communists are now regretting them and moving in a different direction. The Times bureau chief in Beijing, Keith Bradsher, reported in 2024 that “The bullet trains are a symbol of the country’s capacity to build infrastructure, often even before there is consumer demand for it. But that infrastructure has been paid for with enormous borrowing, which has reached $870 billion just for China State Railway Group, the state-owned enterprise that runs the rail network….China’s leadership is shifting the country’s growth strategy from infrastructure and real estate investments toward high-tech manufacturing and exports….Today, lines serving some smaller cities, especially where economic growth has stalled or worse, are infrequently used….hundreds of smaller cities and towns have built large stations, even if they have as few as one train a day.”

Radio Free Asia reported in January 2025, “Many of the high-speed trains are noticeably empty, with people piling onto slower trains in search of cheaper tickets, residents told RFA Mandarin in recent interviews.”

Caixin Global, which is China-based, reported in 2018, under the headline “Empty High-Speed Rail Stations Face Reckoning”:

* Railway planners simply built too many stations in some parts of China and often chose inconvenient locations, experts say

* Policymakers warned against overoptimistic estimates of railway stations’ economic benefits, especially for smaller cities

The Beicheng high-speed train station in central China’s Hefei City looks impressive enough with its 1,000-square-meter passenger hall, four platforms and eight rail lines. The six-year-old station is also mostly deserted.

On one recent day, a visiting local official counted just six passengers using the station. Only two trains stop there each day – down from four not long ago – delivering an average of eight passengers.

Once expected to attract high traffic volumes, the Beicheng station stands as a monument to rash planning during China’s years of ambitious railway expansion. The local government acknowledged last year that the station had never made ends meet since its opening in 2012 and that it was at risk of being closed down.

Railway planners simply built too many stations in some parts of China and often chose inconvenient locations, transportation experts say.

The Times of London reported in August 2024 on Chinese provinces cutting teacher pay, swamped by $14 trillion in debt for “ghost” train stations “built by local governments in the vain hope that the bullet trains would stop and bring prosperity.”

Compared to that, what the Times derides as “American inertia” looks not so bad.

Sometimes what the Times calls “American inertia” can actually be good if the effect is to prevent American taxpayers and future generations from being saddled with debt to build white elephant projects that some deluded bureaucrat imagines are a good idea. It is hard to prevent a government construction project in China, where there is no rule of law, no freedom of the press, no independent labor unions, no freedom of assembly, and no reliable private property rights. That the Times news editors apparently think America should aspire to Chinese-paced standards of railroad infrastructure construction, or that the downsides aren’t worth including, is odd. It is, alas, somewhat characteristic of the year-end-investigative project pattern at the Times.

Between November 1 and December 31 you can expect lots of this sort of thing. Daily news typically slows down around the holiday season. The journalistic awards—Pulitzer, Polk, Goldsmith—that are big measures of success and driver of promotions and prestige for Times journalists operate on deadlines tied to calendar years. So these projects that Times journalists have been working on for nearly a year all are under pressure to get wrapped up and published by year-end, while there is room for them in the paper. Seasonal print advertising highs used to help drive this cycle, too, though nowadays they are less of a factor.

A second example of the Times falling uncritically for the Chinese Communist Party line comes in a recent opinion column by David Brooks. Brooks writes:

A recent Wall Street Journal-NORC poll found that only 31 percent of Americans believe in the American dream —the idea that you can get ahead by working hard. Nearly half of Americans say they used to believe in it but no longer do, while 23 percent say they never did.

Maybe that state of demoralization explains why Americans watch passively as China leapfrogs us in one scientific and technological field after another. More papers in the elite scientific journals are now written by Chinese scholars than by American ones. Why are we not doing everything we can to preserve our status as the nation of futurity?

The online version of the Brooks column hyperlinks the claim about elite scientific journals to a paper from the Quincy Institute that is headlined “China’s Historic Rise to the Top of the Scientific Ladder.”

If you dig into it, though, the Quincy Institute paper—like much of what comes out of that anti-Israel institution, which pressed the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts to stop taking defense industry funding—is flawed. The paper begins, “The Nature Index, which tracks publications in 145 of the world’s most elite natural science journals — including Nature, Science, Cell, and Physical Review Letters — shows China’s lead in 2024 with 37,273 articles compared to America’s 31,930. This represents a stunning 17 percent advantage for China in what has long been considered the gold standard of scientific excellence…”

I’m here to tell you that there aren’t actually 145 “elite natural science” journals in existence. Of the articles measured by the Index, 11,578 of them were in a journal called “Nature Communications,” which is “open access” and charges scholars an “article processing charge” of $6990.00. If you are genuinely concerned about academic achievement, look at Nobel prizes, not articles in not-actually-elite pay-to-publish journals.

China is taking the same approach to scholarly publishing as it did to high-speed rail—throwing money around with little attention to quality. Retraction Watch, a scientific integrity watchdog co-founded by my former Harvard Crimson colleague Dr. Ivan Oransky, reported in December 2024: “Bribery offers from China rattle journal editors,” “A joint investigation by Science and Retraction Watch earlier this year found paper mills in China and elsewhere have been bribing editors and planting agents on editorial boards for years. A long-known hotbed for paper mills, China has recently taken steps to curtail academic fraud. But observers say it remains business as usual there.”

From that investigation:

Jean-François Nierengarten of the University of Strasbourg, co-chair of the editorial board of Chemistry–A European Journal, published by Wiley, was targeted in June 2023. He received an email from someone claiming to be working with “young scholars” in China and offering to pay him $3000 for each paper he helped publish in his journal.

But Xiaotian Chen, a librarian at Bradley University who has studied paper mills in China, says publishers are not blameless. Chen points out that publishing houses have shown no sign of cutting back on the tens of thousands of special issues they put out every year in open-access journals—reportedly the preferred target for paper mills. Such issues generate hefty profits from the publication fees paid by authors. “Some of the for-profit publishers, they’re just as greedy as a paper mill,” Chen says. “And they count heavily on the contribution from Chinese authors to survive.”

China is a major market for fake papers, and critics say measures to rein in paper mills there have been largely ineffectual. According to a new preprint, more than half of Chinese medical residents say they have engaged in research misconduct such as buying papers or fabricating results. One reason is that publications, though no longer always a strict requirement for career advancement, are still the easiest path to promotion in a range of professions, including doctors, nurses, and teachers at vocational schools, according to sources in China. Yet these groups may have neither the time nor the training to do serious research, Chen says. In such a setting, paying a few hundred or even thousand dollars to see one’s name in print may seem a worthwhile investment, he says.

Voice of America reported in 2024: “According to the scientific journal Nature, some 14,000 papers were retracted from English language journals in 2023 alone, three-quarters of which involved a Chinese co-author. …Perry Link, a distinguished professor in Chinese and comparative literature at the University of California, Riverside said the volume of fabricated research in China reflects officials’ disregard for the truth….Link said political involvement in research also dissuades researchers from producing high-quality new research. ‘Value judgments in the universities are made ultimately by political authorities,’ Link said. ‘Cutting-edge research, even in technical fields, normally is done best by free-thinking minds who see themselves at the cutting edge, not “under” a political authority.’”

Journal editors report being swarmed with submissions from China and also with offers from volunteers to serve as peer reviewers for those submissions.

Where was David Brooks’s editor? Will the Times opinion page run a correction of the inaccurate claim by Brooks that this count of papers published in scholarly journals is somehow an accurate reflection that China is surpassing the U.S. in scientific accomplishment?

I was in touch today by email with the author of the Quincy Institute paper, Caroline Wagner, who is an Academy Professor at the Emeritus Academy at The Ohio State University. In the course of some back-and-forth, she acknowledged, “The USA remains the world’s preeminent science and technology leader.”

I asked her how that fit with the headline of her Quincy Institute paper, “China’s Historic Rise to the Top of the Scientific Ladder,” and with the text of the report, “As China takes a firm place as the world leader in scientific innovation...China has reached parity or superiority across virtually all measures of research output and quality.”

She wrote back, in part,“I understand your critique about a seeming contradiction — indeed, perhaps I should have been more careful in the choice of terms.”

It’s a subtle distinction between using the threat of a rising China to motivate improvement by the U.S.—just as the U.S. did with the threat of the Soviet Union during the Cold War to motivate investment in education, interstate highways, defense, and foreign aid—and reporting that leaves the incorrect impression that China has already outpaced us, or that crudely depicts China as excelling without acknowledging China’s flaws. Yet it’s a distinction worth guarding. As Perry Link noted, disregard for the truth is one of the flaws that characterizes Chinese officialdom. It’d be unfortunate if that approach took hold in America.