Tue, Dec 02, 2025 page8

• ‘New York Times’ is dulling the sharp truth

  • By Hsiao Hsi-huei 蕭錫惠
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  Anyone who has lived in New York long enough would eventually notice a truth everyone knows, but few dare to write down: When it comes to China, the New York Times keeps a special back door open — one that only Beijing can walk through. There is no key to this door, only a tacit agreement that as long as the New York Times does not kick it open, Beijing would not weld it shut.

  And so, the world’s most self-consciously “free” newspaper has learned to speak in the syntax most palatable to the Chinese state. The “professional neutrality” reserved for authoritarians: The New York Times never openly praises Beijing. It simply sands down its sharpest words, one by one.

  On Xinjiang, it avoids the word “genocide,” preferring the softer “mass detention.” For Hong Kong, it would not say “crackdown,” only that the “situation is deteriorating.” Regarding Taiwan Strait issues, its go-to phrasing is always, “Taiwan’s actions, which Beijing views as provocative,” as if an aggressor is merely “annoyed,” not sharpening its knives.

  This style of writing has an elegant name: “balanced reporting.” Authoritarian regimes simply call it free polishing services.

  The New York Times does not lack reporters who can expose China, it lacks editors willing to pay the price for those exposures.

  At every pitch meeting and headline discussion, the question that gets quietly weighed is never “Is this accurate?” It is “Will this get us barred from China forever?”

  The paper never needs a call from the liaison office in Beijing. Its reporters never need to “have tea” with state security. Self-censorship is completed quietly and precisely inside that glass tower on West 40th St.

  What is deadlier than hostility is this kind of gentleness. The real danger is not the People’s Daily. It is the New York Times, decorated with Pulitzers, yet softening at the critical moment.

  It does not lie on Beijing’s behalf. It simply files down the edge of truth until it no longer cuts and then hands it to the world in its most professional tone. Under this gentle packaging, concentration camps become vocational training centers, fighter jets circling Taiwan become routine drills, threats become “warnings” and aggression becomes “unification claims.”

  This is not ignorance, it is calculated benevolence. The New York Times remains an influential newspaper, but it is no longer an impartial referee on China — and certainly not a shield Taiwan can rely on.

  When the lighthouse of the free world begins to shine using authoritarian grammar, what gets illuminated is no longer the truth, but a widening gray zone.

  Taiwan has no retreat. It cannot learn to be silenced nor mistake someone else’s ambiguity for its own safety. In this war — silent, smokeless yet long under way — what we need is not subtler “balance,” but sharper courage.

  Hsiao Hsi-huei is a freelance writer.

  Translated by Lin Lee-kai
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