… the same platform that gave us Walter Duranty in the first place. Astute readers will recall the name of the New York Times reporter that helped Joseph Stalin cover up the Holodomor — Moscow’s genocidal campaign in Ukraine that killed millions through starvation. Or perhaps better put these days, Moscow’s first genocidal campaign in Ukraine.

Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his lies and propaganda in service to mass murder. One has to wonder whether the committee will give a similar award to this gem dug up by Philip Melancthon Wegmann from February 2021:

Published Feb. 5, 2021: New York Times: "Power, Patriotism and 1.4 Billion People: How China Beat the Virus and Roared Back" https://t.co/lx6PMsvcmo

— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) November 28, 2022

As one reader on Twitter remarked, that didn’t age well. With China’s populace going into the streets in dozens of cities to protest its “zero-COVID” policies and the repressive regime in Beijing, that’s an understatement that might qualify for a top-five finish in the Guinness Book of World Records on its own.

As bad as that cheerleading headline has proven to be, the report itself is even worse. It’s still up at the NY Times too, which is either a testament to transparency or cluelessness … or both. For instance, this passage looks especially Duranty-esque:

The Chinese Communist Party reached deep into private business and the broader population to drive a recovery, an authoritarian approach that has emboldened its top leader, Xi Jinping. …

In the year since the coronavirus began its march around the world, China has done what many other countries would not or could not do. With equal measures of coercion and persuasion, it has mobilized its vast Communist Party apparatus to reach deep into the private sector and the broader population, in what the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has called a “people’s war” against the pandemic — and won.

China is now reaping long-lasting benefits that few expected when the virus first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan and the leadership seemed as rattled as at any moment since the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.

The success has positioned China well, economically and diplomatically, to push back against the United States and others worried about its seemingly inexorable rise. It has also emboldened Mr. Xi, who has offered China’s experience as a model for others to follow.

How’s that take looking now? Ever since this article was last updated, China has imposed a continuous series of lockdowns, which have done nothing to “win” the pandemic. It has instead kept the country’s economy from rebounding, incentivized foreign companies to move supply chains to more reliable environments, and now sparked a popular uprising that far exceeds the 1989 Tiananmen Square moment.

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Don’t take my word for that comparison. Ask one of the men who led that protest in 1989, Wang Dan:

A former leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests said the ongoing demonstrations in China, and a “violent” response from Beijing, could lead to the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In a Facebook post shared Sunday, Wang Dan warned President Xi Jinping against mobilizing the military, saying that if the CCP adopts “violent repressive policies” or opens fire on the protesters, like in 1989, the “collapse” of the CCP could happen soon.

“I said early that ‘June 4’ only happens once. If the CCP dares to mobilize its troops to shoot again, the CCP will surely be overthrown,” Wang wrote.

In a rare show of public anger, protests have erupted across China over Xi’s zero-COVID policy, which is believed to have led to the deaths of 10 people in an apartment fire in the city of Urumqi after lockdown measures delayed emergency teams from reaching the victims. …

On Sunday, Wang said the recent organizing and protests against Xi and the CCP have brought on “a new era in China.” He pointed out that although the world may not be “ready” for the collapse of the communist party, the dissolution of the Soviet Union “also occurred overnight.”

“If the CCP repeats itself 33 years later with more bloodshed, it could lead to greater backfire than before,” the activist warned in a YouTube video.

Does that sound as though Xi and his authoritarian regime and policies “won” the pandemic? Have the events of the past couple of weeks demonstrated a patriotic fervor for CCP rule?

Indeed not. In fact, it appears now that Xi and his CCP ruling clique oppressed its people and turned their country into an almost-literal prison state. This was clearly obvious not just at the time but before and since, and yet the New York Times and its vast hierarchy of reporters, editors, and fact-checkers somehow missed it. Instead of reporting the facts, they swallowed the party line from Beijing and regurgitated it for their readers … much as they did with Duranty’s help during the Holodomor.

One has to read all the way through this to get a feel for just how much of an embarrassment this piece has become. It hails the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines, which have turned out to be ineffective; it shrugged off the supply chain crisis which was already emerging as the story was published; and claimed that the CCP was orienting itself to serve its subjects’ “material interests” as a benefit of their mobilization, despite widespread reports of food and medicine shortages.

All of this propaganda was in service to a clear message, too: promoting authoritarianism. How else to read this?

Beijing’s successes in each dimension of the pandemic — medical, diplomatic and economic — have reinforced its conviction that an authoritarian capacity to quickly mobilize people and resources gave China a decisive edge that other major powers like the United States lacked. It is an approach that emphasizes a relentless drive for results and relies on an acquiescent public.

Except, of course, that those “successes” only exist in Beijing’s propaganda stream. That’s something we’d expect American media to point out in real time. That prompts a question about why the New York Times in particular seems so inclined to parrot communist propaganda — and to a lesser extent other media outlets in America as well.

Addendum: World Economic Forum chair Klaus Schwab certainly qualifies as a finalist, as Jonathan Turley points out:

China has expanded its crackdown on protesters over the government’s authoritarian measures to control Covid, including arresting and beating a BBC reporter. The crackdown follows comments last week from World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Chair Klaus Schwab declared China to be a “role model” in how to handle the virus.

Last week, Schwab told a Chinese media outlet in Bangkok, Thailand, that “the Chinese model is certainly a very attractive model for quite a number of countries.”

What Schwab calls “an attractive model” includes the denial of free speech and associational rights as well as brutal confinement conditions for millions. That approach also included the failure to promptly notify the world of the outbreak and the refusal to share information on the origins of Covid 19.