After the recent Trump-Taiwan phone call, a piece of old
"news" got fried hot again: this one claims that Trump has read
hundreds of books about China, and revealed his top list of twenty in an
"interview" with Xinhua, China's official news agency. "Trump's China book list" went viral in cyberspace to show that the
President-elect of the United States isn't that ignorant. Chinese bloggers and cyber
surfers alike cite confidently the LA
Times as the source of this "news."
But it so happened that two rumor-wary friends, Victor and Zhang Tuomu, both Chinese Americans with a Peking University education, had read in the July 25 issue of the New Yorker ("Donald Trump's Ghostwriters Tells All") that Trump doesn't actually read
books. Suspicious of this "Trump's China book list," the two did some digging, and Zhang Tuomu published
their fact-checking results three days ago on a WeChat publication titled
"反海外谣言中心" ("The Overseas Anti-Rumor Center"). The article, written mostly in Chinese, is now
also circulating online, for example here.
The gist of it is that they found no Xinhua report on the
said interview with Trump, but discovered the following instead:
- On April 26, 2011, a commercial PR website, newswire.com, published a "press release" titled "Donald Trump's Favorite Chinese Books." It came from "China Books," said to "Specialize in retail and distribution of western-published books in Mainland China." (This is strange, because the "Trump's China book list" shown in this "press release" contains many books banned in China.)
- On May 3, 2011, a report titled "Donald Trump has read a lot of books on China: 'I understand the Chinese mind'" appeared on the website of LA Times; the piece cites the content of the above commercial "press release" as actual news, apparently without fact checking. (Victor actually checked with the journalist, Tony Pierce, who verified that his "news" indeed came from newswire.com.)
- On May 4, 2011, Beijing's Xinhuanet.com cited the LA Times report (see the irony? LAT says Xinhua said it first; Xinhua says LAT said it first) on Trump's book list, without mentioning the sensitive book titles.
From then on, the LA Times
became the official source of "Trump's China book list" in Chinese
internet articles.
— Xujun Eberlein (@InsideOutChina) November 9, 2016
I might also add that, the latest popularity
of this "news" seems to have been stimulated by VOA's columnist, Han Lianchao, "a visiting fellow
at the renowned American think tank Hudson Institute" (this title seems to
shine an authoritative halo to VOA's Chinese audience), who unsuspiciously mentioned the "book list" on December 4th when discussing Trump's China policy. Han
said "据报道"
– "as reported" – without specifying the source, but I wouldn't be
surprised if he had seen the LA Times
report, or the citing of it in Chinese cyberspace. Han might not be a New Yorker reader, and I don't blame him
for his trust in LAT, because I
trusted the paper too. That is, before this episode.
Now I can almost hear a furious rebuttal: You can't say it
is the LAT! It is just one reporter writing a blog post! I totally agree, in fact I have been following
a few real good journalists there, such as Barbara Demick, and in my mind they represent
the LAT I liked and trusted. But let's also face the inconvenient reality: when people quote the fake news, they say "LA Times reported that," they don't
care who the particular reporter is or which part of the LAT website published it.
Btw, one thing that is still unclear to me is the motive for
the 2011 "press release" placed on newswire.com. If it was a publicity stunt from a
book dealer, which appears most likely, then why did it give a contact address
in China? Many of the books listed are not
allowed to be sold there. We probably shouldn't rule out another possibility: it
might have been a political stunt
from … (add your guess here). If so, the irony is that the fake news has taken five
years to ferment, in a now unpresidented
political climate.