Good news: The lab leak theory is no longer racist (or debunked). Bad news: If you don’t like China, you’re (still) a racist.
Days after Eileen Wang, the former mayor of Arcadia, Calif., resigned from her post and pleaded guilty to acting as an illegal foreign agent of China, the mainstream media are doing what they do best: being very concerned about the racist backlash.
NBC News lamented that Wang’s resignation had “sparked backlash and reignited fears of anti-Asian discrimination.” The double-bylined article cited unspecified “racist comments” that “appeared on social media feeds” after the details of Wang’s case became public. The authors quoted several experts and “advocates” who were very concerned about the “dangerous” rise in anti-China rhetoric, including accusations of dual loyalty against Chinese-Americans.
“China is seen as such a rival that you have to pick sides,” said Russell Mark Jeung, professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University. “We’re so in a political polarized environment and racialized environment that it’s hard to straddle both.”
Wang admitted in court this week that she “secretly served the interests of the Chinese government” while serving as mayor of Arcadia, a small town in the Los Angeles suburbs with a large Asian population. Wang reportedly promoted Chinese propaganda through a website called “U.S. News Center,” and took direction from Chinese government officials. She operated the website alongside Yaoning Sun, a man that Wang “believed to be her fiancé,” according to federal officials. Sun is serving a four-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to the same charge in October 2025.
Arcadia made headlines last year after a Chinese-American couple was arrested for running a massive surrogacy scam involving nearly two dozen children. Authorities raided the home of Guojun Xuan and Silvia Zhang in May 2025 after their two-month-old son was rushed to the hospital with severe head trauma. They found 21 children at the Arcadia residence who were taken into custody pending an investigation. Since then, at least five more children were born to the couple via surrogates they recruited through sham agencies under their control.
Wang was the first of two Chinese-American leaders convicted this week of working as a foreign agent. Lu Jianwang, president of a Chinese community organization in Manhattan, was convicted on Wednesday of running a secret police station that monitored suspected dissidents at the behest of the Chinese government.
The New York Times was also very concerned about the racist backlash. “The intermittent drip of such incidents has fueled broader suspicions about Chinese Americans as spies and perpetual foreigners, echoing earlier periods of American history when they were subject to exclusion, racism and discrimination,” the Times reported.
The article goes on to note that Donald Trump was “accused of racism and xenophobia” during the COVID-19 pandemic for using phrases such as “Chinese virus” and “kung flu.”
For obvious reasons, the Times neglected to mention that many others were accused of racism and xenophobia during the pandemic for, among other things, entertaining the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, that specialized in the study of genetically modified coronaviruses.
The lab leak theory is now widely regarded as the most plausible explanation. At the height of the pandemic, however, the Times and other mainstream media outlets sneeringly dismissed it as a fringe conspiracy theory only a racist would believe. Apoorva Mandavilli, the Times science reporter who led the paper’s coverage of the pandemic, dismissed the lab leak theory while envisioning a day when we could “admit its racist roots.”
In February 2020, when Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) suggested the virus might have leaked from a Chinese lab, the Times scolded him for promoting a “conspiracy theory” that was gaining traction “among those who see China as a threat” as right-wing media outlets “fan the anger.”
The Washington Post agreed that Cotton was spreading a conspiracy theory, but went a step further by insisting it had already been “debunked.” Alas, this was months before the experts at PolitiFact confirmed the debunking. Post fact checker Glenn Kessler mocked Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) for suggesting the virus may have leaked from a Chinese lab. “We deal in facts,” Kessler huffed.
This was around the same time the Times published its infamous report on all the so-called scientific experts who argued that protesting racial injustice was the only acceptable reason to gather in large groups during the pandemic lockdowns. It was also around this time that Times opinion editor James Bennett was forced to resign after the paper published Cotton’s op-ed arguing that riots and looting were bad. Journalists at the Times and other outlets insisted that Cotton’s opinion was a racist threat to the physical safety of their colleagues.
The Times remains as committed as ever to sounding the alarm about racism. “Some lawmakers and civil rights advocates say fears of Chinese espionage have resulted in the blocking of some Chinese Americans from government jobs and the racial profiling of ethnically Chinese scientists and researchers at universities,” the paper reported this week.
The people who work at the Times (and other Democratic activists) presumably think that only a racist could read that sentence and think, “Um, so what?” Fear of Chinese espionage seems like a perfectly legitimate reason to err on the side of caution. How many “ethnic American scientists” are getting research jobs and government posts in China?
Meanwhile, Times columnist Ezra Klein and others have argued that the Chinese government and its defenders are largely to blame for the rise in anti-Chinese racism. “If opposition to China is racist, then Chinese people will become mascots for a politics that would have made the Chinese diaspora unthinkable,” Klein wrote last year.
Wait, never mind. He was talking about Israel and the Jews. The Times would never let anyone say that about China.
Read the full article here
