Updated December 19, 2024 at 15:00 PM ET
AMSTERDAM – In recent years, dozens of news organizations around the world have quoted or covered a young Chinese man named Wang Jingyu, who portrayed himself as a brave dissident standing up to Communist Party repression. But an NPR investigation this year uncovered evidence linking Wang to an elaborate con involving impersonation of government officials, credit card fraud and stretching from a Bangkok detention center to a village in the Netherlands.
NPR's reporting has now led at least 10 news organizations to review their stories featuring Wang and retract or amend them. Those news organizations include the Associated Press, Al Jazeera, Germany's Deutsche Welle, leading newspapers in the Netherlands and Norway as well as Radio Free Asia, which is funded by the U.S. government.
People who study journalism said they can't recall so many news organizations retracting or amending stories because of questions about the reliability of a single source.
"In the 25 years or so that I've been watching this carefully and writing about it, I've never seen anything like this," says Ed Wasserman, former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. "In the literature, I can't think of another instance."
After reading NPR's investigation, Wasserman described Wang like this: "A uniquely successful manipulator of media who managed to develop a reputation and develop real stature in the overseas Chinese community, thanks to the willingness of influential media to tell his story, which cast him in the role of basically a hero and a freedom fighter."
Lea Hellmueller, a journalism professor who teaches ethics at City St. George's, University of London, says Wang's story reminds her of another one in which news organizations gave a lot of publicity to someone they later found to be unreliable: Elizabeth Holmes. She's the Stanford University dropout who tricked reporters — and investors — into believing her company, Theranos, had created a ground-breaking blood testing machine.
"It was really the media that helped her shape this public image," says Hellmueller. "Ironically – and that's why I was reminded of Wang's case – journalism was also the primary driver of Theranos' downfall."
As Hellmueller points out, it was the Wall Street Journal that exposed Holmes and Theranos. "They launched this full-fledged investigation," she says, "bringing out the very best in journalism."
Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors and is due to be released from prison in 2032.
Wang Jingyu first came to the attention of news organizations in 2020. Writing online then, Wang challenged China's official version that none of its troops had died in a border clash with Indian soldiers.
After Wang's comments, Chinese police announced that they would pursue him, but Wang was traveling overseas at the time and was beyond their reach.
Over the next several years, Wang, now 23, repeatedly told reporters that the Chinese Communist Party was attacking him wherever he went.
When he transited through Dubai in 2021, Wang was detained by authorities there. He claimed that Chinese officials met with him in detention and tried to get him to return to China, according to Safeguard Defenders, a human rights group.
However, the Dubai Media Office said Wang was detained for criticizing Islam and not paying hotel bills. They also said that Chinese diplomats had never asked about him.
After Wang arrived in the Netherlands, someone used his name to make bomb threats against hotels and Chinese embassies in Western Europe, according to police. Wang also claimed that a so-called secret Chinese police station in Rotterdam had harassed and threatened him. The Dutch broadcaster, RTL Nieuws, broke the story, which sparked similar coverage from news organizations in the United States, Germany, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and Australia. Even the New York Times, BBC and CNN referenced Wang's account.
In his many interviews, Wang cut a defiant image, refusing to back down from criticizing the Chinese government. He highlighted his many press clippings on his X page, where he has about 44,000 followers.
In the summer of 2023, Wang tipped NPR to yet another story of what he portrayed as Communist Party repression. He told NPR the Chinese government had targeted the family of his friend, a fellow dissident named Gao Zhi. Gao's family was on the run in Thailand trying to obtain visas to the Netherlands.
In Wang's telling, Communist Party agents had called in bomb threats to China's embassy in Bangkok and various hotels, leaving the family's name so that Thai police would arrest them. The only documents verifying the case were a pair of emails that appeared to be from the Dutch immigration service.
Wang assured NPR the emails were genuine.
But when NPR called to authenticate them, Dutch officials revealed they were forgeries.
After Wang and Gao had a falling out, Gao sent NPR more than 700 emails purportedly from Dutch and Thai government accounts that he had thought were legitimate. In fact, they also turned out to be forgeries from fake accounts.
Taken together, the emails provide a road map to a long con that Gao said had bankrupted his family. The culprit, Gao said, was the journalistic uber-source, Wang Jingyu.
Wang acknowledges that Gao was conned, but says he had nothing to do with the scheme and that it is actually Gao who owes him money.
"It's ridiculous," Wang said in a phone interview about the allegations by Gao and his family. "I will sue them all."
The Associated Press published a story about the Gao family in Thailand, but treated the emails as authentic. When NPR told the AP they were forgeries, the news service retracted its article. After NPR broadcast its investigation, other news organizations followed suit.
For instance, Radio Bremen, part of ARD, Germany's leading public broadcaster, retracted a documentary featuring Wang that had been streamed more than 2 million times on YouTube.
Other news organizations who covered Wang have stood by their stories.
RTL Nieuws says NPR's findings did not undermine the results of their investigation into Wang's claims of harassing calls from a Chinese police station.
"We still have faith in the first story we did," RTL reporter Koen de Regt told NPR.
But de Regt said subsequent reporting on Wang's additional claims persuaded reporters that he was unreliable. For instance, Wang had claimed that a man had come to his home brandishing a knife.
"We spoke to neighbors in the building. We spoke to law enforcement," de Regt says. "There's no evidence at all that that incident happened. We don't trust him (Wang) anymore."
Wasserman, the Berkeley journalism professor, says reporters may have been too willing to believe Wang because his stories neatly fit an overall narrative that is true: China does routinely target critics overseas, even though the government denies it. Wasserman also notes that – to some degree – the Chinese government is libel-proof.
"If you get it wrong, where's the harm?" Wasserman says some reporters may have figured. "If they didn't do it to this guy, they probably did it to somebody else."
Some dissidents have been skeptical about Wang's claims for years. For one thing, they say that they had never before seen the Chinese Communist Party unleash such a barrage of repression tactics against someone so obscure. Some also tried to warn reporters about the risks of featuring Wang.
Among them was Badiucao, a Chinese-Australian cartoonist. When Badiucao learned he and Wang would appear in the same investigative TV program, he expressed his doubts to producers, but to no avail.
Some in the human rights community weren't happy that NPR exposed Wang. Yaqiu Wang, director for China Research at Freedom House, the Washington-based think tank, said some questioned whether the story was just providing the Communist Party ammunition to portray its overseas critics as grifters. Still, many activists were supportive.
"Most people said their suspicion of Wang was validated," says Yaqiu Wang, no relation to Wang Jingyu. "They were glad [he] was exposed."
Badiucao says NPR's investigation helped keep the Chinese human rights movement honest.
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