Xi Jinping on Your Local News Website
Norfolk, Nebraska! Population 25,000.
On March 25, 2026, a headline appeared on the Norfolkdailynews.com: "How China maps out a strong start for 15th Five-Year Plan." The accompanying image reads: "How Xi charts for strong start for 15th Five-Year Plan."
The first line of the article wrote: "This is a report from Xinhua News Agency."
See the Norfolk Daily News yourself.
San Francisco, California!
KRON4, the Bay Area’s local TV station. The fifth largest television market in the United States.
On December 29, 2025, a headline appeared on the website: “Global Times: Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era receives high recognition from intl community“
At the bottom of the page, one line: “NOTE: This content is not written by or endorsed by ‘KRON’, its advertisers, or Nexstar Media Inc.”
The link is HERE. Archived HERE.
These are not isolated cases, there are many more… Both of these articles above were distributed through PR Newswire, a commercial wire service owned by Cision. Local news websites automatically publishing wire content through their systems. You can find more yourself. Paste this into Google, it’s a google dork command:
inurl:”online_features/press_releases” (”Xinhua” OR “CGTN” OR “China Daily” OR “Global Times” OR “People’s Daily”) site:.com -site:prnewswire.com -site:globenewswire.com
Fort Wayne, Indiana! WANE is the local CBS-affiliated television station.
On March 6, 2025, the station’s website published an article from Beijing Review: Governance need not be the same, as long as it benefits the people. The article argues that China’s one-party system is a legitimate form of democracy, and concludes:”China's approach to democracy is practical and successful” and “There is no one-size-fits-all model for democracy.“
At the bottom of the page, one line: NOTE: This content is not written by or endorsed by “WANE”, its advertisers, or Nexstar Media Inc.
Boone, North Carolina! The Watauga Democrat has been publishing since 1888. During Hurricane Helene in 2024, the staff kept reporting through power outages and severed communications.
On April 7, 2026, the newspaper's website published an article by China Daily about Xi'an Jiaotong University's anniversary.
The article refers to Tibet as "Xizang" — the term China's government has been pushing to replace the English word "Tibet."
The article also wrote: "following the instructions and guidance of the Party, breathing the same air and sharing a common destiny with the Party, the country and the people"
At the bottom: "SOURCE China Daily."
Allentown, Pennsylvania! (This one is harder to spot)
On March 1, 2026, an article appeared on wfmz.com :"CGTN: The 'innovation mosaic': Mapping China's new quality productive forces." It is, in its entirety, a CGTN press release promoting China's 15th Five-Year Plan industrial strategy.
These findings are part of a broader investigation into how Chinese state propaganda content enters English speaking world. I built a database of 2,686 URLs by searching for keywords including “Global Governance Initiative,“ “community of shared future,“ “multipolar world,“ and others across commercial newswire landing pages. The full dataset is available HERE. Many of these articles appeared on American local news websites.
It raised a lot of interesting questions and I find it hard to answer. Does FCC regulating it? Or is it FTC? If the Chinese state media is defined as Foreign agents, how does FARA apply to newspapers and TV stations?
However, Google is indexing. Every one of these pages lives on a local news domain. The domain, with its local brand and staff has been accumulated trust and authority in local communities and search engine rankings. I assume, when a Xinhua article about “China’s governance success“ appears on norfolkdaily, it inherits the trustworthiness that Norfolk daily has built over a century of local journalism? Yet, now the Chinese state media is purchasing these credibilities.
And it goes further than search. These pages are crawled by Common Crawl, the open dataset that feeds the training data of large language models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others. When an AI model is asked about China's five-year plans or "community of shared future," its answer is shaped (with how many percentage that I do not know), by articles that appeared on local American news websites under the banner of outlets like KRON4 and the Watauga Democrat.
The Chinese authorities have been quite frankly about this. They have been writing openly about this strategy. In 2020, a paper published in News Front (《新闻战线》), a journal under the People's Daily, described a strategy called "borrowing the boat to reach the sea" (借船出海). The paper advocates using Western media distribution channels to carry Chinese state media content, and specifically cites China Daily's partnerships with the Washington Post and the Daily Telegraph as successful examples.
The full paper is HERE. Archived HERE.
The articles published on Chinese state media still exists on the internet. I recommend using these Google Dork commands:
inurl:”online_features/press_releases” (”Xinhua” OR “CGTN” OR “China Daily” OR “Global Times” OR “People’s Daily”) site:.com -site:prnewswire.com -site:globenewswire.com
inurl:”online_features/press_releases” (”Xinhua” OR “CGTN” OR “China Daily”) -site:prnewswire.com -site:globenewswire.com
inurl:”online_features/press_releases” (”Xi Jinping” OR “Five-Year Plan” OR “Global Governance Initiative” OR “Belt and Road”) -site:prnewswire.com -site:globenewswire.com
Insane stuff
Disturbing