David Rohde is a senior national security reporter at MSNBC. He recently went on air to criticize President Trump's primetime address on China. That's his job, presumably — to offer informed, independent analysis of American foreign policy.
Except in 2011, Rohde took a trip to China organized and funded by the China-United States Exchange Foundation, a group he himself described in a column that year as "a non-profit group run by businessmen with close ties to the Chinese government."
At the time, Rhode was working for Reuters. Rohde openly acknowledged the foundation's ties to Beijing and went on the brand trip anyway. The column he produced afterward included lines like this: "Unlike the United States where free-market advocates deride the role of government, the Chinese state has played a central role in creating, supporting and expanding businesses." That reads less like journalism and more like a propaganda.
The China-United States Exchange Foundation — CUSEF — was founded by Tung Chee-hwa, a Hong Kong businessman who served as vice chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, or CPPCC, from 2005 to 2023. The CPPCC is the Chinese Communist Party's primary political advisory body. A 2018 report by the U.S. Economic and Security Review Commission flagged CUSEF's activities as part of the CCP's broader influence operations targeting American media, think tanks, and academic institutions.
Natalie Winters, co-host of the War Room podcast alongside Steve Bannon, flagged the connection publicly. The Society of Professional Journalists' own code of ethics instructs reporters to "refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality." Free travel to China, organized by a CCP-linked foundation, would seem to qualify.
The standard defense for these junkets is that journalists can accept sponsored travel and still report objectively. But Rohde didn't report objectively. He wrote a column praising China's state-directed economic model and criticizing American free-market principles — from the trip the CCP's friends paid for. As journalistic ethics commentator Zan Romanoff has noted, "writers shouldn't pay for access to subjects or sources, or be paid by those subjects and sources to write about them."
CUSEF has been on the radar of the Foreign Agents Registration Act — FARA — enforcement for years. The foundation's entire purpose is to shape American perceptions of China through cultivated relationships with journalists, academics, and policy influencers. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's the U.S. government's own assessment, published in the 2018 commission report.