EXC: MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Took A Trip To China Paid For By Beijing’s Top Propaganda Front

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes (yes, the television host who lectures Americans nightly about “foreign interference”) took an all-expenses-paid trip to China from a foundation tied directly to the Chinese Communist Party’s global influence network.

The sponsor was the China–United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) - one of the CCP’s most active foreign-influence vehicles and a core component of its United Front Work Department. This department is the sprawling apparatus Beijing uses to infiltrate and co-opt elites abroad.

CUSEF presents itself as a “nonprofit” devoted to fostering dialogue between China and the West, but in practice it functions as a lobbying and messaging arm for the Chinese state, cultivating journalists, academics, and policymakers through paid trips, sponsored forums, and private “exchange” dinners.

Hayes joined one of those CUSEF-sponsored delegations just after the Chinese Communist Party’s 60th anniversary in 2009.

“My first trip to China — sponsored by the China-United States Exchange Foundation — came just over a month after the People’s Republic celebrated its sixtieth anniversary,” he later wrote in The Nation.

That single line, tucked deep inside his feature, confirms that his travel was financed by a propaganda front embedded within the CCP’s political-warfare system.

When he returned, he published “The Great Leap” - a piece that read more like a travelogue of admiration than a work of scrutiny.

“The state-run banks flooded the economy with investment capital,” he wrote approvingly, “and state-owned enterprises were directed not to lay anyone off.” He described the government’s management of growth as “impressive,” praising how “the state-led investment dragged the economy over the eight-percent finish line.” There was no mention of censorship, surveillance, or the regime’s tightening grip on information.

Hayes reveals that during his trip, he met with several Chinese Communist Party officials and intellectuals.

“Our biggest challenge is not from without but from within,” Yang Jiemian, president of the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, told us, citing (obliquely, as the Chinese we talked to were wont to do) the potential for instability as China continues on its trajectory. “It has become the consensus of the elites that China should stay on the right track: the past thirty years have resulted in remarkable achievements in all aspects of China. We hope that in the same vein, but in different emphasis, China could have another thirty years.”

He also quoted Yu Qingtai, special representative for climate change negotiations, insisting that China “should not be expected to stay forever as a bicycle kingdom.”

Hayes acknowledged the bias built into the trip itself, writing that “our hosts on the mainland side, who chaperoned us from interview to interview, were Communist Party members and former government officials. We had a few painfully staged interactions with ‘ordinary people’ (including an elderly tangerine farmer who couldn’t remember the year of a specific agricultural reform but knew that it was during the ‘5th plenary of the 16th Central Committee’).”

Still, he conceded that “we did, however, have an opportunity to speak with dozens of members of the Chinese elite: officials, academics and businessmen. And China happens to be a country where the elites hold tremendous power,” before praising them for having “seamlessly melded Leninist vanguardism with American-style best-and-brightest meritocracy.”

“Let me put it simply,” said former Shanghai mayor and current president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Xu Kuangdi. “Most successful businessmen or scholars or engineers — they have become party members of the CPC,” wrote Hayes.

Since that trip, his coverage of China has remained notably restrained.

During the Trump administration’s trade war, Hayes framed tariffs as reckless and destabilizing, arguing they would hurt U.S. consumers — without interrogating Beijing’s record of intellectual-property theft, currency manipulation, or slave-labor supply chains. On his podcast Why Is This Happening?, an episode titled “Unpacking the U.S.–China Trade War with Bill Bishop” cast Washington’s actions as provocative and risky, echoing Beijing’s complaint that U.S. policy was “escalatory.” In a television segment that same year, Hayes called the trade dispute “a months-long roller coaster” that “the president can’t control,” again focusing on American volatility, not Chinese conduct.

According to congressional records, CUSEF-sponsored journalist tours produced hundreds of favorable stories and opinion pieces in U.S. outlets during the same period. Between 2009 and 2017, more than 120 American journalists from 40 news organizations were taken to China under the program. The result: glowing portrayals of China’s economic management and a steady erosion of skepticism about the regime’s intent.

Hayes’s article fit the pattern perfectly with the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission’s warnings about the United Front:

“a network designed to promote Beijing’s preferred global narrative, pressure individuals living in free and open societies to self-censor, and avoid discussing issues unfavorable to the CCP.”

It’s hard to ignore the irony.

The same network that spends hours lecturing Americans about “foreign interference” has one of its marquee hosts accepting travel from a group operating inside the Chinese Communist Party’s influence network. Beijing doesn’t need to hack MSNBC when its anchors are already carrying out the soft side of its information war, unwittingly reinforcing the very narratives the Party wants the West to believe.