David Rohde, MSNBC's senior national security reporter, went on air to hammer President Trump's recent primetime address on Chinese election interference. Tough on China, he argued, was the wrong posture. Too confrontational. Diplomatically reckless.
Turns out Rohde took a 2011 trip to China organized and funded by the China-United States Exchange Foundation — a group registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act and founded by a man who served as vice chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference for nearly two decades.
The CPPCC, for those unfamiliar, isn't some academic think tank. The U.S. Economic and Security Review Commission flagged it in a 2018 report as a "critical coordinating body" within the Chinese government's political structure. The foundation's founder, Tung Chee-hwa, held the CPPCC vice chairmanship from 2005 to 2023. CUSEF is registered under FARA — the Foreign Agents Registration Act — because the U.S. government requires it. That's the outfit that picked up Rohde's travel tab.
We know about the trip because Rohde wrote about it himself. In a 2011 Reuters column titled "Will 'Made in America' sell in China?" — back when he worked at Reuters — Rohde disclosed that he and other journalists "are visiting China this week on a trip organized by the China-United States Exchange Foundation, a non-profit group run by businessmen with close ties" to Beijing. The column itself reads like Chinese propaganda. "Unlike the United States where free-market advocates deride the role of government," Rohde wrote, "the Chinese state has played a central role" in economic development.
Natalie Winters, co-host of the War Room podcast with Steve Bannon, the archived versions of that Reuters column have since had Rohde's byline scrubbed. The original page still exists — minus the part that tells you who wrote it.
Here's what makes the timing so useful. During the very speech Rohde attacked, President Trump stated that "the Chinese government sought to identify US journalists who had reported negatively on the US president and pay them large sums." Rohde apparently found this claim outrageous. A journalist who took a CCP-linked foundation's hospitality, wrote glowingly about China's state-run economy, and then watched his byline vanish from the evidence — that journalist thinks Trump is being unfair to Beijing.
The Society of Professional Journalists' own code of ethics says journalists should "refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other" entanglements that compromise independence. A fully funded trip to China organized by a FARA-registered foreign agent would seem to qualify.
Left-wing media defenders will point out the trip was fifteen years ago. Which is an interesting defense of a man whose current job is telling millions of viewers how to think about China policy. The trip didn't happen in a vacuum — it happened inside a pipeline the Chinese government built specifically to cultivate sympathetic coverage from American journalists. The 2018 U.S. Economic and Security Review Commission report documented exactly this kind of influence operation.