Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

Go East, Young Man A Hoax (If Only)

New York, NY-

After a thorough investigation, the New York Times has revealed that a recent editorial entitled "Go East, Young Man" published on January 8th was not in fact written by Jonathan Levine but rather by a mid-level Chinese Communist Party functionary named Li Fengyu.

Following its publication, several Times readers contacted the newspaper to report that the editorial could not have possibly been written by an American teacher in China. Steven Lorenzo, an unemployed Sinologist living in Brooklyn, said Levine's comment that CCTV was "fair and balanced" sounded eerily like an official quote he had read months earlier in a copy of the People's Daily.

"The forgery wasn't bad, I guess," Lorenzo told the Times, "but that was a pretty amateurish mistake. No American would ever refer to Fox News, even rhetorically, as "fair and balanced" without some qualification. It just smacked of an outsider's perspective"

In addition, some readers' said Levine's reference to Occupy Wall Street didn't ring true to them. "It isn't as if all of us have two college degrees, live in a rich suburb, and have a job," one anonymous protester wrote via e-mail. "No one is idiotic enough to think that those of us protesting actually have the means to pack up and move halfway across the world. That's when I began to suspect that the op-ed was a forgery."

Assigned to determine the identity of the forger, the Times Beijing bureau eventually dug up Li, a 42-year old local government official in Shijiazhuang. Over a lunch of live prawns, fried bumblebees,  and numerous shots of baijiu, Li confessed that he had been tasked with writing the editorial by superiors in the Propaganda Department. "I didn't want to do it, but once I got started it turned out to be a lot of fun," he said.

The Times has determined that while there are 54 individuals named Jonathan Levine living in or near Greenwich, Connecticut, none has ever worked for Tsinghua University. All are gainfully employed, and most of those contacted reported that they were very much part of the "1 percent" and "would never write that kind of crap about China".

The Times regrets the error. Li Fengyu, for his part, has accepted a promotion to the position of 3rd Assistant Secretary of the Organization Bureau of Hebei Province.

UPDATE: I altered the title a bit to ensure readers that this post is, in fact, a parody.