‼️How Elite U.S. Journalists Took All-Expenses-Paid Trips to China — and Came Back Changed On July 28, 2026, White House correspondent Natalie Winters dropped a bombshell investigation that ripped the polite mask off a carefully engineered influence operation. A leaked internal document from the **Committee of 100 (C100)** — an organization Xi Jinping himself once praised as a “friendly organization” making “untiring efforts” to advance Chinese influence in the United States — revealed that at least 26 top American journalists, editors, and broadcasters had been flown to China on curated, high-end trips. The goal was not cultural exchange. It was to reshape how they saw Beijing… and how they covered it. ### The Operation C100’s “Leadership Delegation Program” targeted the people who decide what America reads and hears about China. Delegates came from *The New York Times*, *The Washington Post*, *Politico*, *NPR*, *PBS*, *The Atlantic*, *The New Yorker*, *Financial Times*, *TIME*, *USA Today*, and more. These were not backpacker trips. One 2012 delegation alone — Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou — cost roughly $60,000. Participants stayed in classic hotels, sampled regional Chinese cuisine, toured the Great Wall and Forbidden City, attended dinners in the Great Hall of the People, and sat down with carefully selected officials, state media executives, business leaders, and academics. C100 tracked its success with clinical precision. It publicly claimed that 70% of American “opinion leaders” who visited China returned with improved views of the country. Internally, the real metric was simpler: Did we change how they think? ### The Smoking-Gun Report The most damning piece is a 2012 after-action report marked **“Internal Use.”** It records what the journalists said after the trip: - Financial Times editor Gary Silverman: “I don’t think that I will ever think or write about China in the future without reflecting on what I learned this week.” - WNYC host Brian Lehrer: His perception of China changed “in 100 ways.” - Foreign Affairs managing editor Jonathan Tepperman returned with a “much deeper, more subtle and more nuanced sense” of China and called it the best press trip he had ever taken. - New York Times deputy business editor Winnie O’Kelley came back with “several story ideas” and plans to “shape my staff across Asia in some different ways.” She even hoped to add at least one business reporter in China. A Chinese academic congratulated the organizers: “It is hard to speak on China without being to the country. You made the change!” C100’s own verdict was blunt: “The C-100 Leadership Delegation Program has had a visible impact on their understanding and perceptions of China.” They hoped the delegates would share those new perceptions with colleagues and reshape coverage back home. ### The Names Here are some of the participants (titles at the time of their trips): - Jill Abramson — Managing Editor, *The New York Times* - David Brooks — Columnist, *The New York Times* - David Ignatius — Associate Editor & columnist, *Washington Post* - Eugene Robinson — Columnist & Associate Editor, *Washington Post* - Ruth Marcus — Columnist, *Washington Post* - Fred Hiatt — Editorial Page Editor, *Washington Post* - John Harris — Editor-in-Chief, *Politico* - Juan Williams — Senior Political Analyst, *NPR* - Brian Lehrer — Host, WNYC - Clive Crook — Senior Editor, *The Atlantic* - Jonathan Tepperman — Managing Editor, *Foreign Affairs* - Gary Silverman — U.S. News Editor, *Financial Times* - And many more from *Newsweek*, *TIME*, *Los Angeles Times*, *USA Today*, *HuffPost*, and *The New Yorker*. ### What Happened After They Came Home Winters tracked the subsequent work of several delegates. Some of the same voices later became prominent critics of tougher policies toward Beijing: - David Brooks called Trump’s proposed tariffs “the single worst policy idea on the table.” - Eugene Robinson described the trade war as an “ill-advised gambit” and suggested Xi Jinping could emerge as the “reasonable adult.” - David Ignatius warned America was “dramatically overestimating China’s capabilities” and called growing alarm “scare talk.” One Financial Times columnist later defended allowing the Chinese-founded fast-fashion giant Shein to list in London despite serious supply-chain and labor concerns. ### The Bigger Picture This was not random tourism. C100 has repeatedly been linked to figures and institutions inside the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front system — the same influence network U.S. officials describe as designed to “co-opt and neutralize sources of opposition.” The organization selected journalists based on their ability to deliver favorable coverage and then measured success by whether those journalists’ thinking actually shifted. The documents, itineraries, and internal assessments were scattered across archives for years. Natalie Winters pulled them together, named the names, and published the evidence. Full investigation and original documents: