The China Project announced shutdown. What happened?

To financially sustain an English language media reporting on China has always been tough, let alone in this polarizing climate, according to the publication's editor-in-chief Jeremy Goldkorn.

On Monday, the China Project, formerly known as SupChina, abruptly announced that the company can no longer operate in its current form and will have to be shut down due to a funding shortage. The news surprised almost everyone in the China watching field. On social media, condolences poured in from China reporters and experts.

During its seven-year run, the New York-based online publication has consolidated itself as one of the most influential English language media focused on China. The independent media publishes around two thousand articles, analysis, and investigative stories per year with contributors from dozens of countries around the world. Its podcasts, including the flagship program Sinica, regularly invite interesting and important figures in the China field on as guests.

“We provided a space for complex and highly informed reporting and discussions about China that isn’t available anywhere else,” the China Project’s editor-in-chief Jeremy Goldkorn, whom I talked to for a Voice of America story about the shutdown, told me.

A quote from former US Ambassador to China Max Baucus is proudly pinned on the China Project’s website. Baucus, who worked under President Barack Obama, called the publication “a jewel in the crown of China reporting”.

Just last week, the company held a successful conference in New York, where over 20 China experts from the fields of journalism, human rights, finance, and academia gave talks.

According to the China Project’s website and Goldkorn, the publication has been having a strong growth in subscriptions, reaching over 2 million subscribers worldwide every month, many of whom government officials, diplomats, businesspeople, and scholars.

But it was not enough.

“While our subscription offerings have been growing strongly and steadily, we are not yet in a position to rely on these revenues to sustain our operations,” Goldkorn wrote in the publication’s shutdown announcement.

The direct cause of the shutdown, he wrote, was that “a source of funding that we had been counting on was no longer going to come through”.

“Depressing”

The folding of the China Project quickly became the talk of the town in the China watcher circle. On social media platform X, BBC’s China correspondent Stephen McDonell called the development “depressing”. New York Time’s columnist Li Yuan wrote it was a “very sad news for China coverage”.

Many young reporters and writers said they are grateful for the help and freedom the publication gave them.

Dr. Yangyang Cheng, whose words can be found in the New York Times, the Guardian, and other well-known publications, is a Fellow at Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center. From 2019 to 2021, she wrote a monthly column for the China Project.

Dr. Cheng, whom I communicated with for the VOA story, said that she had turned down opportunities to write for bigger outlets and stayed with the China Project because the publication gave her freedom and trust to express herself on her own terms.

“The China Project let me do that and for that I'm eternally grateful,” she wrote during our text interview.

I also talked to Caiwei Chen, reporter at Rest of World, who considers the China Project one of the most important platforms for China related news and writings. Her first article as a freelancer was published on the platform. The article was about women standup comedians in China, a topic that at the time was not quite as popular as it has come to be today.

“(The China Project) gave many opportunities to a lot of young writers of my generation,” she said.

Attacked in both China and the US

As respected as the China Project has been in the China watcher community, the company has long suffered attacks in both China and the US, which turned into financial burdens.

“Defending ourselves has incurred enormous legal costs, and, far worse, made it increasingly difficult for us to attract investors, advertisers, and sponsors,” Goldkorn wrote in the shutdown announcement.

Last year, the China Project was accused by Chinese state media of smearing China and by two US federal lawmakers of working for the Chinese Communist Party.

In March 2022, Global Times, a nationalist outlet controlled by Beijing, attacked the China Project after it had published a story about Chinese netizens posting indecent comments about Ukrainian women. Global Times claimed that the China Project was working with the National Endowment for Democracy to undermine China. Global Times also claimed that the China Project has made three “strategic goals” on how to cover the war in Ukraine in order to shape negative narratives about China.

But the alleged “strategic goals” were entirely fabricated, as I discovered at the time.

In October of 2022, Shannon Van Sant, a former business editor at the China Project, who was fired less than three months into her job in 2020, openly claimed that the China Project did not want her to write about human rights issues and that she was instructed to produce pro-China journalism. Her lawyers filed a complaint to the Justice Department, insisting that there was “reasonable belief” that the China Project was influenced by Beijing.

US Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Chris Smith, both known for being China hawks, supported Van Sant. They told Semafor, which broke the news, that Van Sant’s “revelations underscore the extent to which Xi Jinping’s China seeks to shape narratives, corrupt the media and subvert truth-tellers.”

“At a minimum, these actors should be forced to register under FARA, disclosing who they are ultimately working for and allowing others to act on that information accordingly,” they added.

In a statement published at the time, Goldkorn called the allegations baseless and refuted them one by one.

“No investor, board member, or executive at the company – or anyone else for that matter – has ever tried to direct my editorial coverage at The China Project for political purposes or to promote the Chinese Communist Party,” he wrote. “If they did, I would leave immediately.”

For five years, the China Project has maintained a column focused on human rights abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The coverage landed them in Beijing’s crosshair and has scared away investors who don’t want to anger the people who run the world’s second biggest economy.

In a long X thread published on Tuesday, Kaiser Kuo, the China Project’s editor-at-large and host of its most popular podcast Sinica, wrote that “Chinese companies and co’s with China exposure were reluctant to sponsor” due to the China Project’s persistent reporting and discussions of Xinjiang.

During the interview with me, Goldkorn said that from a journalistic point of view he is not afraid of attacks from either China or the US. But problem occurs when those attacks dim the publication’s financial prospect.

“As a journalist, it’s a badge of honor. As a guy who was hoping to keep a media company running, it’s not good,” he said.

Monetizing English language media reporting on China is hard

The China Project was launched in 2016 by Anla Cheng, who is of Chinese descent and came from a banking background. Cheng wrote in a statement accompanying the launch that “as China remakes the economic, political and cultural orders of the 21st century, understanding this complex nation is more important and challenging than ever. SupChina serves that need.”

Up until September last year, the China Project was called SupChina.  

A couple of months after launching the company, Cheng recruited Kaiser Kuo, former member of the Chinese rock band Tang Dynasty and director for international communications at Chinese tech company Baidu. Kuo was then and still is now the host of the podcast Sinica, a current affairs program about China.

Hired at the same time was Kuo’s podcast partner and friend Jeremy Goldkorn, who would soon become the editor-in-chief of the China Project. Goldkorn, who is now 52, moved to China for work in 1995. Two years later, the South African became the managing editor of the Beijing Scene Magazine, which he said was Beijing’s first independent English language magazine. For the next few years, he worked for a few other startup media in China.

In 2003, he founded Danwei, a business research firm, in Beijing. Ten years later, it was sold to the Financial Times. In 2010, he took on the job as the co-host of Sinica.

During Goldkorn’s seven-year tenure as the editor-in-chief of the China Project, China continued to rise in importance in American politics, economy, and national security. The relationship between the two countries came to one of the lowest points during the Covid-19 pandemic, although it seems to be bouncing back for now.

But no matter how frequently China is talked about in the news, a China-focused English media company is hard to do well financially. And from the very start, the China Project have had challenges in making money.

“Despite that China is a huge news story, in some ways, it’s not a huge story for an average American. The amount of people who are interested particularly in in-depth news about China on a frequent basis is not huge,” Goldkorn said.

“Finding the right balance between providing a news service that covers all kinds of things going on in China and figuring out a way to monetize that is pretty tough.”

After the China Project announced shutdown, mourners online suggest that Goldkorn and Kuo restart the publication somewhere else with new investors.

But Goldkorn said right now he has no plan on what to do after the China Project. There is still a lot of work to be done to unwind the company. In the shutdown announcement, Goldkorn wrote that some of the initiatives and projects may survive, and more updates will be provided soon.

Those who lament the closing said that it shows space for complex and nuanced reporting on China in the English language world is becoming smaller than ever.

Goldkorn shares that view.

“It’s increasingly difficult to produce media about China that is complex and informed and goes wide and goes deep. The mainstream Western press has limited attention span about China,” he said.

“And outside the mainstream press, there are a lot of highly ideological actors that have a particular view that they are trying to push. And us shutting down is going to be the silencing of a voice that was quite important.”