When “State Influence” Becomes a Shortcut

Rush Doshi has responded to my weekend post. I want to thank him for the detailed, substance-focused discussion. This kind of public back-and-forth—on a specific claim, with sources on the table—feels increasingly rare online, where “debate” too often devolves into name-calling. His response also pushed me to think more carefully about issues that extend well beyond this one Tesla story, and that matter for China-watching in general.

A U.S.-based friend cautioned me against having this discussion at all:

“The problem isn’t that whether Sohu is state-owned or not; the supposed state-society distinction lives only in the philosophical imagination of American liberals. They corner you into proving one’s true independence from the party state. But it’s a false premise; they wrote the rules such that you can’t win.”

I understand the warning. Still, I think the discussion is worth having—both for intellectually honest and curious readers, and for more practical reasons. It inevitably touches on a larger question that keeps resurfacing in Western discourse about China: once you divide everything in China into two buckets—either “state-owned,” or “not state-owned but under state influence”—is that the end of the conversation?

To recap: Rush approvingly quote-retweeted a story published by Electrek, a website influential in the EV sector, which alleged that Chinese state media was amplifying an alleged Tesla failure:

“The PRC’s industrial policy planners have decided now is the time to drive Tesla’s market share down as low as possible, and they have enlisted the Propaganda Department to help.”

The Electrek story mistook an insignificant Chinese website—one that carried a brief repost of the alleged Tesla failure—for a key Chinese state media outlet. I also noted that the repost ultimately traces back to original reporting by a local, state-owned newsroom that emerged in recent years with a noticeably different tone than the usual “state media” caricature—an outlet that, among other things, spoke up for a Chinese journalist who had been briefly detained and then released.

In his response, Rush wrote:

Zichen makes three critical errors in his post: (1) he not only overstates the “attribution error” but makes one of his own, (2) he omits critical information that contradicts his argument and indicates Electrek’s was directionally right, and (3) he in no way counters the point that China is putting pressure on Tesla.

I’m happy to engage with each of these points. But to do so—especially on the first and ...