Chinese Satirical Journalism: A Complete Guide to the Time State Media Fell for The Onion
China’s most famous satirical-journalism story isn’t really about a Chinese satirical outlet at all — it’s about the country’s own state-run newspaper mistaking an American joke about North Korea’s leader for genuine, glowing praise, and running with it in earnest for 55 full pages.
When the People’s Daily Believed the Joke
In 2012, The Onion published a satirical piece naming North Korean leader Kim Jong-un its “Sexiest Man Alive.” The story travelled through Hong Kong media, which correctly identified it as satire, before crossing into mainland Chinese outlets that dropped that context entirely. Reporting on the episode confirms the outcome directly: China’s People’s Daily ran a glorious 55-page photo gallery treating the satirical article as genuine, quoting invented lines about Kim’s supposed charisma as though they were sincere praise. Separate coverage traced exactly how the mix-up happened: Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV website correctly labelled the original piece as satire, but when state-run Yangtse.com republished the story hours later, the satire label had vanished entirely, leaving only the comical reader comments attached to the original.
That wasn’t an isolated incident — the same outlet had, a decade earlier, published as genuine news an Onion story claiming the US Congress wanted to build a new building and might leave Washington entirely, a spoof of the familiar pattern of sports teams threatening relocation for a new stadium. Media researcher Jeremy Goldkorn has noted a structural reason satirical content spreads unusually easily inside China’s media ecosystem: stories can be freely shared by any other outlet in their entirety, or edited, as long as the original source is credited somewhere on the page, a system that spreads content widely but makes it easy for a small, crucial detail — like a “this is satire” label — to quietly disappear somewhere along the chain.
Homegrown Satire, Tentatively Testing the Waters
China does have its own genuine domestic attempts at Onion-style satire, operating in a genuinely more cautious register than their American counterpart. Coverage of the trend describes homegrown satirical news as “tentatively testing press freedoms” in a media environment under close scrutiny by state regulators. One student-run account, nicknamed “Fudan Onion” after Shanghai’s Fudan University, saw its satirical content escape its original campus context entirely: an invented story claiming the university would charge graduates for using its name on their resumes was picked up and republished as genuine news by education outlet MBAChina.
Chinese Satirical Journalism vs. American, Indian and Pakistani Satirical Journalism
The People’s Daily incident places China alongside Iran’s FARS news agency and other state outlets covered in broader lists of Onion mishaps, in the genuinely select company of national media organisations fooled by the same satirical publication. That’s a meaningfully different starting point from India’s Faking News, covered in our guide to Indian Satirical Journalism, where domestic satire itself caused the confusion rather than a foreign outlet’s original work slipping past editorial scrutiny somewhere down the republishing chain.
Further Reading
For China’s crosstalk comic tradition, see our guide to Chinese Humour. For the country’s coded internet satire, see Chinese Satire. For the stand-up comedy boom, see Chinese Comedy. For the satirical-journalism format practised daily from the American side, visit our sister publication Bohiney.com.
This guide draws on published sources including Fox News’s reporting on the Kim Jong-un satire incident, Malay Mail’s roundup of Onion mishaps, and Sixth Tone’s coverage of homegrown Chinese satirical news. It is maintained as part of Prat.uk’s ongoing guide series on national satirical journalism traditions.
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