The New York Times pulled an ad at the last minute in March 2020. But for what reason? I spoke with Brett Kingstone, a real estate developer from Florida and the client who paid for the ad. He says that after the entire editorial procedure and approval from the paper, it was pulled from print at the last minute before publishing and hitting major cities. The ad was one of its kind in those days—asking to hold China’s Communist Party accountable for causing the global pandemic with the spread of the novel coronavirus, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.
For our second topic, we explore the reasons behind China’s top real estate developer Evergrande’s potential default. The company is likely to go bankrupt if the country’s state-controlled economy does not rescue this real estate giant. Will Chinese leader Xi Jinping take the damage it will cause to the housing market, which accounts for around 30 percent of China’s economy? And will the regime be able to sustain the social uproar and the protests from investors and homeowners due to the company’s lack of payment to them?