Blog on US-China trade war by Shenzhen academic posing as US professor goes viral in China
Commentary on how China can handle US President Donald Trump gets more than 100,000 page views
Commentary on the US-China trade war by an apparently fictional US professor went viral among Chinese internet users on Wednesday, with the blog attracting more than 100,000 page views.
According to the blog, Landers “is son of a former member of the US Productivity Commission under Reagan’s term, a scholar with a sense of justice. He recently made a non-public report on how the developed countries controlled the world, especially on President Trump’s statement on trade sanctions against China on June 15, and offered suggestions on how to deal with it from the perspective of a western scholar”.
Readers, however, could not find any information on the professor. But they did discover that the Productivity Commission is an official organisation in Australia, not the United States.
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Further investigation led the readers to Zhang Meng, who teaches economics at the Harbin Institute of Technology in Shenzhen. His WeChat shows he “created” Landers.