Chinese Communist Party-controlled Xinhua News Agency trumpeted a quote from congresswoman and self-proclaimed socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) in an effort to characterize "the rate of school shootings in the United States as a mark of global shame."
"We can't even keep our kids safe from their school being turned into a war zone," Ocasio-Cortez said in a push for increased gun control at a Wednesday House hearing.
Xinhua's article showcases the Ocasio-Cortez quote in bold underneath the congresswoman's official portrait.
Ocasio-Cortez has a long relationship with Chinese state-controlled media, the Washington Free Beacon reported last year. She thanked the newspaper Sing Tao, whose owners are members of a Chinese Communist Party advisory group, for covering a June 2020 roundtable discussion. She also paid the paper that month and in April 2021 to run ads.
Ocasio-Cortez is not the only left-wing American whom China has used in its propaganda. The Chinese state-controlled Global Times in May prominently featured an interview with liberal activist Ryan Deitsch in which he called the United States a "white supremacist country."
China's efforts to shame the United States may be an attempt to distract from the Communist regime's contemptible human rights record. China is carrying out a genocide against its ethnic Uyghur minority.