The China Project

» see thechinaproject.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On 6 November 2023 a post titled "Some sad news" went up over four signatures: the editor in chief, the head of podcasts, the chief executive and the founder. Three days later, on 9 November, the site published its last article, about Taipei Pride. A retrospective appeared on 31 December under Jeremy Goldkorn's byline, and the homepage still serves that post as its hero, so the front page looks like it was updated on New Year's Eve. The retrospective puts the real date plainly, in its own words: the site shuttered in November 2023.

It launched in February 2016 as SupChina and became The China Project on 1 September 2022, same staff, same beat: English-language reporting on China for readers who needed to understand the place professionally. Its own closing count is about 30,000 stories, newsletters, podcasts and videos from more than 400 contributors. The best known property was the Sinica Podcast, which Kaiser Kuo had been making since before SupChina existed and which the company published from May 2016 onward.

The business was paid information wrapped around a free newsroom. ChinaAccess ran $120 a year for individuals and ChinaEdge $1,000, with twenty-five-plus Fortune 500 clients, six newsletters pushing 450,000 sends a month, and a claimed audience of two million. The accounts are harder reading: the 2022 SEC filing shows $1,071,592 of revenue against a net loss of $1,990,874, and the 2023 Wefunder raise asked investors for a $41.45 million pre-money valuation on $58,960 of cash.

I was never in this publication's audience. It wrote for people who had to make decisions about China for a living, and from Turkey my China coverage arrived through whatever the wires carried. The reason it gets a stone here anyway is specific and slightly uncomfortable. rip.so has cited thechinaproject.com twice as a primary source, once for Tencent Dajia and once for Queer Lala Times, and in the second case its article is close to the only English account of that closure anybody wrote. Two graves on this site are propped up by the reporting of a third.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the complaint ~

On 21 October 2022 Shannon Van Sant, who had been SupChina's business editor for under ninety days in 2020, sent a 480-page disclosure to the Department of Justice through the group Whistleblower Aid, with copies to the SEC and to Congress. It alleged the outlet was operating as an unregistered agent of the Chinese Communist Party. The document has never been made public. Semafor broke the story on 30 October and carried a joint statement from Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Chris Smith calling for the company to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The particulars were about editorial pressure: a push to promote a book by a consultant favored by Chinese state media, and a block on her writing further about human rights abuses.

Goldkorn answered the same day. His response argued that the complaint named no source, vehicle, vector or mechanism for the influence it alleged, and that it rested entirely on that short tenure. It also pointed at the traffic running the other way: the site had been blocked inside China since July 2018, and the Cyberspace Administration of China and the Global Times were denouncing it as a US-backed anti-China operation. Van Sant, he wrote, had been fired for poor performance. No FARA registration was ever filed and no enforcement action by any agency is on the record. The most the chief executive would later confirm to VOA is that unnamed agencies had opened informal inquiries, and he declined to say which ones.

~ the week it closed ~

The closing letter is unusually specific about timing, and what it describes all happened inside one week. The company ran the most successful event in its history, the NEXTChina conference in New York, and launched Edge, the database product it expected to lift revenue substantially. Then it learned that a source of funding it had been counting on was not going to arrive.

The letter does not blame the complaint for the shutdown, and it does not have to. It says the accusations put targets on their backs in both countries and that defending against them cost enormous sums in legal fees. The lasting damage, by its own account, was to the company's ability to attract investors and sponsors. Goldkorn told VOA that a sponsor of that final conference had asked to have its name taken off the marketing materials days before the end. The corporate paperwork closed on 8 February 2024, when a Form C-TR terminating the company's reporting obligations went to the SEC over Anla Cheng's signature.

~ what the archive still holds ~

Everything is still there. The site answers with 255 kilobytes of working WordPress and an open REST API that counts 11,817 posts, and the captures run unbroken from the month it closed through 2026. Nobody ever published a promise to keep it up, so this is preservation by inertia rather than by commitment, and the newest file in the uploads directory is dated November 2023. The events domain, by contrast, does not resolve.

Sinica got out. Kaiser Kuo relaunched it on Substack on 14 February 2024 with sponsorship from the University of Wisconsin's Center for East Asian Studies, writing that he had been gutted by the demise of the publication that carried the show from May 2016 to November 2023. It is still going, and James Carter's history column went with him. The newsletters did not, and Edge, which the closing letter calls just launched, never billed a full quarter. supchina.com answers 200 today and says "Coming Soon."

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