President Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro faked an expert in his anti-China books, and the volumes' publisher wants readers to know it.
All reprints of Navarro's supposedly non-fiction Death by China will "alert" readers that the Harvard-educated economist Ron Vara quoted within its pages is fabricated, according to Pearson, which owns the book's publisher Prentice Hall.
The 2011 book, which levels a laundry list of accusations against China's trade practices, including deliberately harming Americans with dangerous consumer goods, came under renewed scrutiny this week following a report that one of its sources does not exist.
The move follows a report by The Chronicle Review citing Death by China's co-author Greg Autry that Vara was actually Navarro's "alter ego" and a fictionalized "everyman character."
"Pearson has strict editorial standards that apply to all of its publishing businesses and authors," Scott Overland, Pearson's director of media relations, said in an emailed response to the South China Morning Post.
"These standards are constantly evolving to ensure they remain rigorous and in line with current practices," Overland said. "We take any breaches of these standards very seriously and take swift action when one is identified."
"In this case, we are amending our current inventory and all future reprints and editions to alert readers that this book contains a fictional character."
To draw the connection between Vara and Navarro, The Chronicle Review, which focuses on the arts and academia, interviewed Tessa Morris-Suzuki, who had been examining references to Vara in Death by China and earlier works by Navarro.
Morris-Suzuki had been working on an essay about the language attributed to Vara in Navarro's writing, particularly its similarity to terms like "yellow peril," which had been common in political rhetoric a century ago, when she began trying to find details about Vara.
"I quickly discovered that (Vara) was invisible," Morris-Suzuki told the Post. "I think inventing a source like this is a problem, even if it was originally meant as a joke."
"Peter Navarro's books are supposed to be factual, and people are likely to trust their content because of his status as a university professor, and then later as an adviser to Trump," she said.
"The earliest quotations that he attributed to Vara were quite harmless little aphorisms, but the later ones make very strong claims about the dangers of Chinese products, which readers are likely to believe are coming from an expert."
Reports that Navarro quoted a fictional source in a non-fiction volume that largely encapsulates the rationale behind the US-China trade war has put the spotlight on one of the most divisive members of Trump's administration, who has been referred to as the president's "China muse."
Navarro has stood firm against other administration members, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who has worked to forge a trade deal with Beijing.
As the most vocal proponent of the trade war, Navarro is under increasing pressure because the stand-off that is now cutting into global economic growth and testing the patience of American corporations and farmers.
The fictional source controversy has spawned a Ron Vara Twitter account with a profile photo of Navarro and a quote from Death by China attributed to Vara: "Only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath."
I told him to say that. https://t.co/2elrSZmPQc
" Ron Vara (@RonVaraUSA) October 15, 2019
The thesis that Navarro laid out in his book had come under criticism even before news that the book contains at least one faked source.
Despite serving as one of Trump's most trusted advisers on China, Navarro does not speak Mandarin and has spent little time in the country.
China experts quoted in a 2017 Foreign Policy profile spoke of Navarro as someone who made no effort to interact with specialists in the field, with one describing his work as full of "hyperbole, inaccuracies" and a "cartoonish caricature of China."
And while the self-directed film version of his book won the praise of Trump, who called it "right on" and urged others to see it, the Death by China documentary tanked at US cinemas to the tune of around $38,000 in box office takings, according to IMDB.
"I think the issue (of Ron Vara) highlights the need for US China policy to be based on very carefully researched and sourced information, not on quotations from invented people," Morris-Suzuki said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a query about the change to further editions of Navarro's book.
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