A French reporter who was accused of being a fictitious “robot” after penning an article backing China’s narrative of its policies in Xinjiang turns out to be a real person – though writing under a fake name and with ties to Chinese state-run media.

The 40-something French woman living in Sarthe, western France, told Le Figaro that she was the one who wrote the article “My Xinjiang: Stop Fake News Bossy” published by Chinese state media China Global Television Network under the pseudonym Laurène Beaumond.

“This was my article, from start to finish,” she told Le Figaro. “It was me who proposed it to CGTN.” While declining to reveal her true identity, she told the newspaper that she used to be an anchor for CCTV French, living in Beijing from 2011 to 2017.

“I am worried about my safety,” she said. “I’ve been appalled by the baseness of the attacks against my name, and how they’ve said that I don’t exist.” She said she had several jobs in France and contributing to CGTN was not her main source of income.

The controversy emerged after Le Monde newspaper reported on March 31 that Beaumond, whose CGTN article criticized Western media reporting on the Xinjiang concentration camps as part of a “tyranny of fake news,” did not exist. The newspaper made its claim after checking the database of the French Professional Press Card Committee.

The author claimed that she had studied art history and journalism at the Four Majors in Paris, just as CGTN described. She also took internships at several media outlets but did not disclose which ones she worked for.

The author, however, said that she regretted the title of the article, as she did not conduct any proper journalistic investigation, but only described what she saw and heard during several trips between 2011 and 2016. Her husband at the time was from Urumqi. The camps were set up after a 2017 order from President Xi Jinping to combat “Islamic terrorism” and “separatism.”

Her account became ammunition for China’s propaganda machine, which has been employing the narratives of certain Western “witnesses” to counter the “fake news” of Western media, wrote Le Figaro.

The anonymous author said she would stop writing under the pseudonym Beaumond amid concerns over her family’s safety, but she did not say whether she would stop working with China’s state media.

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