Yes, this happened. In May 2018, Global Times put ExpatRights into a Metro Beijing feature about illegal work in China’s English-teaching market.
Reporter Katrin Büchenbacher’s article carried the print headline Thin ice. Its dedicated ExpatRights section, “Teachers get all the blame,” described Kyle H founding ExpatRights in 2017 to help foreigners facing visa and employer problems. Kyle withheld his full surname because he was concerned for his family.
The experiment Global Times covered
Earlier that month, ExpatRights had answered every teaching advertisement on the first two pages of The Beijinger’s employment classifieds. The application clearly said the candidate had no bachelor’s degree and therefore did not qualify for the work visa being discussed.
Of the nine email replies documented by ExpatRights, eight were ready to proceed and one declined.
“Eighty-eight percent of the schools were keen on getting me onboard anyway.”
That is where the 88% figure came from. Global Times also printed that only one out of 20 employers declined. That line conflicts with the original ExpatRights record: eight willing replies out of nine, with one refusal. This preservation copy keeps the source result as 8/9.
What survives
The original /content/1103557.shtml address stopped working, but Global Times later migrated the story to a new address. Full captures of the old URL also survive in the Wayback Machine, with a second independent crawl record in Common Crawl.
Preservation note
This is an original ExpatRights summary and source record, not a republication of the full Global Times article or its photographs. It preserves what was said, where the article can still be found, and the numerical correction above. It is historical coverage, not a statement of current visa or employment rules.