[6][7][8][9][10] Within mainland China, the newspaper targets primarily diplomats, foreign expatriates, tourists, and locals wishing to improve their English.

[1] The China edition also offers program guides to Radio Beijing and television, daily exchange rates, and local entertainment schedules.

[20] According to its 2014 annual report, China Daily is formally managed by the State Council Information Office (SCIO), which was formed from the Central Propaganda Department in 1991.

[23] A former copy-editor (or "polisher" as termed at China Daily) for the newspaper described her role being "to tweak propaganda enough that it read as English, without inadvertently triggering war.

[35][36] According to the Associated Press, the editorial repeated Chinese Communist Party talking points and China Daily refused to retract it although it subsequently removed the English language version of the op-ed.

[40] In February 2020, a group of U.S. lawmakers asked the United States Department of Justice to investigate China Daily for alleged violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

"[45] In September 2020, India's Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement saying that comments made by China Daily were falsely attributed to Ajit Doval.

[51] In a 2004 journal article, University of Sheffield professor Lily Chen stated that China Daily was "essentially a publicly funded government mouthpiece".

[53][54] The New York Times wrote that China Daily's inserts published in US newspapers "generally offer an informative, if anodyne, view of world affairs refracted through the lens of the Communist Party.

[55] Media outlets such as The New York Times, NPR, Quartz, and BuzzFeed News have published accounts of China Daily's dissemination of disinformation related to the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests.

[61][62] In May 2020, CNN, Financial Times, and other media outlets reported that China Daily censored references to the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic from an opinion piece authored by European Union ambassadors.

[68][69] In October 2021, the German Marshall Fund reported that China Daily was one of several state media outlets propagating a conspiracy theory concerning the origins of COVID-19.

[71] In March 2022, China Daily published an article in Chinese[72] which falsely claimed that COVID-19 was created by Moderna, citing a page on The Exposé, a British conspiracist website.

"[75] In January 2021, a China Daily article praised a report from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, stating that government policies in Xinjiang had "emancipated" the minds of Uyghur women so that they are "no longer baby-making machines".