Yang Rui

In May 2020, after six months off-air, Yang left CGTN to join TMTPOST, a Chinese news website.

Yang Rui was born in Jilin City but spent much of his childhood in Mudanjiang, Heilongjiang. From 1980 to 1986 he attended Shanghai International Studies University, where he received degrees in American/English Literature and International News. He began his career as a journalist with China National Radio. For two decades, he was the presenter of Dialogue, an English language political talk show on CGTN (previously CCTV-9 and CCTV News). Foreign guests appear frequently. Yang Rui's on-camera personality is characterized by China expert David Shambaugh as "an aggressive (often impolite) male interviewer" who "often gives a negative and nationalistic image to foreign viewers" and "badgers and is often offensive to on-camera guests". Asked in an interview why this was so, Rui answered "Hard politics, hard talk".

On 24 May 2012, The Atlantic Monthly's James Fallows quoted more controversial comments, discovered by Shanghaiist, an online Chinese news discussion board, that had been made by Yang Rui on his Sina Weibo account. Rui accused the United States media of not supporting the Palestinian cause and alleged that they were afraid of "getting fired by their Jewish bosses." The complete statement included a passage saying: • "The media and the republic go up and down together. The US has done this to the extreme, but Wall Street's greed was not exposed because Jews control both the financial and media worlds. Why do the US media not dare to support the call for the establishment of a Palestinian state? It's because they're afraid of getting fired by their Jewish bosses. When I interviewed the chairman of the US Jewish Association, I questioned him on this. He snarled at me ferociously and said that in America, no one would dare to speak to him this way. He was like a mafia chief. So please stop saying how beautiful American press freedom is." This statement has been characterised as antisemitic.