Google Translate gives me: "Today is the West so-called "April Fool." "Fool's Day" is not in line with our cultural tradition, does not meet the socialist core values, I hope we do not believe rumors, do not spread rumors, do not pass rumors"
It is exactly the same because I quoted them from the WSJ article.
And to give you more insights on this matter, I shall use my response from another reply: Honesty and integrity has always been part of the China's cultural tradition and it was only recently added into list of "socialist core values". It is reflective of the general consensus of population on the core characteristics of a Chinese person, and not related to the Chinese government specifically. Hence there is nothing wrong with discouraging spreading of rumours (as NH now correctly named the title of this submission).
And how that proves that the April 1st is banned? The "fool's joke" here is just the article title, itself demonstrating the spreading of inaccurate information, which is day as usual for most of the media anyway. Really a bit of meta.
It was an opinion piece, but a editorial. WaPo really tried hard to over analyze that post.
After all, Xinhua has traditionally avoided publishing opinions because their main role is a news agency, but with social media there is a lot less restraint than before.
There's absolutely nothing in that post that makes me think it's an opinion piece or an editorial. It's a regular news entry, and a very misleading one, if not outright malicious.
Google Translate gives me: "Today is the West so-called "April Fool." "Fool's Day" is not in line with our cultural tradition, does not meet the socialist core values, I hope we do not believe rumors, do not spread rumors, do not pass rumors"
And the account seems to be "verified" by Weibo.