The Onion Dupes Chinese State Media

To be fair, The Onion has very high standards and it can be hard to tell if they're being sarcastic unless you know the specific situation. Who knows, they might have been tasked to look for validation.

True, but at the same time by just going to their website you can get a pretty good idea of the kind of news that they tend to report. If People's Daily did even the slightest bit of research (or good reporting) they would have easily realized that The Onion is satirical and would've saved themselves this massive facepalm.