GORDON CHANG: A lot of our anti-American protests are made in China
"No Kings" and other protests are sweeping America this year. On May 1, communists and other leftists are planning to try and shut the country down with "general strikes."
"Recent reporting indicates that these protests are neither spontaneous nor decentralized," wrote Sen. Josh Hawley to then-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in February, seeking an investigation into "radical left-wing organizations and individuals funding anti-ICE protests—including those with possible ties to the Chinese Communist Party."
At the center of Chinese funding is Neville Roy Singham, an American tech billionaire living in Shanghai, who is implementing Xi Jinping’s euphemistically stated goal of "telling China’s story well."
Singham, an avowed communist, operates an "international Revolutionary Front" of about 2,000 groups. Fox News Digital has identified at least 200 organizations inside his network "that directly work on propaganda that parrots the anti-American messaging of the Chinese Communist Party." These messages are produced in "digital shops from New York City to Los Angeles."
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Los Angeles is of special interest because of the series of violent leftist protests there, including an anti-ICE one in late March at the Roybal Federal Building.
"Some may dismiss the No Kings protests as unfocused therapy sessions for radical activists and the leftist billionaire-backed professional protest industry," Kerry Gershaneck, author of "Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to ‘Win Without Fighting,’" told me. "But Singham and the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department have much more insidious goals. Ultimately, they seek the destruction of the U.S. and our belief system through psychological warfare, disinformation, cognitive attacks … all designed to shred our national identity and cohesion."
Singham has the resources to do all that. Fox News Digital reported that there were 223 transactions, from 2017 through last year, that transferred $591 million around countries on five continents. This "Singham network" consists of "five concentric rings of an ideological pipeline that spreads pro-China propaganda." There are 11 nonprofit organizations in the U.S. that are the core of the network with about $401 million flowing from Singham to these groups.
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The core group includes Code Pink: Women for Peace, co-founded by Jodie Evans, Singham’s wife.
Singham, who denies working with the Chinese regime, nonetheless operates openly in China, something he could not do unless he was coordinating his high-profile efforts with the United Front Work Department (UFWD), the part of the ruling organization that interfaces with foreign organizations and individuals. The UFWD subverts foreign countries and is thought to function as an intelligence service, especially when it operates with the intelligence operations of the People’s Liberation Army, another Party organ, and the Chinese central government.
"Communist China’s primary means of defeating America is political warfare," Gershaneck said to me in 2023.
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That political warfare involves support for protests. As Charles Burton, a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing and author of "The Beaver and the Dragon: How China Out-Maneuvered Canada’s Diplomacy, Security, and Sovereignty," told me, "Some of the most organized and militant elements in recent high-profile, anti-U.S. protests have documented financial and operational ties to Chinese influence networks."
"China controls the most expansive, heavily resourced, and sophisticated propaganda capabilities available to any regime in history," Gershaneck notes.
"Heavily resourced" is no exaggeration. As Burton wrote to me late last month, "The budget and resources devoted to the United Front Work Department’s operations abroad is estimated to exceed by at least double the total budget of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs."
The CCP has identified the U.S. as its enemy. People’s Daily, the Party’s main propaganda organ, carried a landmark editorial declaring a "people’s war" on America in May 2019. That war has been fought in insidious ways. The UFWD has bolstered the demonstrations this year — and so were the fast-spreading protests following the death of George Floyd in May 2020.
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That year, Beijing used the now-closed Houston consulate to provide logistical and financial support to violent protesters in America. Radio Free Asia reported that a People’s Liberation Army intelligence unit, working out of that facility, used big data to identify Americans likely to participate in Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests and then sent them videos on how to "incite" riots.
China’s incitement of violence was even out in the open. On October 18, 2020, Chen Weihua, China Daily’s European bureau chief, posted this on what was then called Twitter: "Hope there will be more petrol bomb throwing mobs in protests in the U.S."
Moreover, in late January 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in the International Falls Port of Entry in Minnesota seized 900,000 counterfeit $1 bills, printed in China. Nobody in China’s near-total surveillance state could counterfeit American currency without the knowledge of authorities, so this counterfeiting operation had Beijing’s blessing. We do not know the motive, but it could not have been profit: No one produces $1 bills for that purpose.
Now, the Chinese regime has help funding propaganda and protests in America. After all, it has Singham’s cash and world-spanning network.