(2023-08-10) A Global Web Of Chinese Propaganda Leads To A Us Tech Mogul

A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul. The Times unraveled a financial network that stretches from Chicago to Shanghai and uses American nonprofits to push Chinese talking points worldwide.

The protest in London’s bustling Chinatown brought together a variety of activist groups to oppose a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes. So it was peculiar when a street brawl broke out among mostly ethnic Chinese demonstrators.

Witnesses said the fight, in November 2021, started when men aligned with the event’s organizers, including a group called No Cold War, attacked activists supporting the democracy movement in Hong Kong.

On the surface, No Cold War is a loose collective run mostly by American and British activists who say the West’s rhetoric against China has distracted from issues like climate change and racial injustice.

In fact, a New York Times investigation found, it is part of a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda. At the center is a charismatic American millionaire, Neville Roy Singham, who is known as a socialist benefactor of far-left causes.

What is less known, and is hidden amid a tangle of nonprofit groups and shell companies, is that Mr. Singham works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.

tracked hundreds of millions of dollars to groups linked to Mr. Singham

Some, like No Cold War, popped up in recent years. Others, like the American antiwar group Code Pink, have morphed over time. Code Pink once criticized China’s rights record but now defends its internment of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs

But Mr. Singham, 69, himself sits in Shanghai, where one outlet in his network is co-producing a YouTube show financed in part by the city’s propaganda department. Two others are working with a Chinese university to “spread China’s voice to the world.” And last month, Mr. Singham joined a Communist Party workshop about promoting the party internationally.

He and his allies are on the front line of what Communist Party officials call a “smokeless war.” Under the rule of Xi Jinping, China has expanded state media operations, teamed up with overseas outlets and cultivated foreign influencers. The goal is to disguise propaganda as independent content.

The result is a seemingly organic bloom of far-left groups that echo Chinese government talking points, echo one another, and are echoed in turn by the Chinese state media.

None of Mr. Singham’s nonprofits have registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as is required of groups that seek to influence public opinion on behalf of foreign powers

his associates say Mr. Singham has long admired Maoism, the Communist ideology that gave rise to modern China. He praised Venezuela under the leftist president Hugo Chavez as a “phenomenally democratic place.” And a decade before moving to China, he said the world could learn from its governing approach.

The son of a leftist academic, Archibald Singham, Mr. Singham is a longtime activist who founded the Chicago-based software consultancy Thoughtworks.

There, Mr. Singham came across as a charming showman who prided himself on creating an egalitarian corporate culture. He was unabashed about his politics.

In 2017, Mr. Singham married Jodie Evans, a former Democratic political adviser and the co-founder of Code Pink

Six months after his wedding, he sold Thoughtworks to a private equity firm. A copy of the sale agreement put the price at $785 million. (Apax Partners)

At its center were four new nonprofits with dust-dry names like “United Community Fund” and “Justice and Education Fund.” They have almost no real-world footprints, listing their addresses only as UPS store mailboxes in Illinois, Wisconsin and New York.

The largest is run by Ms. Evans. The group’s founding bylaws say that Mr. Singham can fire her and the rest of the board. They also require that the group dissolve after Mr. Singham’s death.

The other three groups were founded by former Thoughtworks employees

One of them is the Massachusetts-based think tank Tricontinental. Its executive director, Vijay Prashad... Tricontinental produces videos and articles on socialist issues.

From the UPS store nonprofits, millions of dollars flowed around the world. The Times tracked money to a South African political party, YouTube channels in the United States and nonprofits in Ghana and Zambia. In Brazil, records show, money flowed to a group that produces a publication, Brasil de Fato, that intersperses articles about land rights with praise for Xi Jinping.

In New Delhi, corporate filings show, Mr. Singham’s network financed a news site, NewsClick, that sprinkled its coverage with Chinese government talking points

These groups operate in coordination. They have cross-posted articles and shared one another’s content on social media hundreds of times.

Several times a year, activists and politicians from across Africa fly to South Africa for boot camps at the Nkrumah School, set in a popular safari area.

They come to learn to organize workers and left-wing movements. Once on campus, though, some attendees are surprised to find Chinese topics seeping into the curriculum.

“They’re being rounded up to be fed Chinese propaganda,” said Cebelihle Mbuyisa, a former employee who helped prepare materials for the workshop. “Whole social movements on the African continent are being hijacked by what looks like a foreign policy instrument of the Chinese Communist Party.”

U.S. tax records show that one of the UPS store nonprofits, the People’s Support Foundation, donated at least $450,000 for training at the school. On Instagram, Ms. Evans described a photo of the grounds as “Roy’s new place.”

The $450,000 was just part of Mr. Singham’s efforts in South Africa. In all, the foundation has sent $5.6 million to groups that run the school; a news organization; and the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party, a fringe party launched ahead of the 2019 election.

Mr. Singham also funded an online news start-up, New Frame, according to a recording obtained by The Times. One employee, Aragorn Eloff, said Mr. Singham interviewed him for a job.

Its former top editor has denied that New Frame had a pro-China slant. But a former reporter, Anna Majavu, said that an editor removed criticism of Chinese labor practices from a story on mining. “The resistance from the editor was purely political,” she said.

And in June 2022, an editor, Darryl Accone, wrote a resignation letter criticizing New Frame’s soft coverage of China and Russia.

Mr. Singham’s office, adorned in red and yellow, sits on the 18th floor of Shanghai’s swanky Times Square. A visit shows that he is not alone.

He shares the office with a Chinese media company called Maku Group, which says its goal is to “tell China’s story well,” a term commonly used for foreign propaganda

It can be hard to tell where Maku begins and Mr. Singham’s groups end.

Nonprofit filings show that nearly $1.8 million flowed from one of the UPS store nonprofits to Maku Group.

Maku’s website shows young people gathering in Mr. Singham’s office, facing a red banner that reads, in Chinese, “Always Follow the Party.” Resting on a shelf is a plate depicting Xi Jinping

In 2020, Mr. Singham emailed his friends to introduce a newsletter, now called Dongsheng News, that covers China in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Drawing stories from the state media, it blends lighthearted news with bureaucratic official prose.

Dongsheng’s editors, in China, come from Tricontinental, but its address leads to the People’s Forum, a Manhattan event space also funded by Mr. Singham.

Ms. Evans, 68, was once a Democratic insider who managed the 1992 presidential campaign of the California governor Jerry Brown.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, she reinvented herself as an activist. She became known for pink peace-sign earrings and sit-ins that ended with her arrest.

Until a few years ago, she readily criticized China’s authoritarian government.

Since 2017, about a quarter of Code Pink’s donations — more than $1.4 million — have come from two groups linked to Mr. Singham

Ms. Evans now stridently supports China. She casts it as a defender of the oppressed and a model for economic growth without slavery or war.

She describes the Uyghurs as terrorists and defends their mass detention.

Howie Hawkins, the 2020 Green Party presidential nominee, said he had soured on Code Pink and others in the Singham network that presented themselves as pro-labor but supported governments that suppressed workers.

In a 2021 video, a staff member compared Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrators to the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 that year. (2021 Storming of the US Capitol)

This May, Mr. Singham attended the opening of a media institute in Shanghai. Organizers distributed tote bags reading “Communications as solidarity.”