How the Chinese Communist Party Disrupts American Society (Part 1)

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(Minghui.org) Pro-Palestinian protests erupted across the campuses of American colleges in the spring of 2024. The disruption they caused was substantial as they took over buildings, interrupted classes, damaged infrastructure, and threatened Jewish students.

After clearing out a pro-Palestinian barricade at Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, the New York Police Department found that the protesters were surprisingly well-equipped, with industrial-grade chains, gas masks, ear plugs, goggles, hammers, knives, and ropes. They also discovered that 25% of the people they arrested were not students. At the City University of New York, 60% of the arrested protesters were not students.

Credit for these protests was claimed by a coalition of activist groups: Shut It Down for Palestine (SID4P), which called on their followers to “mobilize in the belly of the beast” to “comba[t] material support for Zionism and weake[n] the handmaiden of U.S. global imperialism.”

Further investigation, however, reveals that many of these seemingly grassroots groups were funded by the same sponsor: Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based American tech multimillionaire who has a long history of collaborating with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

From 2001 to 2008, he served as a consultant to Huawei, a telecommunications firm that has been blacklisted around the world for concerns about its ties to CCP espionage. In 2019, he started a consulting business with Chinese partners who are active in the CCP’s propaganda apparatus. In July 2023, Singham was seen at a Shanghai strategic communications conference hosted by the CCP. Later that year, India’s Enforcement Directorate summoned him for questioning regarding NewsClick, an Indian media outlet he owns that was raided in 2021 on suspicion of promoting CCP propaganda with CCP money.

The group of organizations Singham funded, dubbed the “Singham Network,” are found to be “funneling undisclosed funds and disseminating CCP-supported agendas and narratives into the United States since at least 2017,” according to the Network Contagion Research Institute.

“This network has played an increasingly significant role in fueling a more radical pro-Palestinian activism,” the institute further concluded, pointing out Singham’s heavy financial ties to at least three of the seven groups that make up SID4P. As a part of its unrestricted warfare tactics, the CCP has long infiltrated various aspects of American society in an effort to expand its influence and disrupt the American way of life. It has done this under the cover of an array of innocuous-seeming organizations and individuals that embedded themselves within the fabric of Western society. This not only caused significant damage but also led many people to become the CCP’s unwitting pawns.

The Nucleus of Infiltration: The United Front Work Department

Since the 1930s, the CCP has had a department expressly responsible for promoting its influence outside of its own jurisdiction. On January 5, 1939, the Central Secretariat of the CCP officially established the United Front Work Department (UFWD) as an arm within the Party. This department was responsible for creating a “united front” of CCP operations in all aspects of Chinese society—religious groups, ethnic minorities, political parties, business owners, and non-CCP affiliated literati—as well as in overseas societies.

Evidence of these operations lies within the UFWD’s own stated goals. Regarding ethnic and religious minorities, it seeks to maintain connections with representatives of ethnic and religious minorities, “coordinate related departments in nurturing and promoting cadres within ethnic and religious minorities,” and “coordinate related departments in conducting douzheng against the Dalai Lama Group and other enemy forces within and outside of the country that seek to divide the Motherland.”

Douzheng, often translated as “struggle,” is a specialized CCP term meaning an attempt to dismantle an organization it views as an enemy.

As for other nations and regions, the UFWD aims to “launch work operations that have the unification of the Motherland as the primary priority,” and to establish pro-CCP connections within Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan that can further the CCP’s goals. Chinese emigrants to other nations are also within the UFWD’s purview, with the UFWD being responsible for communications between “representatives” of Chinese expat groups, monitoring the “status” of expat groups, and for promoting its propaganda via expat groups. In fact, a separate stated goal of the UFWD is to “launch propaganda operations” both within and outside of China’s borders.

Foreign relations experts around the world recognized the UFWD as an extension of the CCP into other nations, and potentially a source of danger. “China uses ‘United Front’ work to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the CCP’s policies and authority,” according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in its 2022 report to Congress.

“The united front system’s reach beyond the borders of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—such as into foreign political parties, diaspora communities and multinational corporations—is an exportation of the CCP’s political system,” stated the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. “This undermines social cohesion, exacerbates racial tension, influences politics, harms media integrity, facilitates espionage, and increases unsupervised technology transfer.”

The institute also noted that because the CCP uses seemingly benign organizations to perform its united front work its influence is often “covert” or “deceptive” and difficult to trace. In the same 2022 report, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission recommends that Congress keep an “unclassified directory” of the CCP’s apparatus of control that includes “organizations affiliated with the United Front Work Department.”

Through following the movement of these pro-CCP groups, we can shine a light on several of the UFWD’s key strategies for disrupting societies outside China: funding disruptive groups, media manipulation, espionage and involving members of mainstream society (elite capture).

Funding Social Unrest

Long before the Singham Network was launched the CCP was financially linked to groups in the United States that seek to cause social unrest.

In 2020, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement led to protests across the nation due to the perception that African Americans were being unfairly subjected to police brutality. Although on the surface most of these protests appeared to have a noble goal, this did not stop a significant portion of them from turning destructive. An estimate from the Insurance Information Institute put the total amount of insured property loss from the unrest at anywhere between $1 to $2 billion—making BLM the most destructive civil unrest episode in American history.

One of the BLM founders, Alicia Garza, began a venture called the Black Futures Lab to support these protest efforts. An investigation by the Heritage Foundation discovered that the Black Futures Lab’s donation webpage says that all of its donations are processed through an organization called the China Progressive Association, or CPA.

According to a Stanford University paper the CPA “began as a Leftist, pro-People’s Republic of China organization, promoting awareness of mainland China’s revolutionary thought and workers’ rights, and dedicated to self-determination, community control, and ‘serving the people.’” It also works with “other pro-PRC groups within the U.S.” to further its goals.

The Boston branch of the CPA hosted flag-raising events to honor the CCP that were attended by high-level CCP officials. The CCP’s state-run media outlet, China Daily praised the San Francisco branch of the CPA for its participation in the BLM protests.

During Xi Jinping’s visit to San Francisco for the APEC Summit in November of 2023, the Washington Post found that at least 35 pro-CCP Chinese diaspora groups were mobilized to disrupt the protests of anti-CCP groups. The Washington Post noted that they used a variety of violent tactics against anti-CCP protesters, including pepper spray and physical attacks with blunt force weapons. They also stole the personal belongings of anti-CCP protesters. WeChat messages obtained by the Washington Post confirmed that the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles provided financial incentives for these diaspora groups by paying for their hotels and meals while they were in San Francisco.

Buying American Elites

Traces of UFWD activity have also been detected in its support for people in key positions of power in American society. Pro-CCP groups often give money or other material rewards to individuals for acting according to the CCP’s wishes, effectively cultivating its own agents within foreign societies that appear to act independently,

In a 2024 hearing, Dr. Robert Atkinson, president of a Washington D.C. think tank, testified in Congress to the pervasiveness of elite capture by the CCP. When questioned by Representative Andy Biggs as to who the CCP was trying to “capture,” Dr. Atkinson gave the following response: “All. Pretty much all the elites, they try.”

A 2023 investigation by Newsweek discovered some of these capture efforts through UFWD-linked funding to candidates in New York. From 1990 to 2023, over $1 million in campaign donations to New York politicians at the federal, state, and city levels were traced to UFWD-linked groups and individuals.

Representative Grace Meng, one of the focal points of the investigation, accepted over $270,000 of UFWD-linked contributions to her campaigns since 2006. In particular, she accepted thousands of dollars in donations from An Quanzhong—a Chinese businessman who was sentenced to 20 months for his participation in Operation Fox Hunt, a CCP ploy to coerce overseas dissidents to return to China. She also declared an “An Quanzhong Day” in her congressional district to honor this donor.

Henan Chinese Associates USA, an expat group associated with the UFWD, also credited itself for helping Meng win a New York Assembly seat in 2008.

American academia is also not immune to CCP influence. In just one high-profile case, Harvard nanoscientist Dr. Charles Lieber was arrested in 2020 for making false statements to federal authorities about his involvement in the CCP’s Thousand Talents Plan (TTP) and tax fraud.

Dr. Lieber served as principal investigator of his own research group at Harvard, which received $15 million in federal funds from various U.S. government agencies from 2008 to 2019. He later became a strategic scientist at China’s Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) and a contracted participant of the CCP’s TTP from 2012 to 2015.

The TTP is an initiative which aims to attract foreign scholars into working for the CCP and has a direct tie to the UFWD. “The UFWD’s Western Returned Scholars Association (WRSA, 欧美同学会) runs the official association for participants in the Thousand Talents Plan,” noted the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

As part of his three-year contract, Dr. Lieber received “a salary of up to $50,000 a month, living expenses of up to $150,000, and approximately $1.5 million to conduct research at the WUT,” according to a Department of Justice report. He hid this employment from Harvard University.

When Dr. Lieber was interviewed by officials at the Department of Defense in April 2018, he lied and said that he was never asked to participate in the TTP. Again in 2019, he “caused” Harvard to falsely tell the National Institutes of Health that he was not, and never had been, a member of the TTP. Both U.S. agencies funded Dr. Lieber’s research.

He was convicted in 2023 of making false statements to federal authorities, for hiding the Chinese bank account he used to receive TTP payments, and for falsifying his tax returns—a total of six felonies. The presiding judge sentenced him to a two-day detention, two years of supervised release with six months of home confinement, and a total of $83,600 in fines and restitution.

Even after serving his sentence, Dr. Lieber continues to work with Chinese universities and is now a chair professor at Tsinghua University’s Shenzhen International Graduate School.

(Continued in  Part 2)