American multimillionaire Neville Roy Singham financially supports the goals of the Chinese Communist Party. A lengthy New York Times article (“How a U.S. Tech Mogul Used Nonprofits to Sow Chinese Propaganda,” August 10, 2023) provides abundant detail.
One element of Singham’s efforts is a group called No Cold War “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.”
Even without further investigation, such a formulation of what the group is trying to fix is severely suspect. We should stop so much noticing and protesting China’s totalitarian repression and mass murder in order to focus better on racial injustice and the weather?
Of course, there is plenty of racial injustice in China, the government of which especially targets certain ethnocultural groups, like the Uyghurs and Tibetans, for systematic abuse. But it is not always clear from wording alone what leftist-style collectivists mean when they say that they oppose racism, a form of collectivism (of negating individuals) that is forcibly imposed by the Chinese Communist Party state just as it imposes all the other forms of China’s individual-negating collectivism.
Authors Mara Hvistendahl, David A. Fahrenthold, Lynsey Chutel, and Ishaan Jhaveri report:
In fact [No Cold War] 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.
From a think tank in Massachusetts to an event space in Manhattan, from a political party in South Africa to news organizations in India and Brazil, The Times tracked hundreds of millions of dollars to groups linked to Mr. Singham that mix progressive advocacy with Chinese government talking points.
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, which human rights experts have labeled a crime against humanity.
In 2002, Code Pink was cofounded by Jodie Evans, a former Democratic campaign manager. In 2015, Evans was saying on Twitter, “We demand China stop brutal repression of their women’s human rights defenders.” In 2017, Evans and Singham married. In 2021, Evans was quoted as rationalizing the Chinese state’s treatment of the Uyghurs: “We have to do something.” She dismisses all unpalatable information about the totalitarian nature and actions of China as a species of western warmongering propaganda.
Code Pink is not alone among left-wing groups in raising concerns about anti-Asian discrimination and tensions between Beijing and Washington.
But Code Pink goes further, defending the Chinese government’s policies. 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.
In June, Code Pink activists visited staff members on the House Select Committee on China unannounced. In the office of Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts, activists denied evidence of forced labor in Xinjiang and said the congressman should visit and see how happy people were there, according to an aide.
The year 2021 is later than the year 2019, when The New York Times published details of China’s “continuing clampdown in Xinjiang, in which the authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.” Many eyewitness accounts of China’s mass atrocities against the Uyghurs, including torture, rape, and murder, had been published by the time Code Pink activists were telling people to go see how happy the Uyghurs are.
