OPINION:
A nexus of privileged Westerners and nonprofits is working overtime to hide the truth about the Chinese Communist Party and demoralize and destroy the West.
In mid-October, CodePink, a self-described anti-war group, launched what it called a “community trip” to communist China as part of the group’s “China Is Not Our Enemy” campaign.
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For 12 days and 11 nights — and for a nice capitalist sum of $3,000 to $4,000 per person — selected participants were invited to “explore China’s revolutionary history while marveling at high-tech infrastructure and modern socialist development.”
Highlights included “Red Memorials, Historical Reenactments and Museums, Socialist Infrastructure, and Rural Revitalization.”
To say the trip was “guided” would be an understatement. Communist China is the largest surveillance state known to man, but participants could take solace knowing they were in safe hands.
CodePink is one of several organizations supported by Neville Roy Singham, a tech tycoon based in Shanghai. Mr. Singham is married to Jodie Evans, the group’s co-founder.
Mr. Singham is the subject of multiple U.S. federal and congressional investigations into his alleged ties to the CCP. As the House Ways and Means Committee noted, Mr. Singham “spent $100 million to establish a multi-pronged, non-profit network that aims to cause chaos in pursuit of its anti-American ideology.”
A December 2023 New York Times investigation, “A global web of Chinese propaganda leads to a U.S. tech mogul,” found that Mr. Singham shared office space and staffers with a company that aimed to educate foreigners about “the miracles that China has created on the world stage.”
Mr. Singham is a self-described socialist who, in his youth, was a member of the Black nationalist Maoist group League of Revolutionary Black Workers. In 1974, he was investigated by the FBI for being “potentially dangerous because of background, emotional instabilities, or activity in groups engaged in activities inimical to the U.S.”
In 1993, he founded the software firm ThoughtWorks, which he later sold for $785 million. Mr. Singham has used his wealth to support causes dear to his heart and the CCP’s.
His son, Nate Singham, works as a researcher for Tricontinental, a Marxist think tank, according to InfluenceWatch, an online database of dark money groups run by the Capital Research Center.
Tricontinental is named after the 1966 Tricontinental, a conference in Havana, Cuba, that consisted of communists and was held under the auspices of the Castro dictatorship.
As journalist Jason Burke noted in his recent history of 1970s terrorism, “The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s,” that gathering “profoundly worried Western security services, who saw it as the centerpiece of a global effort to sow subversion and dissidence.”
The Tricontinental Institute played an important part in promoting the riots now unfolding in France, as journalist Asra Nomani documented.
The message is clear: The West is unstable, and communist China is on the rise.
Notably, none of Mr. Singham’s groups has registered under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. Mr. Singham himself has denied that he “takes orders from” the CCP and said he is “solely guided” by his “long-held personal views.”
Perhaps. Mr. Singham is hardly the first Westerner to shill for a communist regime.
“I have seen the future, and it works,” progressive journalist Lincoln Steffens proclaimed after he visited the Soviet Union in 1919.
What that “future” looked like became increasingly clear: the construction of a massive one-party police state, the establishment of gulags, the staging of show trials, the indoctrination of the population, and the elimination of the upwardly mobile.
Steffens was one of many prominent Western leftists to serve as apologists for a totalitarian communist state, but he is far from the last.
Less than a year after Steffens’ death, another American journalist, Edgar Snow, published “Red Star Over China,” which portrayed guerrilla leader Mao Zedong as a poet rather than a budding communist tyrant.
Mao went on to murder an estimated 45 million Chinese people in the Great Leap Forward, making him modern history’s greatest butcher.
Snow’s widow later expressed horror at the dictatorship he helped promote.
Privileged Westerners have a long and sordid history of boosting authoritarian regimes. CodePink is not the first; if the U.S. fails to expose communist propaganda networks, it will not be the last.
• The writer is the director of the Counter Extremism Research Center at Capital Research Center.
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