American entities shill for Communist China and push the CCP agenda on the American people
China has boasted of one of the most critical connections between the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the groups and individuals campaigned to stop President Trump
We have among us subversives who would sell out the United States to the Chinese Communist Party.
New bombshell admissions over China’s influence in the United States, Europe and Southeast Asia link organizations such as the Berggruen Institute with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The Berggruen Institute first rose to national attention after co-founding the “Transition Integrity Project” which provided insight regarding a Joe Biden effort to seize power on the back of an ostensible Trump victory.
The news lends further credibility to election-tampering theories especially concerning Chinese Communist Party influence.
A 2017 report effectively claims — on the CCP’s behalf — that CNN host Fareed Zakaria, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook Oversight Board member Helle Thorning-Schmidt, #NeveTrump philanthropist Pierre Omidyar and many others “cooperate” with the CCP and its goals.
An unearthed media communique entitled “Holding High the Banner of Party Media and Fulfilling Its Duties and Missions” appears on the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) website.
The government entity reportedly engages in “online propaganda and public opinion work” and upholds a “Socialist core value view,” while spearheading censorship of media and the internet in China. In other words, they pump out pro-CCP lines abroad, while cracking down on dissent within communist China.
The release brags of the work of the Chinese Communist Party’s Western-focused propaganda efforts via the state-owned China Daily newspaper and website. China Daily has purchased placement inside the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post — the latter of which also carries a Fareed Zakaria opinion column on a weekly basis.
At the time of publication, Zakaria’s latest column is entitled: “The Pentagon is using China as an excuse for huge new budgets,” wherein CNN host lauds China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative and insists the U.S. need not worry about China’s rise as a military power.
“As a party media website,” the CAC document confirms, “China Daily uses international communication to implement the spirit of the important April 19, 2018 speech [by Xi Jinping], conscientiously fulfilling its duties and missions, and effectively internalizing the spirit of the speech into the entire network’s strategy and guidelines for all journalists.”
The 2018 speech discussed the “spiritual garden” of cyberspace, with Xi insisting that China strengthen governance in cyberspace according to their law, strengthen the construction of online content, strengthen positive online propaganda, foster a positive, healthy, upward and benevolent online culture, and use the Socialist core value view.
With this in mind, the CAC brags of promoting over 10,000 propaganda pieces to foreign audiences and, critically, touts unashamedly their work with Western think-tanks in achieving the following goal:
“Through cooperation with think-tanks such as the Berggruen Institute in the United States, the Canadian Center for International Governance Innovation, and the Australian Lowy Institute for International Policy, we have attracted nearly 200 overseas think-tankers as special commentators on China Daily. In one year, these entities published more than 300 of their signed articles, enabling them … to influence more overseas audiences and tell China’s stories well.”
The Berggruen Institute has strong ties to China and the Chinese Communist Party, perhaps playing a role in the theft of the 2020 presidential election. (Photo: Klaus Jerrnigan/Herzog & de Meuron Architects)
The names associated with some of these think tanks — especially the Berggruen Institute — should cause alarm to national security-minded individuals and indeed Western governments.
Among its key 21st Century Council members, the Berggruen Institute lists influential global think-tankers and public figures including:
Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey
Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffinton
Anti-Trump funder Pierre Omidvar
Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers
Former Danish Prime Minister and Facebook Oversight Board Member Helle Thorning-Schmidt
CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria.
The CCP’s claims appear to be more than just bragging, as evidence unearthed by ACV shows members of the aforementioned entities indeed have contributed Chinese government-sanctioned propaganda articles to China Daily. In 2008, a fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation lambasted Western “hubris” for the CCP’s propaganda outfit.
In 2016, the Lowy Institute’s program director Tristram Sainbury — also a fellow at Renmin University — told the state-media Xinhua agency: “I expect China will be driving an agenda that is closer to the longer term economic challenges that the G20 has been facing for a long time.”
Tom Bernes, distinguished fellow and former executive director of the Center for International Governance Innovation told China Daily in 2016: “China, over the last couple of years, has begun to take an important role in global economic governance.”
In late 2016, the Berggruen Institute’s Nathan Gardels urged closer co-operation with China.
In 2019, China Daily lauded Gilman’s comments during the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China, which Communist leader Xi Jinping also took part in.
In 2020, Bernes slammed President Trump’s insistence on holding China to account for the COVID-19 pandemic, much to the approval of China Daily.
In mid-2020, the Berggruen Institute was explicitly involved in an anti-Trump exercise known as the Transition Integrity Project (TIP). A collaborative effort between former George Soros counsel Rosa Brooks and Berggruen executive Nils Gilman, TIP littered the U.S. media with commentary about how Joe Biden should refuse to concede in the event of an apparent election night victory for President Donald Trump — which is precisely what happened.
Brooks — who repeatedly refused to be interviewed by ACV before pulling the TIP website down and ceasing operations before election day — had previously offered election assistance to Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, and specifically name-dropped now-Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in her e-mail. Sullivan is listed as a fellow of Australia’s Lowy Institute for International Policy — named by the CCP as someone who cooperates with their propaganda apparatus.
Transition Integrity Project co-founder Rosa Brooks was hell-bent on defeating Donald Trump in the November 2020 presidential election, to the point she directed her radical agency into bed with the Chinese Communist Party. (Photo: Reggie Smythe/TIP)
Amidst scrutiny of TIP’s work in attempting to prematurely cover for Biden’s mail-in ballot-boosted “victory,” Gilman lashed out at critics including writer and analyst Michael Anton.
“Michael Anton is the Robert Brasillach of our times and deserves the same fate,” Gilman opined in a tweet dated September 21, 2020.
Brasillachwas a French author and journalist who was executed in 1944 by firing squad for using his various platforms to advance Nazi Fascism collaborationism and anti-Semitism during World War II. The execution, rather than lifetime imprisonment, was highly controversial as he was charged with intellectual crimes as opposed to military or political actions.
In effect, you have a leading CCP-linked think-tanker working to solidify a Biden victory while threatening the life of a public intellectual. And the tweet — despite clearly breaching Twitter’s Terms of Service — visible on Twitter. The social platform’s CEO Jack Dorsey served on Berggrenun’s CCP-linked 21st Century Council, alongside Gilman.
Additionally, the Berggruen Institute lists a bevy of Chinese government-run entities as partners. These include the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence,China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Chinese Association of Artificial Intelligence.
The Berggruen Institute also lists Antonia Hernandez of the Commission on Presidential Debates as a member.
On the run-up to the 2020 election, the Commission on Presidential Debates misled the public over a tweet from C-SPAN political editor Steve Scully.
Scully was caught attempting to collude with famed anti-Trump activist Anthony Scaramucci and falsely claimed he had been hacked and that a tweet sent from his account was not, in fact, sent by him. It was a lie, as Scully would admit to in the weeks to come. But not before the Commission on Presidential Debates had attempted to cover for him. Articles still available today retain the false “hacking” claim.
The news over China’s asserted involvement in the English language press, web-based propaganda, and influence in critical think-tanks should justify further and urgent investigation. The facts of the case as they present themselves appear to confirm a China-backed strategy to remove President Trump from office, just as his work on seeing down the threat from China began to take its toll.
The unearthed relationships follow ACV reporting that highlight the Berggruen Institute’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party through its partnership with several state-run entities and board members with ties to the regime.
The think tank’s efforts to at least rhetorically rig a victory for Joe Biden in advance of the election, as well as its staffing and funding by Obama administration alumni, surely warrant an investigation into whether money changed hands during all of this, and whether or not the Chinese Communist Party effectively funded the efforts to remove President Trump from office.
Eric Li, a former member of the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council and current member of the Berggruen Institute network, penned a Foreign Policy op-ed entitled “Xi Jinping is a Good Emperor,” extolling the brutal Chinese Communist Party leader while insisting “opportunism and shirking responsibility are not within Xi Jingping’s character.”
For the Washington Post, Li authored a piece similarly peddling Chinese Communist Party propaganda entitled “Why Xi’s lifting of term limits is a good thing.”
If such people can freely propagandize for the CCP in Western media, why should we suspect they would stop short of election tampering?