Tag: china

Gates Foundation under fire: Senate Judiciary Committee investigates millions funneled by nonprofit to Beijing-linked entities

U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has launched an investigation into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s alleged funneling of tens of millions in grants to entities tied to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The probe was revealed in a letter dated Monday, Oct. 27, to Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman. The investigation by Grassley centers on whether these payments violate U.S. tax laws prohibiting 501(c)(3) charities from directly supporting foreign governments. It also serves as a striking escalation of scrutiny over nonprofit transparency and national security concerns.

According to Grassley’s findings, the Gates Foundation in 2023 directed $11.7 million to various CCP-controlled agencies, $2 million to a corporation linked by the Department of War to China’s military and $6.7 million to state-run universities bolstering Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping’s regime. Tax filings from 2022 reportedly showed an additional $23 million distributed to over 20 Chinese entities – some explicitly labeled as “foreign governments.”

While categorized as public health or research initiatives, U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulations strictly bar tax-exempt organizations from funding foreign governments without special exemptions. Grassley’s letter demands detailed documentation, including whether grants supported China’s Belt and Road Initiative – a global infrastructure project accused of debt-trap diplomacy. He also questioned whether the foundation obtained required IRS determinations proving funds served charitable purposes, not CCP interests.

Civil terrorism expert Jason Curtis Anderson of One City Rising praised the inquiry. He nevertheless warned: “Without concrete enforcement – audits, sanctions or revoked tax-exempt status – this letter [by Grassley] risks being just a warning.”

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China’s Plan to Sink U.S. Navy Aircraft Carriers Comes Down to 3 Words

China has developed a formidable, multi-layered anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) system, effectively creating a “defensive bubble” designed to deter the U.S. Navy and potentially sink aircraft carriers.

-This system integrates numerous threats, including “carrier-killer” ballistic missiles, new hypersonic anti-ship weapons, quieter submarines, and an emerging “drone wall” of unmanned systems.

-Together, these layers create vast ocean areas that are too dangerous for U.S. aircraft carriers to operate in during a conflict.

-This A2/AD strategy could successfully prevent the U.S. from intervening effectively in a potential invasion of Taiwan.

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How China could use U.S. farmland to attack America

Chinese entities have been acquiring land in key locations near U.S. military bases, sparking national security concerns about possible spying — or even a potential attack.

Former national security official David Feith laid out the potential risk in an interview with 60 Minutes. Feith worked on U.S.-China policy for the State Department in the first Trump administration, and until April, worked in Trump’s second administration on the National Security Council. While there, he grew increasingly alarmed by where China owns America’s farmland. 
 
“The ability to own large tracts of land, especially close to sensitive U.S. military and government facilities, can pose an enormous problem given the nature of technology today, which is that hostile actor from all across the world can very easily exploit access to land, access to buildings and warehouses, access just to a shipping container or two and do enormous damage, either in intelligence terms or in military terms,” Feith told 60 Minutes.

Feith cited Ukraine’s recent drone attack in Russia as an example. In June, the Ukrainian military attacked Russian nuclear-capable bombers with remotely operated drones it had smuggled into the country.

For China, Feith explained, owning farmland in the United States gives America’s geopolitical rival more operating room for potential strikes.

“It’s an entirely new way of war,” he cautioned.

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Ex-Army Sergeant Sentenced to 4 Years for Offering Secrets to China

A federal judge sentenced a former Army intelligence sergeant to 4 years in prison on Tuesday for offering national defense secrets to China. Sergeant Joseph Daniel Schmidt, who had top secret clearance, served in western Washington at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, where he worked in military intelligence.

According to court documents, he served in the Army from January 2015 to January 2020. Schmidt was discharged after a mental health episode in late 2019.

The judge said he considered Schmidt’s mental health as well as the seriousness of the crime in sentencing him to 4 years in prison. Schmidt’s public defender requested that he be sentenced for time served, arguing that the crime was the result of schizophrenia. Schmidt mistakenly believed he was “subject to a mind control network operated by the FBI and [was] hoping to warn the Chinese government about the Program,” according to the public defender Dennis Carroll.

In the Army, Schmidt led a team that de-briefed and interrogated potential intelligence sources. His work gave him access to intelligence collection and reporting systems. After being discharged, he kept a device that gave him access to secure military computer networks. He later offered the device to Chinese authorities for them to access the secure system.

“He used his training to provide sensitive information to the Chinese security service. He knew what he was doing was wrong—he was doing web searches for such things as ‘Can you be extradited for treason,’” said Assistant United States Attorney Todd Greenberg in a statement.

In February 2020, Schmidt flew to Turkey. Court documents state that while there, he searched online about defecting from the United States. He also emailed the Chinese consulate offering to share information with a Chinese official in person.

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U.S. government allowed and even helped U.S. firms sell tech used for surveillance in China: AP

U.S. lawmakers have tried four times since September last year to close what they called a glaring loophole: China is getting around export bans on the sale of powerful American AI chips by renting them through U.S. cloud services instead.

But the proposals prompted a flurry of activity from more than 100 lobbyists from tech companies and their trade associations trying to weigh in, according to disclosure reports.

The result: All four times, the proposal failed, including just last month.

As leaders Donald Trump and Xi Jinping prepare for a long-heralded meeting Thursday, the sale of U.S. technology to China is among the thorniest issues the U.S. faces, with billions of dollars and the future of tech dominance at stake. But the tough talk about China obscures a deeper story: Even while warning about national security and human rights abuse, the U.S. government across five Republican and Democratic administrations has repeatedly allowed and even actively helped American firms to sell technology to Chinese police, government agencies and surveillance companies, an Associated Press investigation has found.

And time after time, despite bipartisan attempts, Congress has turned a blind eye to loopholes that allow China to work around its own rules, such as cloud services, third-party resellers, and holes in sanctions passed after the Tiananmen massacre. For example, despite U.S. export rules around advanced chips, China bought $20.7 billion worth of chipmaking equipment from U.S. companies in 2024 to bolster its homegrown industry, a report from a congressional committee this month warned.

This reluctance to act reflects the tremendous wealth and power of the tech industry, which is more visible than ever under the Trump administration. And in recent months, the president himself has struck grand deals with Silicon Valley firms that even more closely tie the U.S. economy to tech exports to China, giving taxpayers a direct stake in the profits for the first time.

In August, Trump announced a deal with chipmakers Nvidia and AMD to lift export controls on sales of advanced chips to China in exchange for a 15% cut of the revenue, despite concerns from national security experts that such chips will end up in the hands of Chinese military and intelligence services. That same month, Trump announced that the U.S. government had taken a 10 percent stake in Intel worth around $11 billion.

Longtime Chinese activist Zhou Fengsuo said the U.S. government is letting American companies set the agenda and ignoring how they help Beijing surveil and censor its own people. In 1989, Zhou was a student leader during the Tiananmen protests, where hundreds and possibly thousands were shot and killed by the Chinese government. Zhou was arrested and imprisoned.

Now a U.S. citizen, Zhou testified before Congress in 2024, calling on Washington to investigate the involvement of American tech companies in Chinese surveillance. An AP investigation in September found that American companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known.

“It’s driven by profit, and that’s why these strategic discussions have been silenced or delayed,” Zhou said. “I’m extremely disappointed. … this is a strategic failure by the United States.”

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California Political Adviser Pleads Guilty to Being Foreign Agent of China

The former campaign adviser of a Southern California city council member pleaded guilty on Oct. 27 to acting as an illegal Chinese agent.

Sun Yaoning, also known as Mike Sun, worked as a campaign adviser in the 2022 city council race in Arcadia, a Los Angeles suburb.

He also operated a news website targeting the local Chinese American community, posting content supporting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

If the judge accepts the sentencing recommendation, Sun, 64, could face up to 10 years in prison.

In the plea agreement, Sun agreed that he was a foreign agent for China from 2022 to 2024, promoting pro-CCP propaganda in the United States without alerting the U.S. Attorney General.

Campaign filings from the November 2022 election show that Sun worked as treasurer for the campaign of Eileen Wang, an Arcadia city council member.

At the time of the arrest in December 2024, Arcadia City Manager Dominic Lazzaretto said in a letter to the community that Sun had no affiliation with the City of Arcadia and that Wang had spoken with the FBI and was cooperating with investigators.

According to the plea agreement, Sun admitted to writing a report about his activities in support of the CCP.

“Overseas anti-China forces have been ceaseless, Taiwan independence, Tibet independence, Xinjiang independence, and Falungong have been active for a long time,” he wrote.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. As with the other areas mentioned above, the faith group has been a major target of the Chinese regime.

Sun proposed organizing counteractivities and requested $80,000 to fund a demonstration at a Fourth of July parade in Washington, according to the criminal complaint filed on Dec. 17, 2024, by the Justice Department in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

Sun also admitted to providing information to a Chinese official at the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles about activities in the area related to Taiwan. In April 2023, during a visit by then-Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, Sun took photos of protesters and sent them to the Chinese official.

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Chinese Communist Party Making Millions in UK Gov’t Contracts for Migrant Hotels: Report

A report from the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) has found that the Chinese Communist Party is directly profiting from Britain’s migrant hotel scheme to house supposed asylum seekers, many of whom break into the country illegally via the English Channel from the beaches of France.

According to the IPAC audit of the Sino-British economic relationship, the CCP, or entities and people under its control, currently hold £190 billion in UK assets, including schools, national infrastructure such as Heathrow airport, wind farms, power networks, billions of shares in FTSE-listed companies, and properties, including migrant hotels.

Among the Chinese-owned assets listed in the report include three migrant hotels in Britain that have collectively been awarded millions in Home Office contracts, The Sunday Times reported.

One of the firms, Kew Green Hotels, a £300 million business which owns and operates over 60 hotels, is entirely owned by the Communist Party through Beijing’s China Tourism Group Corporation.

It currently owns Holiday Inns in Kent and Cheshire, both of which faced anti-migrant hotel protests in August following nationwide outrage over the government scheme and concern for the safety of communities following the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl by an Ethiopian hotel migrant in Epping.

The report estimated that the two migrant hotels, both of which are block booked by the state to house alleged asylum seekers, have earned the Chinese firm around £15 million through Home Office contracts.

Another Chinese cutout, Campanile, an asset of the Shanghai city government, also owns a hotel in Cardiff, which has been housing supposed asylum seekers for the British government since 2022.

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China, Russia use ‘asymmetric advantage,’ unleash sex warfare to seduce US tech execs, steal secrets: report

China and Russia have deployed attractive women to the United States to seduce unwitting Silicon Valley tech executives as part of a “sex warfare” operation aimed at stealing American technology secrets, according to a report.

Industry insiders told The Times of London that they have been approached by would-be honeypots — some of whom have even managed to ensnare their targets by marrying them and having children.

Chinese and Russian agents are also using social media, startup competitions and venture capital investments to infiltrate the heart of America’s tech industry, the report said.

“I’m getting an enormous number of very sophisticated LinkedIn requests from the same type of attractive young Chinese woman,” James Mulvenon, chief intelligence officer at risk-assessment firm Pamir Consulting, told The Times.

“It really seems to have ramped up recently.”

A former US counterintelligence official who now works for Silicon Valley startups told The Times that he recently investigated one case of a “beautiful” Russian woman who worked at a US-based aerospace company, where she met an American colleague whom she eventually married.

According to the former counterintelligence official, the woman in question attended a modelling academy when she was in her twenties. Afterward, she was enrolled in a “Russian soft-power school” before she fell off the radar for a decade — only to re-emerge in the US as an expert in cryptocurrency.

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Chinese Nationals Arrested In Georgia For Attempting To Buy Black Market Uranium 

In an entirely bizarre and alarming story emerging out of the Republic of Georgia, the country’s State Security Service announced Saturday that three Chinese nationals had been arrested in Tbilisi for allegedly attempting to illegally purchase two kilograms of uranium.

They are accused of attempting to illegally obtain “nuclear material,” Interpress news agency reported as cited in Reuters. It’s unclear whether the suspects have any official links with the Chinese government or its military or intelligence services, however. The suspects intended to buy the uranium for $400,000 and smuggle it to China through Russia, Georgian security and intelligence officials detailed further.

Statements from Georgian security services describe a case where the traffickers were caught red-handed. “According to the authorities, a Chinese citizen already in Georgia, who was in breach of Georgian visa regulations, brought experts to Georgia to search for uranium throughout the country,” CBS writes.

“Other members of the criminal group coordinated the operation from China, the statement said.” Further:

The perpetrators were identified and detained while “negotiating the details of the illegal transaction,” the security service said.

The suspects are facing charges which could bring up to ten years in prison. The scenario of foreigners on risky missions to procure nuclear material in Georgia is not far-fetched, given reports of similar illicit trafficking instances over past years.

For example, one US think tank which monitors the Caucasus region reviews of the abundance of Soviet-era nuclear material there:

The Georgian government has attempted to enhance the safety and security of the nuclear materials under its control, but, prior to the August 2008 war, the anarchic conditions, weak law enforcement, and porous borders in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia have permitted widespread smuggling with neighboring Russian regions, as well as into Georgia. This condition has facilitated trafficking in nuclear materials as well as more conventional forms of contraband such as; narcotics, counterfeit currency, and young women. Georgia’s pivotal location at the crossroads between Europe, Russia, Asia, and the Middle East has raised concerns that transnational trafficking networks could move nuclear materials from Russia through Georgia to international terrorist groups.

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China Is Smuggling Fentanyl to US Through Venezuela, Trump Says

U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed on Oct. 23 that China is smuggling fentanyl into the United States through Venezuela to bypass U.S. and Mexican controls.

“They are doing that, yes, but they are paying right now 20 percent tariff because of fentanyl,” Trump told reporters.

Trump said it is one of the issues he will bring up with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping at their bilateral meeting next week.

“The first question I’m going to be asking them about is fentanyl,” he said.

Trump said that with the tariffs on China, which will rise by an additional 100 percent on Nov. 1 if no deal is made, the fentanyl operation will no longer be sustainable for China.

“They make $100 million sell[ing] fentanyl into our country … they lose $100 billion with the 20 percent tariff. So it’s not a good business proposition,” Trump said. “They pay a very big penalty for doing that, and I don’t think they want to be doing it.”

Trump’s meeting with Xi will come at the tail end of his Asia tour, for which he is departing on Oct. 24.

Earlier this year, FBI Director Kash Patel told lawmakers he had spoken to counternarcotics authorities in China and urged them to restrict exports of more fentanyl precursor chemicals.

The Chinese Ministry of Public Security in August added seven chemicals to an export control list, three of them central to producing fentanyl. The restrictions went into effect Sept. 1.

The United States has determined that China is the main supplier of the deadly illicit drug in the United States, and Trump in an executive order on Feb. 1 imposed initial tariffs on China for its “central role” in the fentanyl crisis.

In the order, Trump noted that despite a long history of discussions over the years, Chinese regime officials “have failed to follow through with the decisive actions needed to stem the flow of precursor chemicals.”

According to the order, in addition to subsidizing and incentivizing chemical companies to create and export fentanyl precursors, the regime has also provided “support and safe haven” for transnational criminal organizations that launder the related profits.

“The CCP does not lack the capacity to severely blunt the global illicit opioid epidemic; it simply is unwilling to do so,” the order reads.

In recent weeks, Trump has authorized nine strikes on vessels suspected of trafficking drugs.

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