Overview
Neville Singham, an American expatriate living in China, is reportedly under criminal investigation in the United States.
Singham has been tied to a network of nonprofits that promotes narratives friendly to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Civil Defense has profiled the nonprofits, finding that several of them regularly promote or defend the CCP.
Speaking at a conference in Shanghai, China in late 2025, Neville Roy Singham, a wealthy American expatriate, explained why he needed to rewrite the history of World War II. Singham criticized the “international rules-based order,” saying it was “created” by a “lie.”
“If we want to therefore have a new world’s [sic] order that is based on multilateralism that President Xi [Jinping] and CPC [Communist Party of China] and China have proposed, we have to undo the ideological damage that has been done by the narrative of World War II,” Singham said.
Indeed, Singham trumpeted his own revisionist history at the conference. In it, he primarily credits the communists and socialists of the Soviet Union and China with victory during the Second World War, downplaying what he described as the contributions of “Anglo-American capital,” meaning the United States and the United Kingdom.
Singham’s advocacy for Xi Jinping’s foreign policy is conspicuous but unsurprising.
Years earlier, major investigations by media outlets, including New Lines Magazine and The New York Times, connected a network of nonprofits allegedly funded by Singham to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) media apparatus. A series of congressional inquiries and investigations followed.
Then, in July 2026, news broke that Singham is under criminal investigation by a grand jury in the Southern District of New York. Authorities are reportedly investigating whether he has violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and also whether he lied on 990 tax forms filed with the Internal Revenue Service. The central question is whether Singham is not just a benefactor of far-left causes but is also working with the CCP.
In 2023, for instance, The New York Times concluded that Singham is at the “center” of a “lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda.” Singham “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide,” the Times reported. (Singham has denied working under the direction of any government.)
Singham’s favorable views of the CCP (also known as the CPC) and other far-left authoritarian regimes have long been known. “China is teaching the West that the world is better off with a dual system of both free-market adjustments and long-term planning,” he told CNN in 2008. During the same interview, Singham praised Venezuela as a “phenomenally democratic place.” (At the time, Venezuela was ruled by Hugo Chavez, who transformed the country from a democracy into an autocracy during his reign from 1999 until 2013.) “I have been following China since I was 14 years old,” Singham wrote in a 2021 email. “The Chinese and Cuban revolutions defined my generation’s attraction to liberation and socialism.”
In 2017, Singham sold his software company, Thoughtworks, for $785 million. He moved his businesses to Shanghai and began funding several nonprofits in the United States. These nonprofits are central to the reported investigation into his activities.
Civil Defense has published organizational profiles for eight nonprofits that have been connected to Singham. They are: CODEPINK, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, the United Community Fund, the Justice and Education Fund, People’s Welfare Association and the People’s Support Foundation. Below, Civil Defense takes a closer look at the media and educational materials produced by the first four of these nonprofits.
The profiles rely on primary sources, including the IRS tax filings that are reportedly under investigation, as well as other extensive reporting. The tax filings and other evidence establish that the nonprofits connected to Singham are part of a close-knit network, with overlapping personnel and funding flowing between them. Readers can click on each of the profiles to explore these relationships further.
As detailed below, personnel working for these nonprofits have dismissed claims that the CCP is an “authoritarian” regime, undermined claims of Taiwanese independence, whitewashed the CCP’s oppression of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the western Xinjiang province, falsely claimed the 1989 Tiananmen massacre was not in fact a massacre of peaceful protesters and echoed known CCP talking points about its supposed economic successes.
While such rhetoric alone does not prove that these nonprofits are working with or for the Chinese government, it does demonstrate, in part, why suspicion of foreign ties has fallen on the nonprofits — and on Singham himself.
CODEPINK
The best-known nonprofit in Singham’s orbit is CODEPINK, an anti-war protest organization that first gained widespread attention opposing the 2003 Iraq War. Over time, CODEPINK mixed its anti-war campaigning with messaging that portrays the CCP in a positive light, often solely blaming America for tensions between the two countries.
CODEPINK’s co-founder, Jodie Evans, married Singham in 2017. The Times reported that CODEPINK received $1.4 million from other nonprofits connected to Singham in the years that followed. (In response, Evans denied following the “direction of any political party, my husband or any other government or their representatives,” adding that she has “always followed my values.”)
Claims that the CCP is not “authoritarian” and China is a “local democracy”
One of CODEPINK’s ongoing campaigns, “China Is Not Our Enemy,” consistently portrays the United States as the aggressor in a rivalry with the CCP. The campaign’s bias is obvious, as its main web page alleges that the U.S. government is driving toward war and “continues to manipulate the minds of US citizens to support the war,” while the “media drives baseless narratives of fear and hate.” A piece on the organization’s website credits Evans with launching the campaign in circa 2019 and reads:
“The truth is that China is not our enemy. The only enemy is U.S. imperialism, war itself, and the spinning gears of propaganda that drag us into it, time and time again.”
—Megan Russell
CODEPINK’s “China is Not Our Enemy” Campaign Coordinator
After a trip to China in 2023, Evans spoke for more than an hour about her experiences on a CODEPINK livestream. She dismissed the idea that the CCP is an “authoritarian” regime, claiming that China is a “local democracy,” with a “really direct intimate relational democracy on the ground.”
Independent accounts contradict Evans’s glowing review of the CCP’s rule. For instance, Freedom House reports that “China’s authoritarian regime has become increasingly repressive in recent years,” as it “continues to tighten control over all aspects of life and governance, including the state bureaucracy, the media, online speech, religious practice, universities, businesses, and civil society associations.”
During that same 2023 livestream, Evans praised China’s “peace economy culture,” which she contrasted with America’s supposed “war economy culture,” claiming it was refreshing to be in a country where she felt “safe.” When asked if she had anything “negative” to say about China, Evans struggled to find an answer: “I can’t for the life of me think of anything right now.” Evans eventually explained that she had trouble paying for things because “they don’t take American credit cards.” That was her only criticism of the CCP-ruled country. Evans also lauded her time in China in a piece for CODEPINK’s website.
In November 2023, CODEPINK helped organize another visit to China as part of its “China Is Not Our Enemy” campaign. One participant, Dee Knight, described his visit in an essay for the organization’s website. “Taiwan is part of China,” Knight wrote. He asserted that China “seems to have [a] more genuine democracy” than Hong Kong and Taiwan, which he described as “parts of the country” that the United States “has been trying to strip away.”
Whitewashing the CCP’s ethnic repression in western China
In a separate piece, “Eyewitness Xinjiang,” published at another publication, Knight dismissed reports that the CCP is using ethnic Uyghurs (a predominately Muslim minority) for “slave labor” as “western accusations…to create a scandal that’s used to try and [sic] isolate China and strangle its economy.”
In fact, CODEPINK consistently downplays the CCP’s human rights abuses against ethnic minorities in the western Xinjiang province, even though the regime’s repression has been thoroughly documented by independent groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner.
In its China FAQ, for example, CODEPINK avoids blaming the CCP for any human rights violations against ethnic Uyghurs or any others in western China. “Any violation of their human rights is of concern to us,” CODEPINK writes. The very next sentence blames America: “At the same time, we call out the US government for using Xinjiang’s human rights situation to drive war with China.”
Evans has also blamed the United States for the CCP’s crackdown in Xinjiang. During a 2021 livestream, she alleged that “the Saudi king” admitted that he was paid by the United States to “take Wahhabism to the Uyghurs in China so that the U.S. would have a flank on China.” She described Uyghurs as “the most fierce fighters in Yemen and Syria” who “come home and bomb shopping centers.” China is “trying to deal with the situation,” she added, “I’m sure it’s not pretty…but is it a reason to go to war on a billion and a half people?”
While some Uyghurs have joined al-Qaeda and ISIS-affiliated terrorist groups, those jihadists are not part of a plan concocted by the United States and the Saudi monarchy. In fact, U.S. forces have struck Uyghur jihadists in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. Moreover, counterterrorism concerns cannot justify what Human Rights Watch has described as the CCP’s system of “mass arbitrary detention, unjust imprisonments, intrusive surveillance and forced labor” — all of which have systematically repressed “hundreds of thousands” of civilians.
Messaging amplified by state-controlled media
Chinese state-controlled media outlets have amplified CODEPINK’s messaging on multiple occasions. In September 2020, China Daily Global quoted Evans as claiming that China “has taken 850 million people out of poverty, without invading other countries, or enslaving other people” and the American elite were “terrified” by such success. In July 2021, China Daily Global quoted Evans as saying that the United States was engaged in a “multi-pronged hybrid war” against China. In 2022, the People’s Daily Online highlighted CODEPINK’s role, alongside other groups, in protests outside of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office as she prepared to visit Taiwan.
In March 2024, Evans was featured in a China Global Television Network segment in which she accused the U.S. government of dividing the Korean Peninsula into two nations but did not criticize the CCP for its sponsorship of North Korea. South Korea, backed by the United States, is a democracy. North Korea, backed by the CCP, is ruled by a dictator. While Evans accused the United States of committing “a crime against humanity” on the Korean Peninsula, she was silent when it came to the CCP’s well-documented support of Kim Jong Un’s repressive regime. “My life is about stopping this monstrous regime that is the United States of America that thinks it’s okay to murder people,” Evans said in the CGTN segment.
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Tricontinental is a Marxist research institute. Singham chairs Tricontinental’s International Advisory Board and his son, Nathan, has worked as a researcher for the organization.
Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental’s executive director, has described Singham as “[o]ne of my oldest & dearest friends.” In a thread posted on Twitter (now X) in December 2021, Prashad praised Singham as “a Marxist with a massive software company!” Prashad explained that Singham sold his company “a few years ago and decided to give away all the money toward political education for a new generation of radicals.” Prashad added: “Those funds – now largely in non-profits – were the original source for @tri_continental’s endowment, & other projects, which we hope will last for at least a generation.”
In response to The New York Times’s 2023 investigation, Prashad stated: “We do not and have never received funds or instructions from any government or political party.”
In November 2025, Tricontinental published Singham’s revisionist study (discussed above) of World War II. It is titled “The 80th Anniversary of the Victory in the World Anti-Fascist War.” A version of Singham’s study was also published by Guancha, a news outlet that Reporters Without Borders has described as a “Chinese propaganda media” outlet. In his study, Singham credits “socialist leadership and mass heroism,” not the Allied powers, for the victory over the fascist Axis powers. He claims that China and the Soviet Union fought fascism while “Washington and London would rather count profits,” and that the Allies’ “hatred of communism and love of their colonies outweighed their anti-fascist principles.” Singham describes the Soviet Union’s relocation of industry while under attack by Nazi Germany as something that “only a socialist-led society could achieve,” adding that the Soviet military’s success was due to “the fusion of Marxist science with mass creativity.”
In November 2025, Singham spoke about his study at an event hosted by the Global South Academic Forum in Shanghai, explaining that dozens of others contributed. Tricontinental served as one of the event’s sponsors, with Prashad delivering a keynote address. In his own brief remarks, Singham accused the West of spreading the “fascist lie” that there is “a battle between fascism, democracy, and communism” when, in his view, “fascism is actually a face of capitalism and imperialism, as is colonialism.” (Singham credited Prashad for elaborating on this view.)
In October 2026, Jodie Evans is releasing a new book, China Is Not Our Enemy. (CODEPINK’s ongoing campaign, discussed above, shares the same name.) Evans’s book was coauthored with Mikaela Nhondo Erskog, a researcher at Tricontinental. Erskog’s bio says she “is also part of Dongsheng, an international collective of researchers interested in Chinese politics.” According to The New York Times, Singham introduced Dongsheng News to his friends in 2020, claiming it “provides unique progressive coverage of China that has been sadly missing.” The Times added: “Drawing stories from the state media,” Dongsheng News “blends lighthearted news with bureaucratic prose.”
The People’s Forum
The People’s Forum, which is based in Manhattan, describes itself as a “movement incubator for working class and marginalized communities.” In a 2021 social media thread, the organization described Singham as “our funder.” The group has denied “allegations of Chinese government funding,” claiming they “are not only false but part of a dangerous escalation to crush dissent, target activists, and silence peace and anti-war movements.”
The People’s Forum’s educational activities include classes on Marxist-Leninist communism, as well as an annual “Red Books Day,” during which readers celebrate the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The People’s Forum’s educational programming has often portrayed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in a sympathetic light. Several examples follow below.
Conferences cohosted with the Qiao Collective
In August 2020, The People’s Forum cohosted a virtual event with the Qiao Collective titled “Socialism vs. Barbarism: Understanding the New Cold War on China.” The webpage for the event reads: “This class will equip socialists and anti-imperialists with an analysis of U.S.-China relations within a longer history of U.S. imperialist aggression; the nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics; and China’s vision of multilateralism as an alternative to U.S. unilateralism.”
The Qiao Collective, the event’s cohost, says its mission is to serve “as a bridge between the U.S. left and China’s rich Marxist, anti-imperialist political work and thought in order to foster critical consideration of the role of China and socialism with Chinese characteristics in contemporary geopolitics.”
On September 18, 2021, The People’s Forum cohosted another conference in conjunction with the Qiao Collective, as well as Monthly Review and CODEPINK. The conference, titled “China and the Left: A Socialist Forum,” was intended to “provide a forum for those invested in Chinese socialism and internationalism” and “for those invested in challenging [the] rise in the U.S.-led imperialist aggression on China to meet, strategize, and discuss.” The conference’s home webpage chastised “self-avowed leftist organizations and thinkers” who had supposedly “abandoned an anti-imperialist analysis of China in favor of equivocating narratives about Chinese ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘hegemony.’”
Tricontinental’s Vijay Prashad delivered the keynote address at the September 2021 conference. His speech was titled, “What’s the Left to Do in a World on Fire?” During his remarks, Prashad harshly criticized the United States, including the American left, while defending the CCP. “This is supposed to be about China,” Prashad said of the conference, “why is he talking about the United States? Because friends, frankly, the United States does not have the right to judge anybody.” Prashad continued: “The U.S. left does not have the right to judge anybody. Because what gives the U.S. left the right to do anything?” Only after the U.S. left “build[s] power here, then let’s talk…otherwise you’re just a college professor, or you’re somebody who has nothing better to do than go on the internet and harass political forces outside the United States,” Prashad said.
“I really don’t think this is an issue of what you feel about the Chinese Revolution,” Prashad said. “I really don’t think that’s the point right now…because all I want from you, all I’m asking of you is to campaign…against this war.” (Needless to say, there was no war.)
“I literally don’t care what your assessment is of the Communist Party…of Xi Jinping,” Prashad told the audience. “I don’t even care if you’re racist against the Chinese people. I honestly don’t care.” Prashad defended the CCP’s track record, claiming it “just helped eradicate absolute poverty” and did a better job of managing the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in China, than Western governments. Prashad criticized people for calling the Chinese government’s “project…authoritarianism.”
CODEPINK’s Jodie Evans touted Prashad’s remarks, including his criticisms of the American left, in posts on her Twitter (now X) account. She also thanked Prashad for his “shout out” to CODEPINK “while calling out the USofA as [the] biggest criminal and terrorist on the planet.”
Course commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Chinese communist revolution
In October 2024, The People’s Forum released a three-part series to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Chinese communist revolution titled “When the People Stand Up: 75 Years of the Chinese Revolution.” The reading packet for the first course in the series reprints Mao Zedong’s September 21, 1949, speech, “The Chinese People Have Stood Up!,” which apparently served as the inspiration for the name of the course. The course whitewashed the CCP’s history, including Mao’s disastrous rule.
The course’s reading packets include essays by Ken Hammond, who is a professor of East Asian and Global History at New Mexico State University. Hammond is a member of the Party for Liberation and Socialism and is also listed as an advisory group member for the Friends of Socialist China, which describes itself as a “platform based on supporting the People’s Republic of China and spreading understanding of Chinese socialism.” Hammond has praised the “leadership” of the CCP and Xi Jinping in state-controlled media.
In his essays for The People’s Forum’s course, Hammond portrays Taiwan as a rogue “island province” of mainland China, falsely claiming that it “remains under the control of the Nationalists to this day.” In fact, the nationalists are just one political party in Taiwan, which evolved into a liberal democracy while mainland China remains under one-party rule. Hammond also whitewashes the April 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, declaring “it was not a massacre of peaceful protesters by the army.” Human rights groups beg to differ, as the massacre has been amply documented, as has the imprisonment of tens of thousands of others. Indeed, the CCP continues to cover up the Tiananmen Square massacre, relying on a shifting official narrative and continuing to ban events dedicated to the innocent lives lost.
1804 Books
In 2021, The People’s Forum launched its own online bookstore, 1804 Books. It has since published works by authors known for their favorable views of the CCP.
One of them, “China’s Revolution and the Quest for a Socialist Future,” is authored by the aforementioned Ken Hammond. 1804 Books’s promotional page for the book describes China as “long the most prosperous and sophisticated country in the world,” which “was subjected to the military, economic, and political domination of Western imperialism.” China “has achieved great things in education, health care, and the provision of other social services” since the 1949 communist revolution, the promotional page reads, but “the process of socialist construction remains an unfinished and ongoing venture, and the future of the revolution is very much a work in progress.”
Another work published by 1804 Books is “China’s Great Road,” which is a collection of articles written by the author and economist John Ross. The webpage advertising the book claims that “Ross has cut through the anti-Communist and Sinophobic narrative of China perpetuated by Western media to give readers a clear view of what is possible for socialist countries around the world.” In 2016, Ross appeared in a video that the Chinese government aired in Times Square as part of a media campaign asserting its control over the South China Sea. Ross is senior fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies of the Renmin University of China and has also authored a series of articles for CGTN, which the U.S. State Department has designated as a Chinese state media outlet.
BreakThrough News
Founded in 2020 and based in New York City, BreakThrough News maintains a presence across multiple social media platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and YouTube. It has more than 1 million subscribers on YouTube alone. Much of its coverage is friendly to the CCP’s point of view, with a narrative framing that is intended to delegitimize criticisms of its one-party rule.
BreakThrough News has decried a congressional subpoena seeking information on its activities as a “witch-hunt” that infringes on its First Amendment rights.
In early 2022, New Lines Magazine reported that BreakThrough News was “pressing Uyghur genocide denial” through its correspondent, Rania Khalek. New Lines described Khalek as “an apologist for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad,” who was subsequently deposed from power in 2024, and reported that Khalek’s “previous media ventures, Redfish and Soapbox, were both exposed by journalists as cutouts of Russian state-funded media.”
Khalek remains BreakThrough News’s “chief correspondent.” She and the outlet have not only sought to downplay or whitewash the CCP’s oppression of Uyghurs, but have also pushed other CCP-friendly talking points.
In a September 2021 episode of her show, for instance, Khalek hosted Tings Chak of Tricontinental to discuss a “groundbreaking report” Chak had authored. (Chak’s X account indicates that she is based in Beijing.) “China is a poor country of 1.4 billion yet it eradicated extreme poverty while in the rest of the world poverty is on the rise,” a post promoting the episode reads. “What’s behind China’s success? Socialism!” Another promotion for the show claimed that “what China has accomplished is huge & full of lessons for socialists.”
That claim echoes the CCP’s propaganda, as Xi Jinping declared “complete victory” over extreme poverty in February 2021. Independent observers pointed out that even based on its own figures, the CCP had set a “low bar” for defining poverty and there were multiple problems with the claim. Nevertheless, BreakThrough News has woven Xi’s supposed success in ending poverty throughout its coverage, including by using it to argue that the U.S. government should spend more on alleviating domestic poverty instead of supporting Taiwan.
In an October 2022 video, Brian Becker decried what he called the “endless demonization of Xi Jinping,” claiming “every time you read an article or a headline in the western media about China…it’s always the authoritarian Xi Jinping, the authoritarian this, the authoritarian that.” Becker described Western media coverage as “non-stop demonization.” Along with his guest, Tricontinental’s Chak, Becker discussed the CCP’s supposed success in eradicating poverty. Becker claimed that China’s “form of governance,” including “bringing people out of that extreme poverty and at the same time building all this infrastructure,” is an “incredibly important success story.” Chak replied there was “no doubt about that.”
Another BreakThrough News journalist is Amanda Yee, who hosts the outlet’s “China Report” show on YouTube. Yee describes the show as an effort aimed at “helping you sort through all the propaganda with an independent view of the country that we’re taught to hate but know so little about.” In reality, “China Report” often promotes CCP-friendly narratives.
In a November 2025 episode of her show, Yee discussed “People’s Democracy in China.” A social media promotion for the show reads: “Western media calls China ‘authoritarian.’ But what if its political system actually has practices that are MORE democratic than the US’s?” Yee declared that “so much of the western framing around China is just fear-mongering over its political system.”
Other episodes of the “China Report” have sought to delegitimize Taiwanese independence, defend the CCP’s ethnic unity law (foreign policy analysts and human rights activists have criticized the law, finding that it has harmed ethnic minorities) and promote China’s “revolution and development model” as a paradigm for governments throughout Latin America. Elsewhere, Yee has defended the CCP’s conduct during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, claiming it is a “fabrication” that has been “exploited by the West for over 30 years as evidence of the ruthless, authoritarian nature of the CPC to justify imperialist aggression against China.”
BreakThrough News has produced other controversial content as well. For example, in January 2023, Khalek released a friendly interview with Sheikh Naim Qassem, the deputy secretary-general of Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. The interview was conducted in Beirut, Lebanon. Nearly five years earlier, in May 2018, the United States and several partner nations throughout the Middle East designated Qassem and other senior Hezbollah figures as terrorists.
Conclusion
It is beyond the scope of this report to determine whether the nonprofits described above, each of which has been connected to Neville Roy Singham, are working with the CCP. And the brief summary above is not intended to be exhaustive. There are additional examples of how each of these nonprofits has advanced narratives favorable to the CCP. These organizations also cover topics other than China, its relations with the world and the CCP’s governance.
Still, it is remarkable how often each of these nonprofits echo the CCP’s messaging.
Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.