Major CCP-linked NGO receives tens of millions each year in federal grants
One of the largest environmentalist charities receiving public funding in the United States maintains a branch in China in which multiple former members of the Chinese government hold senior leadership positions.
The Nature Conservancy, a northern Virginia-based nonprofit organization that controls roughly $10 billion in assets, has maintained a presence in China since the Chinese government first invited it to aid conservation efforts nearly 30 years ago. Since then, the organization’s footprint in China has grown to several offices in major cities and over 60 staffers.
Of these staffers, many at the very top, including the China program’s director and multiple executives, are alumni of the Chinese government. The chairman of the China program’s board currently works with the CCP as a consultant aiding its highest administrative body in pushing Chinese influence abroad while other board members maintain similarly strong ties to the Chinese state. While allowing its China program to be led by those close to the CCP, the Nature Conservancy has received tens of millions of dollars’ worth of federal grant funding.
Ying Wu, the board chairman, simultaneously serves as a consultant for the State Council’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Office. The State Council is the “executive body of the supreme organ of state power” in China, according to the National People’s Congress, the country’s CCP-controlled legislative body.
A Canadian court ruled in 2022 that the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office conducts espionage and spies on Chinese people living abroad. The office is part of the United Front Work Department, an entity that works to influence people and organizations outside of China for the benefit of the CCP.
Tencent CEO Ma Huateng, who sits alongside Ying on the board, served two terms as part of China’s National People’s Congress. WeChat, a Tencent-owned messaging service popular in China, engages in censorship and surveillance on behalf of the CCP, according to Human Rights Watch. The company has provided the Chinese government with materials that have led to the arrests of religious minorities and political dissidents. Even those using WeChat outside of China are subject to its surveillance. Pharmaceutical CEO Baoguo Zhu, also a board member, previously served in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a government entity describing itself as “a major achievement of the Communist Party of China” that works to integrate “Marxist-Leninist theories on the united front, political parties, and democratic politics with the unique realities and fine traditional culture of China.”
“Almost no one would argue that conservation and care for the environment is a bad thing,” Capital Research Center spokeswoman Sarah Lee told the Washington Examiner. “But given the Nature Conservancy’s close connections with a newly ‘green’ Chinese economy and its ability to sell donated land for ‘environmental’ use to private landowners at the same time stories emerge of CCP-affiliated businessmen and women purchasing land in the U.S. for wind turbine production and the like, it would be wise to keep a close eye on exactly how these partnerships are developing, and for what reasons.”
China’s focus on green energy development has a strategic component, according to some policy analysts. Those at the Heritage Foundation argue it is part of a broader effort to “transform its energy resource vulnerabilities into a net advantage” as China lacks significant fossil fuel reserves but dominates in solar panel, wind turbine, and electric vehicle manufacturing.
