Shanghai’s Million Dollar Man
The House Ways and Means Committee has spent a year mapping how Beijing-aligned money moves through American tax-exempt nonprofits. Three letters sent earlier May tightened the scrutiny.
On May 4, Chairman Jason Smith of the House Ways and Means Committee sent three letters to the lawyers representing The People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Each set a May 18 deadline demanding communications with Neville Roy Singham, contracts with fiscally sponsored projects involving foreign nationals, lists of foreign donors above $5,000, and grant recipients located outside the United States.
The Committee is no longer asking whether American tax-exempt nonprofits have been wired into a Chinese Communist Party-aligned influence operation. It is asking how deep the wiring goes.
The Network in Plain Sight
Singham is the operational center. He sold ThoughtWorks to Apax Partners for roughly $785 million in 2017, moved to Shanghai, and reinvested the proceeds in what The New York Times in August 2023 called a “global web of Chinese propaganda.” From an 18th-floor office in Shanghai’s Times Square, he shares space and staff with Maku Group, a Chinese consultancy whose mission, in its own words, is to “tell China’s story well” abroad, a phrase taken directly from the CCP’s foreign-propaganda lexicon.
The financial scaffolding is American. According to public filings cited in Smith’s letters, more than $20 million flowed from Singham and his wife, CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans, to The People’s Forum between 2017 and 2022, channeled through shell companies and donor-advised funds. BreakThrough News received more than $1 million from the Justice and Education Fund, plus $540,000 routed anonymously through the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund. Tricontinental, whose International Advisory Board Singham chairs, received $700,000 from a Singham-connected 501(c)(4) in 2019 alone, plus more than $12.5 million from a donor-advised fund Singham helped underwrite.
In November 2025, Singham personally introduced a 174-page report at a Shanghai forum co-hosted by Tricontinental and East China Normal University, a school the House Select Committee on the CCP described as “under the thumb of the CCP.” The report’s thesis: the United States and its allies did not save the world from fascism. The Soviet Union and the Chinese people did. Writing for the pro-Beijing outlet Guancha under the Chinese pen name “Luo Yi,” Singham called the Western account of WWII victory “a colossal lie.” The forum closed, according to its own program, with attendees singing The Internationale.
The Jurisdictional Question
The lawyers for the three organizations, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund and Andrew D. Herman, raise the predictable objections: the Committee is adjudicating rather than legislating, has no jurisdiction over the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and is chilling protected speech.
However, the Supreme Court held in McGrain v. Daugherty (1927) that the power of inquiry is an essential auxiliary to the legislative function, and reaffirmed the principle in Trump v. Mazars (2020). Rule X of the House rules gives the Committee jurisdiction over tax-exempt organizations. The First Amendment does not shield foreign-aligned funding arrangements from disclosure, and the press clause does not convert a 501(c)(3) into a sovereign entity.
The Singham Apparatus
By Fox News’ count, Singham has poured roughly $278 million through a Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund donor-advised account and a set of shell companies into six core American nonprofits: BreakThrough Media, CodePink, the Justice and Education Fund, The People’s Forum, the People’s Support Foundation, and Tricontinental. The Justice and Education Fund, where Jodie Evans is listed as president on filings, functions as the principal switchboard. It disperses money to The People’s Forum, the ANSWER Coalition, BreakThrough News, Tricontinental, and an array of overseas affiliates. Those include Brazil’s Brasil de Fato, which The New York Times documented as interspersing land-rights coverage with praise for Xi Jinping, and India’s NewsClick, which Indian authorities raided in 2023 on suspicion of receiving illegal Chinese funding.
Since October 7, 2023, that infrastructure has run hot. The People’s Forum, the ANSWER Coalition, and the International Peoples’ Assembly have served as the primary conveners of the Shut It Down for Palestine coalition. They organized “March for the Martyrs” in December 2023. They praised Leila Khaled, a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine militant and plane hijacker, as an icon of “resistance.” They co-organized the May 2024 Nakba Day march that shut down the Manhattan Bridge. The same network surfaced in Minneapolis at the ICE protests, in New York at the Mahmoud Khalil rallies, and in U.S. cities mobilizing to defend Nicolás Maduro within hours of his January 2026 capture by U.S. forces.
The footprint runs beyond the protest line. Code Pink, co-founded by Evans, has recruited Americans for pro-CCP “Red China” tourism trips run by China Academy, a Shanghai-linked content platform. BreakThrough News co-produced The Encampments, the documentary on the Columbia University encampments executive-produced by Macklemore and featuring Mahmoud Khalil. Tricontinental publishes the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng, a Chinese journal that, in Smith’s words to Vijay Prashad in February, “operates under the supervisory control” of an association that “appears to function as a state proxy” for the National Ethnic Affairs Commission of the People’s Republic of China.
What all of this has in common is the man whose money built it. Singham was a strategic technical consultant for Huawei between 2001 and 2008, before the Federal Communications Commission designated the company a national security threat in 2020. He runs Shanghai Luoweixing, whose Communist Party branch secretary, Zhou Yihua, is a Maku Group co-founder. His Manhattan-funded nonprofits and his Shanghai consultancies share staff, addresses, and floors. Three Singham-linked U.S. nonprofits have sent roughly $9 million in seven payments to Maku.
Singham was photographed in 2023 at a Chinese Communist Party forum in Shanghai jotting notes in a notebook adorned with a red hammer and sickle. The People’s Forum, in a December 2021 post the Committee now cites in its letters, called him “a Marxist comrade” and acknowledged that he had sold his company and donated most of his wealth to nonprofits focused on political education, culture, and internationalism. Members of his network refer to him as “Comrade.”
This is the apparatus that the May 4 letters target. The reform question follows. Either existing tax-exempt standards account for this kind of foreign-aligned funding arrangement, in which case the Internal Revenue Service has a great deal of explaining to do, or they do not, in which case Congress will write standards that do. Smith’s letter to Treasury and the IRS, sent after the Committee’s February 2026 hearing on foreign influence over American nonprofits, signaled the latter.
The Court was clear in McGrain. The power of inquiry is an essential auxiliary to the legislative function. What that function produces in this case will determine whether the tax code remains an instrument of American self-government, or one more attack surface for those who have spent the better part of a decade quietly working to bring it down.
The deadline is May 18. The lawyers will object again. They will lose again. The records will come, or the subpoenas will.
