The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has appointed a big-time China hawk to its Board of Directors
On November 4, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—a CIA offshoot that finances dissident media and political organizations in countries targeted by the U.S. for regime change—announced the appointment of John Moolenaar (R-MI), to its Board of Directors in an honorary role.
Moolenaar is chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a relic of the McCarthy era that has advanced a Sinophobic discourse and hardline anti-China foreign policy.
Peter Roskam, chairman of the NED’s Board of Directors, stated in response to Moolenaar’s appointment that Moolenaar “brings a steady hand and a clear moral compass to every issue he tackles. He recognizes the stakes in today’s global contest between democratic resilience and authoritarian coercion, and his insight will help guide NED’s efforts to support those on the front lines of freedom.”
Moolenaar said that “freedom, accountability, and inalienable rights are values that unite us as Americans and separate us from the failed communist ideology that rules over China. I look forward to joining NED’s Board and supporting the courageous individuals and organizations who are working with freedom-loving people in China and around the world.”
A supporter of Trump’s bombing operations[1] and trillion-dollar military budget, Moolenaar boasts on his website about adding anti-China measures to the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, and about his role in helping to block a Chinese company from building a $2.4 billion electric vehicle battery plant near Big Rapids, Michigan.
Moolenaar also voices support for the Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecution of two Chinese scientists at the University of Michigan (Yunqing Jian and Zunyong Liu) who were accused of bio-terrorism because they tried to bring in plant material for research they were undertaking that could be harmful to crops.
Moolenaar makes it seem like the DOJ foiled a Chinese plot to poison Michiganders’ agriculture and food supply, when the fungus at the center of the case, Fusarium graminearum, is a common plant pathogen widespread throughout the U.S, and Ms. Jian stated that she had been simply trying to speed up her research into crop production.
Journalist Stephen St. Clair characterized the case—in which the prosecution admitted it could not prove that Ms. Jian had any ill-intent—as a “frame-up” and “political fabrication built on xenophobia and war propaganda, not scientific reality.”[2]
Peddlers of Disinformation
The House Select Committee on the CCP was established in December 2022 with the purpose of drawing attention to the “China threat” and to help mobilize the public to “win the new Cold War,” in the words of Kevin McCarthy, the then-House Speaker who launched the committee.
Mike Gallagher (R-WI), the committee’s first chairman who has since taken a job at the defense-intelligence contractor Palantir, stated: “The greatest threat to the United States is the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP continues to commit genocide, obscure the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, steal hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American intellectual property, and threaten Taiwan. The Select Committee on China will push back in bipartisan fashion before it’s too late.”
Gallagher’s comments were disingenuous on numerous levels, including in his claim that the CCP “continues to commit genocide”—allegedly against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province.
This claim was disproven by witnesses at a special Uyghur tribunal chaired by British barrister Geoffrey Nice who determined that Chinese authorities had refrained from genocidal mass killings in response to Uyghur rioting and terrorism carried out by separatists in Xinjiang where China’s most important oil and gas pipelines pass through.[3]
Gallagher’s claim about the coronavirus is misleading because it was the U.S. government that censored investigations into CIA-supported gain-of-function research in U.S-run biolabs that appear to have led to the manufacture of the virus.[4]
With respect to Taiwan, Gallagher’s statement obscures a) China’s historical control over Taiwan; b) the circumstances in which the U.S. engendered its separation from the Chinese mainland after its proxy, Chiang Kai-shek, was defeated in China’s civil war in 1949; c) how Taiwan was used as a base for CIA covert operations designed to overthrow the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its allies during the Cold War and beyond; and d) how the U.S. has turned Taiwan into a heavily “armed porcupine” with the intent of menacing the PRC.
Additionally, Gallagher leaves out that the U.S. has threatened China directly by a) flying spy planes around Taiwan; b) placing its naval ships directly in Chinese territorial waters and encircling China with military bases; c) revitalizing old World War II runways on Pacific islands that had long grown over with jungle cover; and d) placing nuclear-powered attack submarines in Australia.
In addition, the U.S. has a) initiated an expansive covert-influence operation in China that dwarfs what the Chinese are accused of doing in the U.S.; b) beefed up the U.S. military presence in the Philippines and South Korea; and c) encouraged a military build-up in Japan while supporting extreme right-wing leaders there who worship at a shrine of war criminals who ordered Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s.
Fear-Mongering Committee
The fear mongering of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party was apparent in hearings held on January 30, 2024, which featured alarmist statements about China from two former CIA directors, Mike Pompeo and Leon Panetta, and a video clip featuring House Speaker Mike Johnson warning about China buying up U.S. farmland, shops on U.S. main streets and supposedly establishing outposts around the U.S.
In his testimony, Pompeo invoked Bush-Cheney-era language in suggesting that China was part of a new “axis of evil” with Russia, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, while Panetta urged support for a $106 billion military aid package to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.[5]
Another House Select Committee hearing blamed China for the fentanyl crisis in the U.S.
Minority party chair Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL)—whose anti-China rhetoric is right on par with Gallagher and Moolenaar—claimed that 97% of illegal fentanyl entering the U.S. came from the PRC.
This figure derived from the claim that China was exporting precursor chemicals used in the manufacture of fentanyl and that Chinese mafia elements were hiding fentanyl in the flow of legitimate commerce under the nose of the CCP—as part of what Gallagher considers a plot to wreak havoc in the U.S.
The committee’s charges are reminiscent of the original Cold War when the CCP and Cuba’s Castro regime were accused of flooding the U.S. with drugs—though in reality it was corrupt capitalist regimes and CIA assets that were the primary suppliers of drugs into the U.S.[6]
The Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a statement suggesting that the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and Trump administration were “spreading all kinds of false information on the fentanyl issue, smearing and scapegoating China” as a pretext for escalating draconian tariffs on China.
These statements appear to be accurate, as China has among the strictest drug prohibition laws in the world; most of the fentanyl entering the U.S. comes from Mexican drug cartels; and fentanyl can be easily and cheaply produced by local chemists and gangs.[7]
Additionally, independent investigations make clear that the House Select Committee on the CCP exaggerated the ravaging effects of fentanyl by drawing on inflated overdose figures.[8]
Sessi Kuwabara Blanchard summed things up well in an article in Filter magazine that was aptly entitled “‘Yellow Peril’—How Blaming China for Fentanyl Continues a Racist Legacy.”
In the 1870s, future president James A. Garfield warned that the Chinese could “swarm into Russia as irresistibly as the locusts of Egypt, and upon the Pacific coast of this continent as numerous and destructive as grasshoppers. Once started, where would they stop?”[9]
This kind of “yellow peril” rhetoric was not far removed from that presented in hearings Moolenaar chaired in May 2025 on “Preventing CCP Aggression in Taiwan,” which accused China of engaging in the largest peace-time military build-up since World War II at a time when the U.S. military budget had eclipsed $1 trillion.
In his remarks introducing a hawkish line-up of speakers that included “Asia Pivot” architect Kurt Campbell and General Charles Flynn, Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, Moolenaar framed China as an aggressor nation and called for a large-scale military build-up to prevent China’s planned invasion of Taiwan in 2027.
Moolenaar has also raised alarm at what he calls growing Chinese aggression in Central America and the supposed failure there of China’s Belt and Road initiative, which is in reality aiding in the development of high-tech infrastructure and bolstering local economies, which are becoming less dependent on the U.S.
Recycling McCarthy-Era Fantasies
The McCarthy-era and John Birch Society[10] lineage of Moolenaar and his select committee is evident in its vapid warning about the CCP allegedly infiltrating American campuses with the complicity of supposedly naïve university presidents.
On November 6, 2025, Moolenaar wrote a letter to Columbia University President Claire Shipman, demanding that she cut ties with a foundation that sponsors student cultural exchanges to China.[11]
Moolenaar claimed that the foundation operated as an intelligence front for a CCP malign-influence campaign involving the exploitation of American academic institutions. The supposed hidden aim of the exchanges is to sway student attitudes about and influence U.S policy toward China, and to help China gain access to U.S. military technology secrets.
Moolenaar’s letter does not actually explain how the foundation planned to achieve its hidden aims and, characteristically, he does not provide any evidence to support his charges.
Sixteen months earlier, Moolenaar wrote a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber, accusing him of negligence in an incident where a Master’s student at Harvard, Zou Hongji, helped police remove some Chinese students who tried to disrupt a speech that Chinese Ambassador Xie Feng gave at the Harvard Kennedy School.[12]
Moolenaar claimed that Zou—who had helped organize Xie’s visit to Harvard and was instructed to remove any disrupters to the event—was part of a Chinese student association that had ties to the CCP and that the incident raised concerns about “transnational repression by the Chinese government” and infiltration of university campuses by Chinese government agents, which does not appear to be the case.
Raising More “Yellow Peril”
Moolenaar’s appointment to the NED Board in early November coincided with an anti-PRC speech that NED President Damon Wilson gave on Capitol Hill before the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s 2025 China Forum, which convened scholars, international affairs experts, and policy makers to discuss evolving threats from the PRC.
Wilson’s speech hit the right tone for the event in paying tribute to Uyghur organizations documenting alleged human rights abuses by the Chinese government and Chinese dissidents who, ironically, spoke against lockdown policies that were also adopted by the U.S. government and which the NED’s parent agency—the CIA—helped develop.[13]
In September 2023, the NED hosted an event featuring an Axios reporter, Bethany Allen, who claimed to have exposed a major Chinese covert-influence operation in the U.S. in her book Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World.[14]
Reviewing Allen’s book for CovertAction Magazine, I wrote that Beijing Rules was a throwback to “yellow-peril” tracts of the early 20th century, which spread racist caricatures and paranoia about China along with a naïve view about the supposed innocence of the U.S. and how it is being victimized by China.[15]
The same thing can be said about Damon Wilson’s speech, Moolenaar and his House committee, and about the NED’s 2025 Democracy Awards honoring dissident Chinese media outlets, Uyghur and Tibetan activists and the daughter of a pastor who was allegedly detained for operating an underground church.
While the Chinese state displays real authoritarian features, the NED plays these up for political reasons as the soft-power/propaganda arm of the U.S. empire.
Around the time that the Democracy awards were being held, U.S. President Donald Trump welcomed to the White House two of the world’s most oppressive leaders—Syrian President Ahmed Al Shaara, a former Al Qaeda leader previously on the State Department’s terrorist watchlist who has overseen ethnic cleansing operations targeting Shia Alawites, and the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, who Trump amazingly suggested had an admirable human rights record despite vast evidence to the contrary.
The NED raised no outcry about authoritarian practices in these nation-states nor others that ally with U.S. geopolitical objectives.
It has also not to date ever honored dissidents in these countries—it only does so with China and other countries’ the U.S. is intent on weakening, destabilizing and potentially going to war with.
NED’s True Purpose
In its news brief introducing Moolenaar’s appointment to the NED’s Board, the NED claimed that the House Select Committee on the CCP “has played a leading role in examining the CCP’s authoritarian reach and its efforts to reshape global norms in ways that undermine democratic governance. Under his leadership, the committee has investigated how the CCP leverages technology standards, supply chains, and coercive economic and political tactics to expand its influence and suppress fundamental freedoms. This work aligns with NED’s strategic priorities, which focus on supporting local partners who [allegedly] are countering censorship and economic authoritarianism, defending religious freedom, and building resilience to authoritarian pressure through innovation, civic engagement, and institutional reforms.”
This language is designed to obfuscate the fact that China—whatever its internal problems—has begun to outpace the U.S. economically and is drawing countries around the world into its orbit through its successful infrastructural development programs and One-Belt-One Road initiative. China as such is threatening the unipolar world order led by the U.S. and is in turn being demonized by U.S. government authorities in an attempt to mobilize public opinion against it.
The NED’s function is to further the demonization of China at a time of heightened U.S. aggression directed toward it while advancing long-standing CIA destabilization efforts by encouraging internal uprisings and dissent.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said that the NED invests heavily in anti-China programs every year to incite “Xinjiang independence,” “Hong Kong independence,” and “Tibet independence” activities by various means, adding that the NED “colludes with ‘Taiwan independence’ forces and attempts to incite division and disrupt stability across the Taiwan Strait, which has been met with indignation and opposition from the Chinese people on both sides of the Strait.”
Moolenaar’s appointment to the NED’s Board makes sense in light of what Zhao describes, while also showing the reactionary political lineage of that organization.
Moolenaar supported Donald Trump’s illegal bombing of Iran, for example. ↑
Ephrat Livni, “Agriculture Smuggling Arrest Highlights Dispute Over Chinese Students,” The New York Times, November 22, 2025, A5. Ms. Jian’s lawyer spoke of political hysteria and prejudice against Chinese students that the case epitomized. St. Clair emphasized that the smuggling charge is a distortion, criminalizing a routine practice of international scientific collaboration. He also noted that “the ‘evidence’ that Jian is a CCP operative is equally fraudulent, based on a standard “annual self-assessment form” found on her laptop. This is a bureaucratic document required of tens of thousands of Chinese academics who receive state scholarships for study abroad. St. Clair wrote that “The frame-up of Jian is not an isolated incident but follows a well-established playbook for the political persecution of scientists of Chinese descent. The immediate precursor was the case of Chengxuan Han, a 28-year-old Ph.D. candidate arrested just days after Jian for transporting common, non-hazardous biological materials for her research.” The only organization at the University of Michigan that has waged a principled political struggle in defense of Yunqing Jian and Chengxuan Han from the outset is the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), the youth and student movement of the Socialist Equality Party. ↑
See A. B. Abrams, Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2023), ch. 10; F. William Engdahl, Target China: How Washington and Wall Street Plan to Cage the Asian Dragon (Los Angeles: Progressive Press, 2014), 53. Engdahl shows a pattern of one-sided U.S. economic warfare on China and not vice versa. ↑
See Dr. Andrew G. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan: How I Uncovered the Biggest Lie in History (New York: Skyhorse Press, 2022). ↑
Shontel Brown, a Democratic Party member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party from Ohio expressed agreement with Panetta, calling on the provision of yet more resources to arm Taiwan and Ukraine among other countries. ↑
See Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, rev ed. (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003). ↑
A member of China’s National Narcotics Control Commission said that “the United States has no proof that most fentanyl in the country comes from China. It’s highly irresponsible to draw such a conclusion based on some individual cases.” ↑
For the larger pattern of congressional committees inflating public fears over drugs and fueling support for the failed War on Drugs policy, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). An additional important point is that the fixation with alleged Chinese subversion of the U.S. takes attention away from how neoliberal policies championed by Democrats and Republicans have resulted in skyrocketing social inequality patterns and trapped many youth in low-wage job cycles and despair resulting in a growth of drug use. ↑
Quoted in Stephen G. Yanoff, The Second Mourning: The Untold Story Of America’s Most Bizarre Political Murder (Bloomington, Indiana: Authorhouse, 2014), 216. Garfield’s warnings came at a time when China was run by a decaying dynasty, the Qing, that was forced to grant humiliating concessions to Great Britain after China’s defeat in the two Opium Wars. ↑
The John Birch Society was an extremist anti-communist organization funded by Fred Koch and other millionaires, including Donald Trump’s father Fred. It warned of communist infiltration of public schools and all societal institutions in the U.S. It went so far as to accuse Dwight Eisenhower of being a communist. ↑
Livni, “Agriculture Smuggling Arrest Highlights Dispute Over Chinese Students.” Livni reports that Moolenaar’s committee has been pressuring schools to sever ties with Chinese institutions. Moolenaar has also introduced a bill in Congress to deny government funding to scientists who work with anyone affiliated with a foreign entity. Even Donald Trump has pulled back from endorsing many of the extremist anti-China measures supported by Moolenaar such as denying Chinese students visa, which Trump said would “put half of American colleges out of business.” ↑
The protesters said they were against China’s policies toward Tibet, Hong Kong, East Turkmenistan, and Taiwan. The Harvard police had escorted the protesters out of the venue because they were disrupting Xie Feng’s speech and Harvard student Cosette Wu faced disciplinary probation for her action. Moolenaar expressed opposition to Harvard’s punishing Cosette Wu and to the fact that Zou Hongji was not reprimanded by Harvard and that Harvard administrators wrote him a letter of apology. ↑
On the latter, see Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (New York: Skyhorse, 2021), which discusses how the CIA developed the blueprint for the lockdown policy years before the COVID pandemic and carried out simulations beforehand. ↑
See Bethany Allen, Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World (New York: Harper, 2023). ↑
The major covert-influence operation that Allen claims to have uncovered was carried out by a single person, Christine Fang, a kind of “Oriental seductress” as Allen depicts her, who was said to have used the cover of a Sister City program and sex to woo mayors and political figures like Eric Swalwell (D-CA), though it is unclear what classified information, if any, she obtained from them. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
