Biden's Asia Policy Czar Helped Found Group 'Heavily Influenced by the CCP'

Joe Biden's incoming Asia policy czar was a top leader at a nonprofit group that was bankrolled by the head of a Chinese propaganda front group and partnered with a Chinese foreign mission.

Kurt Campbell, a former Obama State Department official and businessman, was until August 2020 listed as board vice chairman of the U.S.-China Strong Foundation, ostensibly a nonprofit group that promotes student language exchanges with Beijing but whose leaders included prominent members of the Chinese government's overseas propaganda fronts, according to State Department and Department of Justice records.

Campbell is slated to serve as the chief coordinator for President Joe Biden's Asia policy on the National Security Council, but his leadership role with the foundation is raising concerns with China hawks in Washington.

"The indicators suggest that the U.S.-China Strong Foundation could be a front group, or so heavily influenced by the CCP as to be tantamount to a front group," said Anders Corr, an intelligence analyst and publisher of the Journal of Political Risk.

The U.S.-China Strong Foundation was founded in 2013 and was previously known as the "100,000 Strong Foundation." The group was a privately funded spinoff of an Obama administration joint initiative with the Chinese government in 2010 to encourage 100,000 American students to travel to China to learn Mandarin through foreign-language exchanges.

Campbell left his government post just a couple of weeks later and immediately helped launch the U.S.-China Strong Foundation as an independent nonprofit with more than $1 million in seed funding from Florence Fang and the Ford Foundation, according to a Politico column he wrote at the time.

The foundation has partnered with the Confucius Institute U.S. Center, an umbrella group of Chinese-language educational centers partially funded by the Chinese government.
 

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/bidens-asia-policy-czar-helped-found-group-heavily-influenced-by-the-ccp/