A charity led by billionaire and Democratic mega-donor Bill Gates funneled millions of dollars into government departments run by the Chinese Communist Party as well as organizations that collaborate with the Chinese military, newly released tax forms show.
In 2023, the Gates Foundation directed roughly $11.7 million into various arms of China’s communist-controlled government, as well as $2 million to a corporation the Department of Defense determined works with the Chinese military and an additional $6.7 million to state-run universities that help prop up Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime. The multitude of six and seven-figure grants from the Gates Foundation to Chinese government entities builds on a multi-year trend of Microsoft billionaires supporting America’s chief geopolitical rival.
Most of the grants paid out by the Gates Foundation to Chinese entities in 2023 were for public health initiatives concerning research, global health awareness and sanitation, among other areas.
CRRC, a Chinese corporation manufacturing railway vehicles, was among the top recipients of Gates Foundation funds. It raked in $2 million from the charity in 2023, with an additional $2.1 million earmarked for it in 2024. The rail corporation is also an extension of the Chinese armed forces, according to the Department of Defense. CRRC appears on the Pentagon’s 1260H entity list, which covers entities that are “directly or indirectly owned, controlled or beneficially owned by” the Chinese military as well as others that are deeply involved in China’s military-industrial complex through research and manufacturing.
The Gates Foundation provided CRRC with a seven-figure grant to fund its work on “water, sanitation, and hygiene.” Chinese military companies like CRRC have used their deep pockets to pay lobbyists to influence policy in Washington, D.C., often spending millions to defeat legislation intended to bolster America’s defenses against China.
Gates has historically been fond of China with Xi calling the Microsoft co-founder an “old friend” in June 2023. He said in January 2023 that “China’s rise” is “a huge win for the world.” The billionaire privately said that he donated $50 million to support Vice President Kamala Harris’s bid for the presidency.
“The Gates Foundation’s generosity to CCP-aligned universities and businesses is in line with Gates’s personal belief that the rise of China is ‘a huge win for the world,’” Capital Research Center spokeswoman Sarah Lee told the Washington Examiner. “The problem is that China’s human rights abuses and military saber-rattling signals their rise as anything but great for the rest of the world.”
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China’s public universities and research institutions, many of which received funding from the Gates Foundation, work in tandem with the Chinese Communist Party to produce military research.
Tsinghua University, which received roughly $2.4 million from the Gates Foundation in 2023, has eight laboratories that produce research for the Chinese military, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s translations of institutional web pages. These labs work on technologies ranging from military artificial intelligence to air-to-air guided missiles and microsatellites. The university also offers a joint computer science program with the People Liberation Army’s Academy of Military Science, and the institution’s tech infrastructure was linked to a 2018 espionage campaign against the Alaskan government.
ASPI is a defense think tank that receives the majority of its funding from the Australian government.
Peking University, like Tsinghua, hosts a multitude of defense labs conducting nuclear and electronics research with military applications, according to ASPI. The institution also signed a cooperation agreement with the Chinese Navy in 2013 to help it with research, training, construction, and exerting cultural soft power, among other areas, according to an archived webpage detailing the agreement.
Peking University received $3.2 million from the Gates Foundation in 2023. Zhejiang, Sun Yat-Sen, Fundan, and Shanghai Jiao Tong universities, four Chinese universities collectively hosting nine military labs, took in over $1 million from the foundation.
“Gates’s funding of Chinese schools engaged in these efforts — Tsinghua University, linked to Chinese military research, and Sun Yat-Sen University, known to be involved in helping develop the Chinese government’s nuclear capabilities — is baffling and seems at odds with his foundation’s stated humanitarian goals of advancing education, alleviating poverty, and addressing environmental concerns,” Lee told the Washington Examiner.
While corporations that collaborate with the Chinese armed forces and public universities have close proximity to the Chinese Communist Party, the Gates Foundation also directly funded the Chinese government in 2023.
The Center for International Knowledge on Development, for instance, received $300,000 from the Gates Foundation for its “global health” program. CIKD is affiliated with China’s State Council, which, according to China’s National People’s Congress, is the “executive body of the supreme organ of state power” and is largely composed of Chinese Communist Party members.
The center has collaborated on China’s “Belt and Road” initiative, a global infrastructure project funded by the Chinese government that has faced criticism for allegedly saddling developing nations with debt that China can leverage for geopolitical influence.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is also overseen by the State Council, received about $2.3 million from the Gates Foundation in 2023. Hou Jianguo, a member of the Chinese Communist Party, serves as the president of CAS. In 2020, Jianguo wrote that CAS “will be guided by Xi Jinping’s thoughts on socialism with Chinese characteristics for [a] new era.”
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, where some believe the COVID-19 pandemic began, operates under CAS, and the academy’s Institute of Computing Technology was sanctioned by the Department of Commerce in 2022 for supporting the Chinese military and defense industry. The National Health Commission, which the Gates Foundation sent about $2.6 million to in 2023, has also faced scrutiny from American lawmakers for allegedly helping China to cover up the outbreak of COVID-19 early in the pandemic. It also opposed efforts in 2021 to investigate the origin of the virus.
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Other arms of the Chinese government that received support from the Gates Foundation in 2023 included the China Center for Food and Drug International Exchange, which operates under China’s National Medical Products Administration, the Chinese Development Research Foundation, which is affiliated with the State Council, the Chinese Academy of International Trade, which is under China’s Ministry of Commerce, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, and the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, a government think tank.
The Gates Foundation did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.