William Burns, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), has been nominated by President Joe Biden to be director of the CIA, and his nomination hearing is expected to take place later this month.
But U.S. online media recently reported that CEIP had close ties with China during Burns’ tenure, once inviting a Chinese political party to join CEIP’s board of directors, and that CEIP had received donations totaling as much as $2 million (about HK$15.6 million) from the political party and a pro-China Hong Kong foundation.
U.S. online media “Daily Caller” reported on Monday (8) that Burns served as U.S. deputy secretary of state between 2011 and 2014, before moving to the chairmanship of CEIP in March 2015, with an annual salary of more than $540,000 (more than HK$4.21 million) last year. The report said that after Burns took office, CEIP invited CITIC Capital Chairman and CEO Zhang Yichen to join the board, and CEIP’s financial report showed that Zhang Yichen, who is also a member of China’s National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, made donations to CEIP in the range of $500,000 to about $1 million in 2017-2018, and again in 2020, in the range of $250,000 to about $550,000. His contribution in 2020 will range from $250,000 to approximately $550,000, while Yi-Chen Zhang’s contribution will be used to operate the Tsinghua-Carnegie Center for Global Policy, which was established in 2010 in Beijing by CEIP in cooperation with Tsinghua University. Zhang Yichen is also the vice chairman of the China and Globalization Think Tank, which has been accused of having close ties with the Chinese Communist Party.
CEIP’s financial report also shows that CEIP received a donation from the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) in Hong Kong in 2015, ranging from $100,000 to about $250,000, and another donation of the same amount from CUSEF in the 2016-2017 year. According to the report, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission named CUSEF in 2018 as having clear intentions to influence U.S. and other countries’ policies toward China. The Jamestown Foundation, a U.S. think tank, also published a report last September saying that CUSEF is the main unification tool of the Chinese Communist Party in the United States.
The report also noted that Burns, in his capacity as president of CEIP, wrote a letter in 2019 inviting U.S. congressional staffers to Beijing to meet with a number of Chinese academics, journalists, business leaders and government officials, with the goal of establishing a “cross-party dialogue on U.S.-China relations”; 11 people eventually made the trip in November of the same year, and they Among those who met in Beijing was Liang Yabin, an associate professor at the Institute of International Strategic Studies of the Central Party School, who was scheduled to have lunch with members of the Chinese Communist Party at the end of the trip.
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