The far-right organization Proud Boys received a wave of donations from people with Chinese surnames just before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, leaked donor information showed.
Nearly 1,000 people with Chinese surnames gave the group donations amounting to $86,000, according to hacked GiveSendGo data.
The locations of the donors stemmed from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and members of the Chinese community in the United States, reported USA Today, which obtained the data from the whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets.
The Proud Boys is a fringe group that often spars with left-wing antifa. One confrontation in Washington, D.C., resulted in three dozen arrests and saw four people stabbed throughout the night in December.
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The group claims to stand for U.S. democracy and is against communism, as indicated by some members who were present at an anti-communist event in Texas in 2019. In March, federal prosecutors revealed conspiracy charges against several leaders in the group related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
The donations from individuals with Chinese surnames made up roughly 80% of the $106,107 raised for members of the group who suffered severe injuries from the stabbing incident.
Rebecca Kwan, from China, sent the group $500 on Christmas.
“You have to understand how we feel — we came from communist China and we managed to come here and we appreciate it here so much,” Kwan told USA Today.
She added, “The Proud Boys are for Trump and they are fighting antifa, and can you see anything good that antifa did except destroy department stores and small businesses?”
Donald Wang, a donor from Queens, New York, said he gave the Proud Boys $50 and defended the group as “innocent people,” adding, “A lot of people in my community support them.”
President Joe Biden received 61% of the Asian American vote, compared to former President Donald Trump, who received 34%, according to exit poll data from the New York Times.
Kaiser Kuo, host and co-founder of the Sinica Podcast, which discusses current affairs in China, said there is a conservative faction of the Chinese American community that embraces attitudes and beliefs common among people associated with far-right ideologies.
The president of the Association for Asian American Studies, Jennifer Ho, said the Proud Boys’ rhetoric of traditional gender roles and “Western chauvinism” has fans in some Chinese American households, or homes of “any ethnic background.”
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“Because what they share is a fundamental belief in their maleness — a fundamental belief that U.S. society has gone off the rails,” Ho said.
