President Biden’s CIA pick pushed back on concerns about connections between the D.C. think tank he runs and the Chinese government, telling the Senate he takes the danger posed by Chinese Communist Party malign influence operations inside the United States seriously.
William Burns has served as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace since 2015, with the group receiving large amounts of China-linked funding and organizing a China trip for close to a dozen congressional staffers to meet with communist party operatives and leaders of Chinese front groups.
He previously served as the U.S. ambassador to Jordan and to Russia and led the Obama administration’s secretive “backchannel” during the lead-up to the Iran nuclear deal.
Sen. Marco Rubio raised Carnegie’s involvement with the China-United States Exchange Foundation, part of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front, which the Florida Republican said engaged in efforts “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition as part of their efforts to encourage foreign countries to adopt positions and narratives supportive of Beijing’s preferred policies.”
Carnegie received donations between $100,000 and $249,999 from the CUSEF. Rubio asked why Carnegie would “establish a relationship with and accept funding” from CUSEF.
“This is a relationship that I inherited when I became president of Carnegie, and that I ended not long after I became president precisely for the concerns that you just described,” Burns testified. “We were increasingly worried about the expansion of Chinese influence operations. Shortly after I ended that relationship, we began a program at the Carnegie endowment on countering foreign influence operations which was aimed at China and Russia and was supported in part from a grant from the of a grant from the Global Engagement Center from the State Department.”
Burns agreed that the Chinese government used groups like the CUSEF to build influence in the U.S., writing, “The CCP employs a whole-of-government approach to exert influence and uses complementary overt and covert means that draw on a wide array of carrots and sticks to try and influence political, economic, and cultural developments to benefit CCP interests.”C he USEF is registered as a foreign agent.
Rubio pressed Burns on a 2019 trip to China organized by Carnegie where 11 congressional staffers traveled to Beijing in 2019 to meet with Chinese leaders and academics, with the senator noting that “they met with a professor who works for the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee” and with “the president of another front group for the Chinese Communist Party.”
Li Xiaolin, president of the Chinese Peoples’ Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, spoke with congressional staffers, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in October 2020, the Chinese group “has sought to directly and malignly influence state and local leaders to promote the PRC’s global agenda.”
The Biden CIA pick defended the trip, saying it was organized with the Aspen Institute, included Republicans and Democrats, and was approved by the House Ethics Committee. The trip “in my view is an illustration of what Carnegie should do, which is to provide congressional staff members with an opportunity to engage directly with Chinese counterparts and to express their concerns about Chinese actions and malign behavior quite directly,” he said.
Burns welcomed Chinese businessman Zhang Yichen, CEO of CITIC Consulting, to join the think tank’s board of trustees in 2016. Zhang is linked to organizations with Chinese Communist Party ties, and his firm donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Carnegie, helping fund the Beijing-based Carnegie-Tsinghua Center, which partners with one of China’s top technological universities, Tsinghua University.
The center “features seven individuals that work at the university as its guiding scholars who have ties to the Communist Party,” Rubio noted. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute pointed to “military-civil fusion” at Tsinghua University and “defense research” tied to the Chinese military. The senator added the center partnered with the Center for China and Globalization, a think tank linked to China’s United Front, and asked what conditions or restrictions the Chinese government had imposed.
The Carnegie-Tsinghua partnership existed for more than a decade, and in his time leading Carnegie, he made sure his scholars were allowed to do “independent work,” Burns said.
“I’ve also made clear to my colleagues at Carnegie that the moment we were constrained in doing that work we would cease operations because our point is not simply to exist,” Burns said. “Carnegie’s point is not to exist in centers in different parts of the work, it is to do high-quality independent work. When that becomes impossible, or our scholars are self-censoring, then that is the moment at which it becomes no longer feasible to operate there.”
