One of the co-founders of the official Black Lives Matter group, Alicia Garza, is reportedly partnering up with a Chinese organization that has deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party — and that group now appears to be funding one of Garza’s ventures, according to an investigation by the Daily Signal.
Garza is one of several co-founders of the official “Black Lives Matter” group, and in 2018, she launched a project called “Black Futures Lab,” which aims, its website says, to help activists in the black community maintain interest in civic participation and civic activism year-round. The group “gathers information about the ways that policy affects Black communities and one that uses that information creatively to educate and challenge policymakers.” It also lobbies on behalf of BLM’s interests at the local level.
The Daily Signal’s Mike Gonzalez, though, discovered that donations to the Black Futures Lab don’t seem to go directly to the foundation itself but rather to a group called the “Chinese Progressive Association” — a group that has deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
“According to an authoritative 2009 Stanford University paper tracing its early days to the present, and which can be found on Marxist.org, ‘The CPA began as a Leftist, pro-People’s Republic of China organization, promoting awareness of mainland China’s revolutionary thought and workers’ rights, and dedicated to self-determination, community control, and “serving the people,”‘” Gonzales reports.
“To this day, the CPA continues to be a partner of the PRC in the United States. Three years ago, the Boston chapter teamed up with China’s Consulate General in New York to offer Chinese nationals the opportunity to renew their passports, getting praise from China’s official mouthpiece, China Daily,” he continues. It also helped raise the Chinese flag over Boston City Hall to honor the anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s takeover of China.
“It is clear, then, that CPA works with China’s communist government, pushes its agenda here in the United States, and is regularly praised by China’s state-owned mouthpieces,” Gonzalez says. “It is clear, too, from, this perspective, why the CPA would sponsor a new enterprise by Garza: They espouse the same desire for world communism.”
As The Federalist notes, Garza’s Black Lives Matter organization is unabashedly Marxist, so there are certainly shared goals between BLM and the CCP: “The BLM organization sponsors and proposes Marxist public policy such as socialized ownership of resources, banks, and businesses, a highly unequal income tax, putting everyone on welfare through a ‘minimum income,’ and government jobs. In 2015, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors said she and her fellow organizers are ‘trained Marxists.’”
Garza herself agrees. She told a gathering of progressive activists in 2015 that “It’s not possible for a world to emerge where black lives matter if it’s under capitalism, and it’s not possible to abolish capitalism without a struggle against national oppression.”
China has also spoken out in support of American anti-racism protests, though largely as a way of undermining the American position on China’s crackdown of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and, Foreign Policy notes, to deflect attention from concerns over its decision to impose Chinese law on Hong Kong residents and evidence that it may be trying to systematically eliminate Chinese ethnic Muslims.
Gonzalez’s discovery, at least, does seem to indicate that there is a more formal relationship between Chinese activists and the American anti-racism movement.