Congressional Probe Alleges Beijing Weaponizing the United Nations Through Corruption, Espionage, and Influence Operations

 

NEW YORK – The United Nations, the institution the world built after two catastrophic wars to keep the peace, has become a contested battleground — and according to a sweeping congressional investigation, Beijing is winning it, through extreme tactics that have included embedding clandestine entities tied to espionage and criminality into key positions across the organization.

A report released by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party describes what investigators say is a systematic campaign by the People’s Republic of China to exploit the United Nations and its affiliated bodies from within: flooding agencies with Chinese nationals, weaponizing financial contributions to stifle human rights scrutiny, deploying military units under the blue flag of peacekeeping to protect resource interests along Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road corridors, and saturating New York-based multilateral institutions with dozens of Chinese Communist Party-controlled front organizations posing as independent civil society voices.

“China is not simply participating in or driving initiatives at the United Nations,” the committee concluded. “It is exploiting that participation to shape the United Nations to serve the ends of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Perhaps the most striking instance of alleged abuse involves Fang Liu, former Secretary-General of the International Civil Aviation Organization, which is headquartered in Montreal.

In 2016, Liu allegedly delayed an investigation into a cyberattack linked to Emissary Panda, a China-affiliated hacking group, after members of the agency’s own information technology team were found to have concealed the attack’s source and impact on the organization.

Neither Liu nor the team faced consequences. Liu is a documented member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a high-level body within the Party’s United Front apparatus.

The criminality the committee alleges extends further into that case.

Kuang Chi “James” Wan, who led the agency’s information technology team at the time of the cyberattack, was later fired and then arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2023. A federal indictment charged that Wan and an individual described as “a special advisor to Chinese President Xi Jinping” led a scheme to sell $1.54 billion worth of Tengden TB-001 combat drones and missiles to Libyan militants between 2019 and 2023 — a period during which Wan was still employed by the Canada-based aviation agency.

The committee’s report flags a second United Nations-linked entity as a case study in how Beijing uses consultative status as a vehicle for influence operations — and, in this instance, international criminal conduct.

The China Energy Fund Committee held Special Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council beginning in 2011.

Experts cited in the report described the organization as a “political warfare platform affiliated with the General Political Department and the CCP propaganda and ideology system.” Its chairman was Ye Jianming, the head of CEFC China Energy, a Shanghai-based conglomerate that federal investigators and analysts have described as so closely aligned with the Chinese government that the two were often difficult to distinguish.

The CEFC network has also been linked to multiple international corruption cases.

“In 2019, CEFC Deputy Chairman He Zhiping was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison for his role in a multi-year, multi-million-dollar scheme to bribe senior officials in Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC China Energy Company Limited,” the congressional investigation states.

The head of the China Energy Fund Committee’s nonprofit arm, Patrick Ho — also a documented member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference — was convicted in federal court in the Southern District of New York in December 2018 on seven counts of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and money laundering.

Ho was sentenced to three years in prison for orchestrating a scheme to bribe the president of Chad with $2 million in cash concealed in gift boxes, and to pay a $500,000 bribe through the New York banking system to Uganda’s minister of foreign affairs, who had recently completed his term as president of the United Nations General Assembly — the bribes offered to secure oil rights and business advantages for CEFC China Energy across Africa.

Ho’s use of his United Nations consultative status to cultivate relationships with African heads of state was central to the scheme.

The CEFC network entangled other figures charged by American prosecutors.

Gal Luft, a senior adviser to CEFC who co-directed a Washington-area think tank that received $350,000 annually from the China Energy Fund Committee, was federally indicted in 2022 on eight counts including acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Chinese entities, arms trafficking, and sanctions violations. Prosecutors alleged Luft covertly recruited a former senior United States government official — identified in subsequent reporting as former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey — to publicly promote Chinese Belt and Road trade policies while Woolsey was advising the incoming Trump administration in 2016, without either registering as a foreign agent.

The CEFC entity and its principals also maintained documented financial relationships with members of the Biden family. Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden signed an agreement with CEFC officials in 2017, with entities controlled by them receiving $4.8 million over the course of fourteen months.

The findings arrive at a moment of acute institutional vulnerability. The United Nations has faced chronic liquidity crises, and Western democracies — including the United States — have at times been slow to contest Beijing’s methodical accumulation of influence. The report’s authors argue that China is not simply participating in multilateralism; it is systematically converting it into an instrument of Party power.

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