Who is Neville Roy Singham, accused of funding Chinese propaganda in India and abroad?

Neville Roy Singham, an American tech titan, is back in the news again for his alleged association with the propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Two years ago, India's anti-money laundering agency raided NewsClick, a news portal, for allegedly receiving Rs 38 crore in foreign funding. The probe agency identified Singham as the key source of the funding received by the news portal between 2018 and 2021 for pushing the Chinese narrative.

Now, as per a new report from the New York Times, Singham has emerged as a likely key conduit, who allegedly funneled billions of dollars from his non-profit organisations and shell firms to defend China and push its propaganda not only in India but also in the US, Africa, and Brazil. "Singham works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide," said the NYT report published on August 5.

Born in May 1954, Neville Singham obtained a bachelor's degree in political science from Howard University. The US-based New Lines Magazine, in a report published in December 2022, pointed out that Singham has long held an ideological affinity with the CCP, dating back to his membership in 1971 in the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a Mao-influenced group based in Detroit, Michigan.

Singham's China connection

In 1993, Singham founded ThoughtWorks, a technology consultancy firm that provides custom software, software tools, and consulting services. He served as the chairman of the firm until he sold it to Apax, a British private equity firm, in 2017 for $785 million. Singham also worked with Chinese tech giant Huawei from 2001 to 2008 as a strategic technical consultant, according to New Lines Magazine which cited a biographical note on the Chinese recruitment platform Boss Zhipin.  

Singham's role as a strategic technical adviser with Huawei ended in 2008, but he has continued to bank on Chinese development, New Lines said in its report published last year. The American millionaire is invested in two companies in China's consultancy and food industries: Shanghai Luoweixing (with a registered capital contribution of $20 million) and Gondwana Foods ($32.5 million). Singham is also listed as the legal representative of a third company, Shanghai Shinong Company Ltd.

Singham's portfolio, too, overlapped with pro-China philanthropy. In 2019, the Justice and Education Fund contributed $876,000 to the People's Welfare Association, a new group registered in Madison city of Wisconsin. And one of the directors of that firm, until September 2019, was Daniel Tirado Behrens, an employee at Shanghai Luoweixing.

The People's Forum, a Manhattan event space that also figured in the NYT story, had in a series of tweets in 2021 acknowledged funding from Singham. It said: "A few years ago we met Roy Singham, a Marxist comrade who sold his company and donated most of his wealth to non-profits that focus on political education, culture, and internationalism." The forum continued: "It seems to bother some folk that we receive funding that furthers our anti-imperialist politics. It seems to bother them even more that our funder is also a staunch anti-imperialist whose work goes back to the Black Panthers & the LRBW in Detroit."

"The folks who make allegations against us are steeped in the worst kind of racism, believing somehow that our funding robs us of agency & self-determination. Roy follows in the footsteps of his father Archie, a committed activist for National Liberation. Ultimately our solidarity with the peoples & countries at the epicenter of the struggle against US Imperialism will not be moved by the racist allegations made by people who loudly echo State Dept and Pentagon discourse."

How Singham's groups allegedly worked for Chinese propaganda  

The NYT in its report alleged that it tracked hundreds of millions of dollars to groups linked to Singham which "mix progressive advocacy with Chinese government talking points". Singham himself sits in Shanghai, where one outlet in his network is co-producing a YouTube show financed in part by the city's propaganda department. Two others include working with a Chinese university to "spread China's voice to the world". And last month, the report said, Singham joined a Communist Party workshop about promoting the party internationally. Singham shares office space — and his groups share staff members — with a company whose goal is to educate foreigners about "the miracles that China has created on the world stage".

In 2017, Singham married Jodie Evans — a former Democratic political adviser and the co-founder of Code Pink, a women-led organisation that advocates for peace and social justice. It was founded in 2002 in response to America's involvement in the Iraq War. Evans supports China and sees it as a defender of the oppressed and a model for economic growth without slavery or war, the NYT said. "If the US crushes China," she had said in 2021, it "would cut off hope for the human race and life on Earth."

Singham reportedly used four new non-profit organisations, such as the United Community Fund and Justice and Education Fund, which have no real-world footprints. Their addresses were listed only as UPS store mailboxes in Illinois, Wisconsin, and New York. From the UPS store nonprofits, the report claimed that millions of dollars flowed around the world. The NYT managed to track money to a South African political party, YouTube channels in the US, and nonprofits in Ghana and Zambia.

As per the NYT report, Singham funded a very important Left-wing think tank called Tricontinental, whose executive director happens to be the very popular Marxist intellectual and political commentator, Vijay Prashad. Coincidentally, Parasad happens to be the nephew of CPM leader Brinda Karat.     

In Brazil, money flowed to a group that produces a publication, Brasil de Fato, that intersperses articles about land rights with praise for Chinese President Xi Jinping. In India, Singham's network firm financed the news portal NewsClick. "China's history continues to inspire the working classes," one video said as per NYT.

In 2021, Evans-led Code Pink initiated a campaign titled "China Is Not Our Enemy". In a petition on its site, Code Pink said the US was militarising in the Asia-Pacific in the name of "deterrence" for a war with China, but it fuels tension at a cost to the billions of people and pristine ecosystems in the region. "China is trapped in an encirclement by the US through increasing military presence and arms sales. Tell Congress that we do not want war with China!"

Neville Singham's son Nate Singham is based in Brazil, where he works as a researcher with Tricontinental. In the 'What We Do' section, the think tank says its work is about building knowledge from the experience of "social and cultural transformations wrought by popular struggles". "The main epistemological basis for such an approach to knowledge is derived from Karl Marx's '11th Thesis on Feuerbach'. Very famously, Prashad once described Singham as a "Marxist with a massive software company!"

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