Thanks to Elon Musk, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has been effectively shut down. As a result, its global funding of ostensibly independent non-profits has been exposed. While many did valuable humanitarian work, some openly carried out influence operations and subversion against foreign governments.
Such groups – not the least are those targeting Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China – are running out of funding to continue operations.
How do we know? In a cri de coeur, one such US-funded researcher Bethany Allen wrote that “with US funding freeze, China non-profits are facing extinction. They need emergency assistance”. But what are these “non-profits” and what do they do? “Without the work that China non-profits do, it will be much harder to show that China’s domestic model of economic and political governance is deeply flawed,” Allen wrote. “If we can no longer prove that, it becomes much harder to understand why democracies are worth fighting for in the first place.”
Allen’s piece was published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which Kim Carr, a retired senior Labor politician once described as being filled with “hawks intent on fighting a new cold war”. Allen continued: “An entire ecosystem of vital China-related work is now in crisis. When the Trump administration froze foreign funding and USAID programmes, dozens of scrappy non-profits in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States were immediately affected. Staff are losing their jobs; some organisations face imminent closure due to lack of funding; others are paring back their programming.”
When former USAID chief Samantha Power met Hong Kong fugitive Nathan Law Kwun-chung after the 2019 anti-government riots, I was puzzled as I thought the agency was primarily responsible for foreign aid in developing countries. How naive I was!
Y. Tony Yang, a professor and associate dean at George Washington University, acknowledged USAID was “a strategic tool in geopolitical competition”. He has decried its dismantling. “[USAID] has long been a cornerstone of US foreign policy, advancing not only humanitarian aid but also the US’ strategic interests worldwide,” he wrote in Taipei Times.
