The United Nations’ communications chief is the latest top official of the organization to lavish praise on the CCP during a trip to China.

The United Nations’ global communications chief vowed to strengthen the international organization’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party, during an official trip to Beijing last month.

Melissa Fleming is the latest in a series of top U.N. human rights and humanitarian assistance officials who have recently traveled to China for eyebrow-raising meetings and have appeared to embrace China’s authoritarian government.

Their apparently cordial conversations with Chinese officials did not appear to address Beijing’s human rights record, despite the organization’s own previous findings. The United Nations’ human rights office said in 2022 that Beijing is engaged in “serious human rights violations” and possibly crimes against humanity against Uyghurs, but none of the officials appear to have raised that matter or other pressing human rights concerns during their recent meetings. The current head of the human rights office, Volker Türk, even spoke last year at a conference, hosted by China’s foreign ministry, billed as a human-rights-focused event.

Fleming’s trip in mid-June — her first to the country since she started work in her current role, six years ago, per the U.N. — comes against the backdrop of growing U.S. concern about China’s efforts to co-opt the international body, and the Trump administration’s nascent campaign against U.N. initiatives that run counter to America’s national interest.

Kelley Currie, a former U.S. representative to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, told National Review that Fleming’s activities demonstrate that the U.N. secretary-general’s team “continue to distinguish themselves with the lengths they will go to suck up to the totalitarian Chinese regime.”

The United Nations defended Fleming’s conduct as part of the organization’s outreach efforts but added, in a rare comment quibbling with a statement from China’s government, that a Chinese agency’s summary of one of her meetings was “incomplete.”

Fleming was in Beijing to speak at events hosted by the Beijing International Book Fair and the U.N. refugees’ agency (UNHCR). She spoke about a book she published in 2017 chronicling the experiences of Doaa Al Zamel, a Syrian refugee who survived a shipwreck in the Mediterranean. Fleming, a former journalist, previously worked for UNHCR. In response to NR’s questions, a U.N. spokesperson said that her involvement in the book events was cleared by the organization’s ethics offices and that all proceeds from the book are donated to organizations for refugees. The Chinese-language release of Fleming’s book coincided with her invitation to address an International Publishers Association event at the Beijing International Book Fair, the spokesperson said.

The International Department of the CCP, which cultivates the party’s relations with foreign elites, hosted Fleming for a meeting on June 19. That bureau is believed by Germany’s intelligence services to conduct espionage targeting foreign officials. Other China-watchers have warned that the department oversees political influence operations targeting unsuspecting foreign politicians.

International Department Deputy Director Li Mingxiang congratulated Fleming on the release of the Chinese-language edition of her book, according to the International Department’s website. The International Department claims that Fleming, in turn, “thanked the Chinese side for inviting her to attend the new book launch and the Beijing International Book Fair in China” and for its support of the U.N.

The meeting summary published on the International Department’s website also claimed that Fleming “expressed the willingness to further strengthen contact and communication with the IDCPC,” using an acronym for the office’s name.

Two days later, Fleming met Chinese officials at the headquarters of China’s development assistance agency, the China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA). There, the U.N. official was said to have delivered a similar message, praising Beijing’s work in the sustainable-development arena.

According to the agency’s website, she “lauded” its role in development cooperation in the Global South via China’s Global Development Initiative, a signature policy of Chinese leader Xi Jinping designed to market China as the world leader in development assistance. Fleming also praised Beijing’s contributions to “the independent and sustainable development of developing countries in key areas such as poverty reduction and eradication, infrastructure, and green development,” the Chinese development agency’s summary claimed.

But the U.N. said that the Chinese account was not a complete recapitulation of Fleming’s remarks in the meeting.

“During her visit, as customary, she met with government officials, along with the U.N. Resident Coordinator,” the U.N. spokesperson said. “During those meetings Ms. Fleming highlighted the Secretary-General’s urgent appeal to rescue the Sustainable Development Goals. The Global Development Initiative has the potential to energize the pursuit of these goals. The read out from CIDCA is incomplete.”

Sources familiar with the U.S. government’s understanding of a Chinese-government-funded U.N. trust fund previously told NR that Beijing has pushed for the integration of the Global Development Initiative into official U.N. projects.

Fleming also made laudatory comments about Beijing’s policies during an appearance alongside Al Zamel on CGTN, a television propaganda outlet intended for Western audiences, praising Chinese investment in infrastructure projects in Africa and Latin America. She also called Chinese carmaker BYD’s vehicles “very beautiful” during that conversation.

Currie, the former U.S. ambassador to the Economic and Social Council, said:

This is just the latest example of how this compromised group of U.N. leaders has debased themselves by praising China for its lip service to the SDGs [the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals initiative] and its economy built on repression and theft, while simultaneously ignoring China’s commission of genocide and other gross violations of human rights, protection of Xi Jinping’s regime from accountability for the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and privileging Beijing’s authoritarian political model at the expense of democratic values.

I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate to the Trump administration their utter contempt for all the United States has done to support the United Nations for the past 80 years.

Fleming is “responsible for reaching the global public with U.N. news and information on various platforms,” a U.N. spokesperson said. “She often travels to U.N. member states in that context. There is an emphasis in her work on the six official languages of the U.N., one of which is Chinese,” the spokesperson continued. “Her visit was to explore how to extend the United Nations’ reach directly to the Chinese public.”

Fleming’s embrace of China is noteworthy also, in part, because she is one of the leading figures behind a U.N. initiative that aims to convince social media companies and other actors to crack down on what the international organization terms misinformation and disinformation.

In her capacity as the U.N.’s global communications chief, Fleming signed a memorandum of understanding with China’s Xinhua News Agency propaganda arm in June 2024, the outlet said in a post to Instagram.

The U.N. spokesperson described that memorandum as “a standard agreement which establishes the scope of intended collaboration between the U.N. and other organizations, outlining the parameters and goals of the proposed initiative.”

“The primary purpose of the agreement is to provide a framework of cooperation in order to raise public awareness of UN priorities, goals and initiatives. We also have various agreements with news organizations around such as Times of India, Reuters, Spotify, AIT (Nigeria) and many many others,” the spokesperson added.