The university housing the think tank at the center of the classified documents controversy involving President Joe Biden pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from an investment firm owned by China's government, documents show.
The Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement came under the spotlight earlier this year following reports that attorneys for Biden found between 25 and 30 classified documents from November 2022 to January 2023 in his old office, used from 2017 to 2019.
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The University of Pennsylvania, which houses the center and has taken large sums from donors tied to Hunter Biden's business dealings, was given almost $524,000 from 2018 to 2019 by China Everbright Group, a state-owned firm headed by the Chinese Communist Party, according to foreign gift disclosures obtained by the conservative watchdog Americans for Public Trust.
Between mid-2018 and mid-2022, the University of Pennsylvania was gifted at least $105 million from Chinese donors, disclosures show. The latest revelation of Chinese ties came days after the GOP-led House Oversight and Accountability Committee released a memo based on bank records showing that the Biden family, including Hunter Biden, received $10 million from accounts in China and Romania while Joe Biden was vice president under President Barack Obama.
The committee, led by Rep. James Comer (R-KY), previously called on the University of Pennsylvania in mid-January to turn over records on "anonymous" Chinese donations to the Penn Biden Center. The congressman also sought visitor logs to the think tank, security documents, and communications related to it soliciting money.
"UPenn is cooperating, and we expect them to continue producing documents to the committee," Comer told the Washington Examiner.
China Everbright Group was founded in 1983 by the State Council of China, a government body that is China's "supreme organ of state power," according to Chinese government records. One of the firm's owners at the time of its donations to UPenn was Central Huijin Investment, a government-run company in Beijing previously chaired by Ding Xuedong, now-deputy secretary-general of the State Council, bank records show.
In September 2019, China Everbright donated over $191,500 to UPenn, following donations totaling over $332,200 in 2018, according to gift disclosures. The Penn Biden Center launched in February 2018 in Washington, D.C., and its managing directors have included 11 individuals who went on to join the Biden administration, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Michael Carpenter, U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe as of November 2021, the Washington Examiner reported.
China Everbright has also been listed in numerous Chinese reports as the parent company of China Everbright Bank, which was founded in 1992. The bank was, in turn, listed in 2014 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission records as a "major investor" in BHR Partners, which Hunter Biden's Rosemont Seneca Partners investment firm co-founded in 2013, and which has counted Hunter Biden as a board member.
Hunter Biden "no longer holds any interest" in BHR, one of his lawyers told the New York Times in 2021.
A separate $1 million donor to UPenn in 2019 was Cathay Fortune, a Shanghai-based private equity firm, which previously invested in the phosphate mining and metal company China Molybdenum Company Limited — now CMOC Group Limited. The Hunter Biden-linked BHR Partners, then-Bohai Harvest RTS, helped China Molybdenum purchase a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2016, according to multiple reports.
China Everbright's first donation to UPenn, $18,140 in October 2018, came more than a month after the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an independent government agency, determined in a report that the firm's president, Gao Yunlong, was one of more than two dozen government officials in China with ties to the CCP's United Front.
The United Front is "a network of party and state agencies responsible for influencing groups outside the [CCP], particularly those claiming to represent civil society," which "facilitates espionage" and secretly accesses "valuable and sensitive technology" across the world, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a defense think tank.
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"No foreign funds were contributed anonymously, and no foreign funds were directed to the Penn Biden Center," Ron Ozio, a spokesman for UPenn, previously told the Washington Examiner.
The White House did not return a request for comment.