The founder of the Center for Tech and Civic Life – a controversial election oversight group heavily backed by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg – is a former fellow at the Chinese regime-funded Ash Center, which has also advised Chinese Communist Party officials sanctioned by the U.S. government for human rights abuses.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) used the hundreds of millions of dollars from the Facebook founder’s organization, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, to overrule local election officials and increase turnout in – almost exclusively – Democratic districts. Proving the partisan conflict of interest, leaders from the CTCL overpowered and overruled local election authorities and, through coercion, accessed mail-in ballots ahead of the election.Tiana Epps-Johnson co-founded the CTCL in 2012 with co-workers from the New Organizing Institute (NOI), described by the Washington Post as “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry.” CTCL appeared to play a similar role in the 2020 election, helping secure a victory for Joe Biden – the Chinese Communist Party’s preferred candidate.The National Pulse can reveal, however, that Johnson is affiliated with Harvard University’s Ash Center, which has extensive financial and personnel links to the Chinese regime.
Hosted within the Harvard Kennedy School, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation is funded by several Chinese Communist Party-backed entities. Among its donors are China Southern Power Grid Corp, whose management is “directly appointed by China’s central government.”
Additional donations come from New World China Enterprises Project, a Chinese company whose board is composed of virtually all Chinese Communist Party members. Chairman and Executive Director Cheng Kar-Shun served as a Standing Committee Member of the regime’s Political Consultative Conference, an arm of the party-state responsible for conducting overseas influence operations.
As a result, the center has routinely produced studies amplified by Chinese state-run media outlets and regime officials. A July 2020 report – “Understanding CCP Resilience: Surveying Chinese Public Opinion Through Time” – contends that the Chinese Communist Party is “as strong as ever” and that “Chinese citizen satisfaction with government has increased virtually across the board.”
