A group led by former Chinese government officials increased its financial support for green energy initiatives at American universities in 2024, according to newly released tax filings obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Energy Foundation China (EFC)—whose CEO was a senior Chinese government climate negotiator and whose board chairman served as a director for China’s national legislature—sent $1.2 million to Harvard University, four schools within the University of California system, and Villanova University. That is almost double what the group directed to universities the year prior.
The Chinese nonprofit gave a total of $678,750 to UC schools, the largest of which were given to UC Berkeley and UC Davis, and were earmarked to “reduce emissions and address climate change.” UC Berkeley notably administers the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which has been the site of a number of groundbreaking scientific discoveries since its founding in the 1930s.
EFC wired another $492,477 to Harvard to “support engagement on climate change.” While the group has been recognized as a funder of the Harvard-China Project, it is unclear whether the 2024 grant benefited that climate-focused initiative.
And it gave a small grant of $20,000 to Villanova. Deborah Seligsohn, an assistant professor at Villanova who specializes in U.S.-China relations and energy and environmental politics in China, once participated in a Columbia University-EFC roundtable on green energy, according to her résumé.
The spending appears to be part of a CCP effort designed to use American universities and advocacy groups to push unreliable energy sources and technologies like wind, solar, and EVs over traditional power sources like oil and gas in the United States. If such a green transition is successful, it could decrease American energy independence and make the United States far more reliant on China, which is the world’s largest manufacturer of green energy technology.
EFC was formally established in 2020 with the explicit mission of assisting China’s government on energy and climate issues. Since then, however, the group has funneled more than $15 million to universities and nonprofits in the United States, including nearly $1.4 million to Harvard.
“Americans need to know that the Energy Foundation China is nothing more than an influence operation of the CCP,” Caitlin Sutherland, the executive director of ethics watchdog Americans for Public Trust, told the Free Beacon. “Lawmakers should be on heightened alert and investigate this organization for the adversarial enterprise that it is.”
The group’s support for academic initiatives is just one piece of its strategy to support green energy development—it also backs American climate nonprofits and advocacy groups. Overall, in 2024, EFC sent more than $3.2 million to U.S.-based green energy initiatives, a year-over-year increase of more than $1 million.
For that reason, the group has drawn the ire of lawmakers in recent years. In January 2024, the Republican chairmen of the House Natural Resources, Energy and Commerce, and Transportation and Infrastructure committees opened a probe into EFC over its efforts to influence U.S. energy policy and, a few months later, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee asked the IRS to investigate the group’s tax-exempt status.
Michael Lucci, the founder of China watchdog group State Armor, said EFC should be forced to disclose that it is a foreign agent controlled by China. “EFC’s influence in the U.S. is extraordinarily malicious,” he said. “If we allow them to succeed, China will end up with the power to control American power.”
EFC’s single largest contribution last year was a $550,000 grant for the International Council on Clean Transportation, a D.C.-based group that assembles research for regulators about the benefits of EVs. The group enthusiastically endorsed Biden-era regulations designed to usher in an economy-wide transition to EVs and, earlier this year, said the Trump administration’s reversal of those regulations will put American lives “at risk.”
In addition, it gave $360,000 to the New York-based Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, $233,750 to the State Legislative Leaders Foundation (SLLF), and $220,000 to the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Colorado think tank behind a recent push to ban gas stoves.
It represents the first time EFC has ever contributed to the SLLF. The Massachusetts-based foundation is a forum of state legislative leaders and regularly hosts policy seminars, including some focused on energy and climate issues. The foundation’s board is led by Connecticut’s state senate president and the speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, and includes 32 other state legislative leaders.
The group gave additional grants in 2024 to the Innovation Center for Energy And Transportation, the Institute For Sustainable Communities, the Jackson Hole Center For Global Affairs, and the Bay Area Council Foundation.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for EFC denied the group seeks to influence U.S. energy policy, instead saying its contributions are related to emissions-reduction work in China. “Our focus is on supporting climate-related work in China, given the global impact of the country’s emissions,” she said.
EFC is registered in the United States as a 501(c)(3) organization since it is technically based in San Francisco, having split from the United States Energy Foundation in 2020. The group’s operations are conducted from its Beijing office, and its roughly 90-person staff is rife with Chinese nationals who have ties to the CCP apparatus, the Free Beacon reported.
And while EFC has spent about $15 million on U.S.-based initiatives since 2020, it has dumped $218 million on climate and energy initiatives in China in that same timeframe.
EFC CEO and president Ji Zou was the deputy director general of China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy, an agency within the Chinese government’s National Development and Reform Commission. Ping He, a senior policy adviser at the group, worked for eight years at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a leading state-run research institution.
Hongjun Zhang, the chairman of EFC’s board of directors, was a legislative director for the National People’s Congress, which is China’s national legislature, and has been described as the “highest organ of state power” in China. Zhang has also consulted on legal issues with at least six other Chinese state agencies, according to his biography.
Other top EFC officials include Xin Liu, who served as a high-ranking official at the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau; Wei Han, who worked for China’s National Institute of Standardization, a government economic agency; and Sha Fu, a former professor at the Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, a think tank under the auspices of China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment.
And the group’s top international cooperation officer, Yunfei Xing, managed energy development projects in developing countries for China Machinery Engineering Corporation. That company is a subsidiary of the state-run conglomerate China National Machinery Industry Corporation, which seeks to spread Chinese influence across the world by developing infrastructure projects in poor regions.
“The Energy Foundation is an independent, nonpartisan, charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco,” the EFC spokeswoman said. “We do not accept funding from any government or political party. No government or party directs or controls us or our grantmaking decisions. We do not fund or engage in activism, litigation, lobbying, or electoral activities in any country, and are fully committed to complying with all applicable laws and regulations.”
The universities didn’t return requests for comment.
