A leaked database of CCP members showed that hundreds of people affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are presently embedded in the Chinese branches of American corporations like PepsiCo, 3M, and IBM. The list names roughly 1.95 million people, their ethnicity, education level, and their affiliated Party branches. Most of the people on the list come from Shanghai.
It’s not surprising for CCP members to be embedded in companies operating in China, since Beijing mandates it. But the list exposes how far the communist regime’s influence operations reach outside the Mainland. Here is some information that came from the leak:
- IBM has 24 Party units within its offices in China, totaling around 808 members.
- PepsiCo has 45 employees in its Party units.
- 3M’s Party committee has 230 members. The company manufactures healthcare goods, including N95 respirators.
- Dow Chemical Company, one of the biggest chemical producers in the world, has 337 CCP affiliates.
- Marriott-owned Westin Hotel & Resorts has 23 CCP members.
- Insurance company MetLife has 31 employees in its Party unit.
- Analytics firm Nielsen Holding has a Party committee of 94 people.
Chinese state media declares that there are 92 million CCP members in the country. The database of 1.95 million people is only a fraction of the total CCP supporters in China. The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) acquired the database from a Chinese dissident. In addition to American companies, other large international companies have CCP panels in their company structures. Infiltrated companies include Rolls Royce, Airbus, Boeing, AstraZeneca, Jaguar Land Rover, Pfizer, HSBC, and Standard Chartered.
In an interview on The Epoch Times show American Thought Leaders, Bill Gertz said that the database is a key piece of evidence that will aid in exposing the CCP’s influence operations worldwide.
“I think it’s important to understand that membership in the Chinese Communist Party makes those people devoted not to the nation of China or to the people of China, but to the political party of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. And they definitely can be tasked to do any task that the party wants, whether that’s collecting intelligence, suborning foreign officials, and gathering information that could be useful for government and party agencies,” he said on the program.
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Matt Warren, a professor of cybersecurity at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, said that most of the CCP members in the database are working either in IT-related or defense companies. These people are likely passing private information from the infiltrated companies to the communist government. Warren believes that these CCP-affiliated people are a major security risk. He suggests these companies should quickly bolster their safeguards.
Many CCP members also work inside British consulates
One member was found to be working close to a team of MI6 officers using diplomatic cover. British MP Iain Duncan asked the government to immediately expel all CCP members from consuls in China.
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U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also recently raised concerns about China’s infiltration of American businesses and educational institutions.
“We’ve seen this everywhere, and President Trump’s been the first President of the United States, and, frankly, one of the first global leaders to identify this challenge from the Chinese Communist Party… They have infiltrated our schools, and they spend money on research projects and so co-opt our institutions that are higher learning and research. They now infiltrate — we’ve seen this — into our government, into our businesses. President Trump called this out. We’ve begun to push back against it; there’s a lot more work to do,” he told Breitbart.
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