China’s American Mao: Inside Singham’s blueprint to ‘wage war’ for a ‘new world order’

Part 5 of a Fox News Digital series investigating the House of Singham investigates how an American tycoon built an “International Revolutionary Front,” in the words of Mao Zedong, a global system in which ideology, funding, activism and propaganda converge. This reporting includes analysis using large-language modeling.

Last November in Shanghai, as American tech tycoon Neville Roy SIngham took the stage at the Golden Tulip hotel for a conference endorsed by the Chinese Communist Party, he offered the clearest window yet into the ideology and strategy behind the global network he has funded over nearly a decade. 

Clutching a 172-page report he had authored, Singham put forward a worldview that reframes history, challenges Western power and calls for a “new world order” promoted by Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China, or CPC, as it’s called in the country.

“If we want to, therefore, have a new world order that is based on multilateralism that President Xi and CPC and China have proposed, we have to undo the ideological damage that has been done by the narrative of World War II,” he said.

The packed room of about 200 ideologues assembled for the Global South Academic Forum, applauded enthusiastically. And it was no wonder. 

In the audience in Shanghai, Mao’s vision of an “international revolutionary front” appeared in real time, a cross-border network of academics, activists and organizers listening intently, many of whom Singham has helped fund over the past decade, a Fox News Digital investigation reveals.

The House of Singham, as Fox News Digital has uncovered, includes a network of about 2,000 organizations spanning the globe, from the People’s Forum in New York City to the Shanghai Maku Cultural Communication Co. that Singham has built after his 2017 wedding in Jamaica to Jodie Evans, a globe-trotting activist and co-founder of CodePink, a nonprofit that Singham also funded.

From their honeymoon in China and over the years, Evans has called Singham her “adorable troublemaker,” her “darling Roy” and “adorable husband” in Instagram posts, while regaling his love of ping pong.

PART 1: POWER COUPLE OF CHAOS: HOW A TYCOON AND ACTIVIST BUILT A ‘REVOLUTIONARY BASE’ AT THE HOUSE OF SINGHAM

In new details that have not been previously reported, Fox News Digital uncovered material in Singham’s own writings that underscores just how he has positioned himself as China’s new American Mao, adapting Maoist doctrine for a modern era of global activism, media and ideological warfare against the United States.

In his study, “80th Anniversary of the Victory of the World Anti-Fascist War,” Singham invoked the “truth” of Mao from the communist leader’s book “On Protracted War,” where he wrote, “The richest source of power to wage war lies in the masses of the people.”

Singham’s study revealed not just an interpretation of history, but a strategy.

“The war never strategically ended,” Singham wrote. “It simply changed form.”

At the core of his thinking is a rejection of the West and the United States of America and its system of free enterprise, or “fascism,” as he calls it derisively.

“The liberal fiction of three competing systems — democracy, fascism and communism — obscures the truth,” Singham wrote. “Fascism is capitalism in crisis, its mask dropped. The real struggle was never between three systems but between two: socialism and capitalism, with fascism as capitalism’s emergency response to revolutionary threat.”

The 71-year-old Singham funds his activism and lifestyle in Shanghai with a fortune estimated at nearly a billion dollars made on the 2017 sale of his American tech company, Thoughtworks.

While his language often seems dense and academic, the idea is clear: the defining conflicts of the 20th century collapse into a single ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism – with “fascism” recast as a form of capitalism — one that continues today. 

In that framework, terms like “fascism” have become central to modern activism, appearing frequently on protest signs and messaging produced by nonprofit groups in Singham’s network to describe U.S. policy, institutions, global influence and “hyperimperialism,” a term Singham uses in his report.

In his paper and remarks, Singham advanced a sweeping reinterpretation of World War II, arguing that Western nations — particularly the United States — have falsely claimed credit for defeating fascism while imposing an illegitimate global system.

He dismissed the conventional framing of World War II as a battle between democracy and fascism, calling it a “fascist lie,” and instead argued that socialist and “colonized” nations bore the true cost of defeating Nazi Germany.

“This was not their war. It was their profit,” he wrote of Western powers.

From that premise flows a broader conclusion: that the post-World War II global order, shaped by the United States and its allies, lacks legitimacy.

PART 2: RED WEALTH, DARK MONEY: HOW AN AMERICAN TYCOON DEPLOYS MAO’S PLAYBOOK AGAINST THE WEST

In his writing, Singham makes clear that this is not just a disagreement over history, but a battle over who gets to define it.

Singham keeps coming back to the idea of propaganda, even as he accuses the West of using it. He argues that Western power was built by shaping how people understand history, calling it “manufacturing memory” and “propaganda as history.” He writes that the modern global system is built on what he calls a “fascist lie” about World War II.

“The current global system… is the product of betrayal — planned from the beginning, executed with precision, covered with propaganda,” he wrote.

At the same time, he lays out his own approach, describing an “ideological apparatus” powered by “money and methods.” He argues that controlling the story — through media, institutions and movements — is a key form of power.

“The ideological apparatus requires both money and methods — institutions, media, education and organizing structures that can sustain and reproduce the narrative,” he wrote.

The concept that conflict has shifted from battlefields to narratives and from armies to information mirrors the system Fox News Digital has documented across a five-part series about the House of Singham.

PART 3: SHANGHAI SABOTAGE: INSIDE SINGHAM’S SECRET STRATEGY TO DEMONIZE AMERICA

Since his 2017 celebrity-filled “Revolutionary Love” wedding in Jamaica to Jodie Evans, the co-founder of a fiery activist group, CodePink, Singham has built a transnational network of nonprofits, media platforms and activist groups designed to operate across borders while appearing independent.

Singham and his wedding guests set about building an international revolutionary front to harness the power of “the masses of the people.” 

In a video interview with ShanghaiEye, a state-funded media arm of the Communist Party of China, Vijay Prashad, Singham’s friend — and wedding guest from the 2017 ceremony — explained the strategy was to tap the power of “the Global South.” Singham is chairman of the international advisory board of Tricontinental Ltd., which Prashad established with Singham’s money in 2017. Tricontinental was a key sponsor of the Global South Academic Forum.

As reported, a Fox News Digital investigation found that Singham poured $278 million into six nonprofits between 2017 and 2023, building a transnational network that now includes about 2,000 organizations in the House of Singham. 

To understand the global reach of the House of Singham, Fox News Digital further analyzed the international operations of key nonprofits in its network, including the geographical distribution of 223 transactions that moved $591 million in total, including the Singham seed money, across five continents from 2017 through 2025.

The investigation also analyzed the geographical focus of 1,663 events the People’s Forum hosted between its first event in early August 2018 and its most recent gatherings early this year.

Singham and Evans used the nonprofit groups they had created, with Evans sitting on many of their boards with scant disclosure in IRS tax filings about where they spend their money.

The House of Singham “has a major transparency problem,” says Robert Stilson, a senior research analyst at Capital Research Center, an investigative think tank based in Washington, D.C., following the money on nonprofits.

PART 4: REVOLUTIONARY TOURISM: INSIDE THE $600M MARRIAGE OF DARK MONEY AND FAR-LEFT AGITPROP

The People’s Support Foundation funneled $108 million across the world. It gave money to 43 mostly Marxist groups around the globe, from Brazil to Ecuador, Haiti, South Africa, Zambia and Scotland, to run film training, schools, organizing and even the Marx Memorial Library in Birmingham, Scotland.

Established in 2019 with a mailing address at a UPS Store in Madison, Wisc., the People’s Welfare Association named Eugene Puryear, a leader in the Party for Socialism and Liberation, to its board in 2024, according to its tax filing. It claimed to focus “principally” on “foreign communities with large marginalized populations.”

The People’s Support Foundation gave the People’s Welfare Association $66 million between 2017 and 2024. In turn, the People’s Welfare Association pumped about $96 million from the United States to the world. The bulk of the money went to South America, where it sent $43 million, and Sub-Saharan Africa, where it funneled $41 million. It sent $2.4 million to Central America and the Caribbean, $9.5 million to Europe, including Greenland and Iceland and $307,150 to South Asia.

What did the People’s Welfare Association spend the money on? It only says on its tax forms that the regional donations are for “grant-making” and “grants.”

Decades ago, Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong wrote, “Without the united front, the revolutionary cause cannot succeed.”

Tricontinental, funded by Singham and led by Prashad, has become an ideological anchor for the network, producing academic work aligned with the worldview articulated in Shanghai.

In February 2017, Prashad was a featured guest at the wedding of “Jodie and Roy,” joining a panel on “The Future of the Left.” 

By year’s end, he was named a board member of Tricontinental Ltd., newly established in Northampton, Mass., on Sept. 12, 2017, with Singham funding. Tricontinental got $17 million over the next several years to proselytize the merits of Marxism and China’s economic and political regime. 

Tricontinental became an ideological anchor for the House of Singham. 

By September 2022, Prashad wrote the introduction to a new report from Tricontinental, framing the U.S. as a war-monger, waging a “new Cold War” in the world. He used China’s Belt and Road Initiative, “building human dignity,” as a contrast to the “dangerous escalation” of the U.S. and the West against Russia and China. 

There has also been rhetorical alignment between members of this network and far-left U.S. politicians, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, _Vt.; Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., in statements critical of U.S. foreign policy. While the politicians have appeared at events supported by the House of Singham, no direct ties have been established between them and the Singham network.

Earlier this month, Vijay Prashad went to Havana as part of a “delegation of solidarity” to Cuba. 

One of the red flags is that Singham and Prashad coordinate conferences, like the Global South Academic Forum in Shanghai last fall, with East China Normal University, which the Chinese Communist Party’s Ministry of Education calls one of its “subordinate” institutions.

In 1940, Mao called upon his followers to join “the international revolutionary front against imperialism.”

By early 2018, a new organization stood up: the Justice and Education Fund Inc., with People’s Forum executives Manola de Los Santos and David Sung Mo Chung on the board, along with Tings Chak, also on the board of Tricontinental.

Over several years following his 2017 wedding, Singham pumped $69 million into the Justice and Education Fund. Inc., with Box No. 203 at a UPS Store on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in New York City as its address. The funds were for a lofty mission of “community & human services.”

The Justice and Education Fund also got a “non-cash” lease at the People’s Forum for office space.

The principal is listed as Sung Mo Chung, the full Korean name for David Chung, the organizing director at the People’s Forum.

In 2024, in an example of the circular flow of money between these nonprofits, the Justice and Education Fund got a donation of $5.4 million from another nonprofit in the House of Singham: the People’s Support Foundation, with the address at a hotel in downtown Chicago.

Over the past several years, IRS records reveal that the Justice and Education Fund churned out $51 million – an important chunk of it outside the U.S.

It also served as a clearinghouse for money sent back into the core hub of organizations in the House of Singham, sending millions of dollars back into BreakThrough BT Media, CodePink, People’s Forum and People’s Welfare Association, one of the latest nonprofits with a UPS Store address.

It gave $3 million to another “People’s” arrival in the House of Singham: this one, the People’s Dispatch Ltd., a propaganda machine for Marxism in the world with yet another UPS Store as its mailing address. It had a familiar name as its president: Prashad, the wedding guest who spoke on the panel about “The Future of the Left.”

Another favorite in the House of Singham: the Inter-Religious Foundation for Community Organization Inc., also got a boost with an infusion of cash. One of its executives, De la Cruz, ran for president as a candidate from the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and she has joined delegations to Venezuela to support communist leaders, like Nicholas Maduro.

At the People’s Forum, Tricontinental and other groups’ programming includes Cuba solidarity campaigns, Venezuela advocacy, anti-Iran sanctions initiatives, opposition to NATO expansion and educational events on China, all framed within a broader narrative of “resistance” to U.S. influence. 

Event flyers and social media posts repeatedly highlight Cuba, promoting teach-ins, cultural programming and delegations opposing U.S. policy.

That narrative aligns with Singham’s rejection of the Western system.

“The ‘rules-based international order’ means the same thing as the ‘civilising mission’: submit or be destroyed,” he wrote in his 172-page report.

Not long ago, the People’s Forum organized 142 groups focused on spreading North Korea’s communism to South Korea.

The Alliance for Global Justice funded Samidoun, which the Treasury Department described last year as a “sham charity” that supports Hamas.

Critics say that these organizations should be forced to register as lobbyists for a foreign government under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is monitored by the Justice Department.

What’s more, lawmakers have raised questions about whether these financial flows comply with U.S. nonprofit laws governing charitable expenditures and foreign influence. None of the entities associated with the House of Singham have been found to have violated charitable expenditure or foreign influence laws.

Amid criticism from lawmakers and the Trump administration, the People’s Forum issued a rare statement last month, writing defiantly, “By labeling our organizations as ‘agents’ of ‘foreign manipulation,’ the U.S. government seeks to demonize and suppress the legitimate grievances of people who are disgusted by the violent ICE raids and deportation of immigrant communities, the deployment of military forces and federal agents to cities and towns in the United States, the persecution of students protesting the genocide in Gaza and the endless military interventions and use of blockades and sanctions to create famines abroad.”

The People’s Forum added a link for donations.

Nearly a decade after a wedding in Jamaica brought together activists, intellectuals and organizers, the network that formed there now operates across continents — funding organizations, shaping narratives and mobilizing protests.

What began as a network has evolved into a system.

And in Singham’s own words, that system is not simply reacting to the world as it exists.

It is working to redefine a “new world order,” in the vision of the People’s Republic of China, President Xi and the Communist Party of China.

Not long ago, the conference that Singham hosted released a video tribute to the ideologues and activists at the assembly, with a simple message: “Rise Up: A Song of Defiance….”

Nikolas Lanum, Hannah Brennan, Brooke Curto and Kyle Schmidbauer contributed to this report.