Thread by @BethanyAllenEbr

Because of the U.S. funding freezing, the entire global ecosystem of China nonprofits is facing an extinction event.

I'm not exaggerating for clicks. This is really what is happening. Read my piece below:

In many cases, these orgs provide our last window into what is actually happening in China. They do the painstaking, risky work of tracking Chinese censorship, tallying local protests, uncovering rights violations, & documenting the Uyghur genocide.

aspistrategist.org.au/with-us-fundin…

The research and other work done by these nonprofits is invaluable. It largely isn’t replicated by think tanks, universities, private firms, or journalists. If it disappears, nothing will replace it, and Beijing’s work to crush it will be complete.

The US spending freeze has revealed how dependent these organizations are on a single government for their survival—and, by extension, how fragile our sources of information about China really are.

The US must immediately grant emergency waivers to China-focussed nonprofits. If the US is not able to do this, governments around the world that value democracy, human rights, and truth must step in and find a way to restore funding to these organisations now.

This crisis should serve as a wake-up call for democracies everywhere. Funding from a single government should not be the only thing standing between us and an information blackout on Chinese civil society. That is not a model of international democratic resilience.

A key part of China’s agenda is to persuade its own citizens and the world, falsely and through deception and coercion, that democratic systems are not better. Beijing claims its system is the best way to guarantee economic prosperity and stability.

It is difficult and time-consuming to do the work that proves Beijing is lying. Tools that allow us to uncover the flaws of China’s own system, and the actual struggles Chinese people face, directly support the goals, security, and resilience of democratic governments.

Without the work that China nonprofits do, it will be much harder to show that China’s governance model is deeply flawed. If we can no longer prove that, it becomes much harder to understand why democracies are worth fighting for in the first place.

Thanks for everyone who has reached out to try to help. A very important note: USAID does NOT fund any of these China nonprofits. The funding I'm talking about is State Department grants. Efforts to preserve USAID are great but they won't help these China orgs.