Brookings Institution Boosts China Initiatives Linked to Board Member

The namesake of the Brookings Institution’s China Center chairs a company that facilitates investments in China’s global infrastructure initiative and has served on the board of an alleged Chinese propaganda agency, facts that were not disclosed in Brookings literature on those topics.

John L. Thornton, the chairman emeritus of the Brookings board of trustees, has served since 2016 as chairman of the Silk Road Finance Corporation, a Communist Party-backed fund that develops projects for the Belt and Road Initiative, which the U.S. government considers a national security threat. He is on the board of China’s Confucius Institutes, which Beijing allegedly uses to advance propaganda in American schools. Scholars at Brookings’s John L. Thornton China Center have defended “Belt and Road” and Confucius Institutes without disclosing that Thornton serves on organizations that support the initiatives.

Read the full piece at the Free Beacon.