transitioned from an authoritarian state to a democracy, leading to new calls from

88 transitioned from an authoritarian state to a democracy, leading to new calls from the island and from some of its immigrants in the United States for an independent Taiwan. Seeking to capitalize on the ever-larger number of mainlanders in the United States and to battle the nascent Taiwan independence movement, PRC authorities established organizations and Chinese-language schools to bolster their propaganda work in the United States. The Party’s United Front Work Department founded the China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification in 1988, and within a decade it had more than one hundred chapters in sixty countries, including more than a dozen offices in the United States. Chinese officials described Chinese- language media, Chinese-language schools, and Chinese-backed organizations as the “three treasures” (==)of united front work overseas.*? Chinese-language media. By the mid-1990s, analyst He Qinglian estimated that, of the some one hundred Chinese-language newspapers in the United States, more than one-third were funded by money from the mainland.** Owners of these newspapers, seeking subsidies from Beijing, cozied up to PRC authorities with statements such as “opposing Taiwan independence and fostering peaceful unification are the glorious missions and historical responsibility of overseas Chinese publications.”*> Beijing also moved to take control of online and social media outlets. Wenxuecheng (Cu, http://wenxuecheng.com) is the most popular Chinese-language website in the United States. Launched in 1997 by a group of students from the University of Michigan, the website was sold in 2003 to a Taiwanese-American businessman*® with investments in China. Since being purchased, Wenxuecheng has signed deals to run news from Xinhua and the China Daily.*’ There is even an unsubstantiated rumor that the purchase of the website was subsidized by $1 million from the CCP Propaganda Department. Duowei is another online source that was for years an independent Chinese-language media outlet. Among its many scoops was the prediction of the composition of the sixteenth Politburo Standing Committee. But in 2009, Duowei was purchased by a Hong Kong businessman* with substantial business interests in China, including two companies listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The businessman is a founding member of the Tsinghua University Center for US-China Relations and is also fond of writing pro-Beijing essays on China’s claims to the South China Sea. Duowei is now headquartered in Beijing. Indeed, since selling Duowei, the online news source's founder*’ has moved to Mingjing (Mirror Media), a Chinese-language web presence Media HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020547