(The Epoch Times)—The Chinese regime is increasingly sending groups that pose as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to the United Nations in an effort to suppress criticism of its human rights record, according to a report published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) on April 28.
The 10-month investigation, a partnership between the ICIJ and 42 media organizations, examined China’s transnational repression under Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Part of the report focused on the communist regime’s subversion campaign against the U.N. Human Rights Council through “a growing army of Chinese NGOs.”
“Since Xi’s reelection as Communist Party general secretary in 2017 and president the following year, China has sought greater influence within the U.N. human rights system and become more aggressive in silencing dissent,” the report reads.
ICIJ found that the number of Chinese NGOs holding consultative status with the U.N. has nearly doubled since 2018.
NGOs can participate in U.N. meetings, make oral statements, and submit written statements before U.N. sessions after obtaining consultative status, which is granted by the U.N. Economic and Social Council.
An ICIJ analysis of 106 NGOs from China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan found that 59 are not independent but are “closely connected” to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The ICIJ referred to these Beijing-backed NGOs as “GONGOs” or “government-organized nongovernmental organizations.”
Ten of these GONGOs receive more than 50 percent of their funding from Beijing, the ICIJ noted.
In at least 46 of these groups, directors, secretaries, vice presidents, or other high-ranking staff also hold positions in the Chinese regime’s departments or within the CCP.
Additionally, 53 of these NGOs pledge loyalty to the CCP on their websites or in other official documents. Among them, 12 agree to defer their decision-making to the Party, such as leadership appointments.
“In 2024, 33 Chinese NGOs showed up about 300 times on the lists of speakers at Human Rights Council sessions. There were only three of them in 2018. None criticized China,” the report reads.
Rana Siu Inboden, senior fellow at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin, was quoted in the report as saying that Beijing “is clearly using NGOs as a tool.”
“They are encouraging them, helping them, guiding them, coaching them through how to get this [consultative] status,” Inboden said. “And then once they’re [at the U.N.], you can see how their statements, whether it’s in the Human Rights Council or elsewhere, serve the government.”
China’s Tactics
Delegates from the Beijing-backed groups seek to “disrupt and drown out” criticism of China, heap praise on the CCP, and monitor and intimidate those who come to Geneva to testify against China.
“It’s corrosive. It’s dishonest. It’s subversive,” Michèle Taylor, who served as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council from February 2022 to January this year, was quoted as saying in the ICIJ’s findings.
Beijing-backed groups “are masquerading as NGOs” as part of a broader effort by the CCP “to obfuscate their own human rights violations and reshape the narrative around China’s actions and culpabilities,” Taylor said.
The ICIJ and its media partners spoke to 15 activists and lawyers dedicated to China’s human rights who “described being surveilled or harassed by people suspected to be proxies for the Chinese government,” according to the report. These incidents happened both inside the United Nations and in Geneva at large.
Some activists said that their relatives, whom they believed were pressured by Chinese authorities, had urged them to cease their public activism or cautioned them about the risks of their actions, according to the ICIJ.
The report cites an incident in March 2024, when some rights activists refused to set foot inside the U.N. buildings, out of fear that Beijing’s presence could result in retribution against their families in China.
“Instead, they gathered for a secret meeting on the top floor of a nondescript office building nearby. They were there to discuss human rights abuses in China and Hong Kong with the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk,” the ICIJ said.
In January last year, China was among several countries that underwent a peer review process called the “Universal Periodic Review” before the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Rushan Abbas, cofounder of the U.S.-based Campaign for Uyghurs, told ICIJ that after she and other NGO delegates entered the U.N. building where China’s review was being held, “those Chinese GONGOs were taking pictures of us.”
“I did not report [this] to the U.N. authorities because I lost faith in them, as China was acting … like the U.N. was its playground,” Abbas was quoted as saying in the report.
The ICIJ said that independent organizations now have a greater responsibility to speak out about atrocities due to the rise of autocracy around the world.
“If China’s power continues to go unchecked by U.N. authorities, it threatens the credibility of the institution in its efforts to monitor and document violations and abuses not just in China, but all over the world,” the group said.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.