According to an article Duowei News published, on November 4, seven Chinese visiting scholars at the University of California Davis campus formed a Chinese Communist Party branch office on campus. The Dalian University of Technology news website published the news first but then deleted the news from its website. The Duowei article reported that these seven visiting scholars are teachers from seven different universities in China who are either existing party members or probationary party members. The party secretary is one of the teachers from Dalian University of Technology School of Power and Energy. The other six teachers came from Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, Dalian University of Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Jiangsu University, Nanjing Agricultural University, and Hohai University. The branch office vows to “continue to recruit new members; organize the group to study the latest party theory and ideology from China; resist the corrosive influence from the west; and enable the members of the branch office and other Chinese patriotic people to experience warm caring from the party office.” The branch office will recruit new members starting with the existing members to target their colleagues or neighbors. They will also have one group activity every two weeks. The branch office is currently under the management of the Dalian University of Technology in China, which recommended that the branch get in touch with other party organizations in the U.S. that the Chinese communist Party has set up in order to seek leadership in the U.S.
The article reported that one of the organizers told Voice of America (VOA) during an interview that they disbanded the organization after they found out that it had violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act passed in 1938, which the U.S. Department of Justice administers. U.S. law requires that an organization must “disclose its relationship with the foreign government and any information about related activities and finances.” The organizer asked the media not to have too much news coverage of this topic because he does not want the lives of the existing members to be disrupted. Based on this news, there is no indication that the organization is still in operation.
Source: Duowei News, November 19, 2017
http://news.dwnews.com/china/news/2017-11-19/60024426.html