From Movement to Racket: The Metamorphosis of Chinese for Affirmative Action

$16,797,759 in revenue, $15,888,677 in expenses, $909,082 in net income and $47,246,990 in net assets. You would be wrong if you think you are reading a business’s profit and loss statement summary. This is from latest IRS Form 990 of Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), a 501(c)(3) organization based in San Francisco. 

The sheer volume of financial success from this not-for-profit group, founded in 1969 to “protect the civil and political rights of Chinese Americans and to advance multiracial democracy,” is befuddling. How does CAA make its fortune? How has it been using its $47-million-dollar portfolio to further civil rights for Americans of Asian descent? Our deep dive into CAA, touted as one of America’s oldest civil-rights organizations for Asian Americans, exposes the organization as a grift built on the ideological poison of race and powered by federal funds. 

1. CAA has received support from the federal government (Biden) and major progressive foundations to launch “Stop Asian Hate,” advance DEI, support BLM and oppose Israel

If civil rights are fundamentally individual rights of equal access/protection, today’s CAA is focused on political priorities antithetical to civil rights. Its main operations – racial equity, immigration reforms and criminal justice reforms, lushly funded by public taxpayer money and private foundation grants, comport squarely with evolving demands of progressivism.

In 2024, CAA was awarded a $2-million-dollar federal grant by the U.S. Department of Justice to carry out a three-year project for “stop AAPI hate community-based approaches to prevent and address hate crimes and/or hate incidents.” This represented the Biden Administration’s official endorsement of the fear-mongering, divisive, melodramatic and untrue narrative of unprecedented hate crimes singling out Asian Americans without acknowledging rising threats against public safety in general. (I detailed the fallacy of hate crimes/incidents over general crime waves in this 2023 testimony to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.)

In fact, CAA has supported “equitable” criminal justice reforms by endorsing Proposition 47 in 2014, a notorious proposal contributing to a statewide crime spree in absence of proportionate penalties. To this end, CAA has secured funding from Libra, a grantmaking organization that “prioritizes multi-year, unrestricted grants to frontline, BIPOC-led organizations,” to sponsor an initiative called “Asian Prisoner Support Committee (APSC).” In addition to advocating for criminal justice, APSC also organizes anti-deportation campaigns, culturally relevant reentry programs and Ethnic Studies lessons for prisoners. In 2019, CAA invested $522,912 in the APSC to combat “overcriminalization” of Asian youth.

Between 2010 and 2024, CAA received over $1.3 million from the Evelyn & Walter Haas Jr. Fund, a leading progressive grant maker, to expand immigrant voting rights and promote Asian-American activism in state policymaking. From 2020 to 2024, CAA obtained 5 grants totaling $290,000 from Unbound Philanthropy to develop “Chinese language digital engagement.” Unbound Philanthropy is a New York City-based left-wing donor affinity group that primarily funds groups on “left-of-center liberal expansionist immigration policies.” In 2021, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation gave CAA $250,000 to implement a 3-month initiative that “organizes, inspires, and trains grassroots leaders of transgender, non-binary, and queer Asian and Pacific Islander communities.” Other big funders for CAA include: Kaiser Permanente, AAPI Civic Engagement Fund, and the late Laura Lai. 

CAA has also branched out to other “communities of color,” having been awarded a grant of unknown amounts from the Rosenberg Foundation to partner up with #BlackLivesMatter in 2025. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling against race-based college admissions, CAA secured funding from the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans to combat disinformation and fight for racial equity in higher education. Notably, CAA gave $102,704 to the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, a far-left pro-Palestinian nonprofit that “opposes the existence of Israel” and supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel.

2. From fighting discrimination to championing discrimination 

In the beginning, Chinese for Affirmative Action stayed focused on its vision for “a world in which all people live free from bigotry, discrimination, hate, prejudice, and bias.” The group represented plaintiffs in Lau v. Nichols (1974), a landmark Supreme Court case that expanded public school students’ access to bilingual education. 

But as its wallet and influence grew, CAA switched from opposing discrimination to supporting racial preferences. In 1996, it participated in the campaign coalition against the California Civil Rights Initiative, which brought the passage of Prop. 209, our nation’s first statewide constitutional ban on government preferences. Luckily, in spite of huge financial support from the California Teachers Association and Democratic National Committee, the campaign failed. CAA prides itself for playing “a lead role in coordinating opposition (against Prop. 209).” 

In the 28 years since Prop. 209 was approved, CAA has devoted itself to systematically sabotaging the constitutional principle of equal protection. It has cooked up “studies” demonstrating harms of equal treatment, campaigned for SCA 5 – a failed proposal to repeal the higher education portion of Prop. 209 in 2014, and then campaigned for Prop. 16 – the ill-fated blanket repeal of Prop. 209 in 2020. 

Ironically, in a televised debate on Prop. 16 four years ago, two CAA representatives accused me of “taking dark money.” In reality, CAA is a multi-million-dollar grift, a large portion of which has unknown origins. 

3. Dark money, double dipping and foreign agents

I have scrubbed the internet but couldn’t find much more about CAA’s funding sources than the information provided in section 1 of this report. Its publicly accessible Forms 990 tell an elusive tale: for instance, in 2023, when the organization reported  $16.8 million in revenue and $47.2 million in net assets, its IRS filing shows $10.4 million of the revenue as “all other contributions, gifts, grants and similar amounts” with no further details. Since 2010, CAA has refused to disclose or self-report major donors. Adding in what I’ve found independently, 99% of its 2023 revenue was unaccounted for! Speaking of dark money?!

And the story doesn’t end here. In 2020, CAA made $7.1 million in revenue and categorized the earnings as $4.3 million in gifts, grants, contributions and membership fees, and $19,496 in interest, dividends and royalties. The filing didn’t mention that the failed “Yes on 16” Campaign paid the group over $13,000 for “staff time reimbursement.” Is it legal for a 501(c) (3) to take money from a political campaign?

During the Prop. 16 campaign, Chinese for Affirmative Action had on its staff two Chinese nationals by the name of Chentao (Terry) Cui and Jinxia Niu, both of whom had visible ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Cui had worked for Chinese state television as a longtime reporter until 2019 and was on the forefront defending Prop. 16, going so far as to represent CAA in a TV debate with CFER. Niu, CAA’s “Chinese Digital Engagement Program Manager,” had extensive working experiences with Zhejiang Daily Press and South China Morning Post, both of which were owned by the Chinese state. In 2024, Kelly Wong, another CAA staffer who is a Chinese national, was appointed to San Francisco’s Election Committee. The irony is not lost that a “disinformation-fighting” nonprofit has peddled foreign adversary influence in domestic politics!

The shocking story of CAA is a somber reminder of Eric Hoffer’s famous quibble, that “(e)very great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” For true defenders of civil rights, CAA (and many other similar grifts) is a cautionary tale: radical ideologies corrupt ideologues and turn them into self-interested snake oil salesmen. We must stay devoted to the greater principle of equality – the true cornerstone of civil rights- while fend off greed and dogmatism.