Why is Gates giving $600 million to China?
The Gates Foundation's donations, aimed at expanding China's colonial interests across Africa, might be questionable under any U.S. political administration----but especially Trump.
A friend of mine recently sent me the picture above—from a Taiwanese bookstore that prominently featured the newest translation of my book, “The Bill Gates Problem.”
As the picture shows, the cover art of my book is featured on a large poster hanging above a display table. On the table are translations of my book—and also, curiously, copies of Bill Gates’s recent memoir, “Source Code.”
While my book has always had more success abroad as it has in my home country, the United States, I don’t think my book has ever overshadowed Gates’s book in any commercial space like this. It’s a welcome surprise, but also a mystery. How did I get top billing—in Taiwan of all places?
I have no idea, but this episode gives me the opportunity to examine an important part of Gates’s philanthropic work that I didn’t have the time or space to address fully in my book: the Gates Foundation’s close relationship with China—the super-power that asserts control over Taiwan.
As Western media amplifies the pro-democracy demonstrations in Taiwan challenging China’s colonial influence, the Gates Foundation has taken a far less sympathetic posture. On the foundation’s website, for example, it lists Taiwan simply as a “province of China”—with no recognition of its claims to independence.
Gates’s political positioning on Taiwan aligns with its expansive financial relationship with China. The foundation has given at least $573 million in charitable donations to Chinese organizations since 2002.1 This includes hundreds of financial gifts to content creators, advocacy groups, universities, pharma developers and others. The foundation also opened an office in Beijing in 2007 “under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Health of the People’s Republic of China”—described as a partnership that helps coordinate work on public health, tobacco control and agriculture.
What’s especially notable about the foundation’s financial giving is that so much of it appears aimed at helping China expand its colonial footprint on the African continent. This includes $5.8 million in donations to the China International Center for Economic and Technical Exchanges “to enhance China’s role as a development partner to Asia and Africa” and “to strengthen China’s role as a development partner to Africa” (and for other projects).
Such donations from an American philanthropy might be questionable under any U.S. political administration, but they may have special potential to draw critical attention from the ascendant political right in the United States. Earlier this summer, for example, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health Policy, chaired by Republican Ted Cruz, held a hearing titled “China’s malign influence in Africa.” Likewise, Republicans have already used Harvard University’s financial relationship with Chinese donors as a pretext to target the school.
Given that many of Trump’s advisors and allies in his second presidential term are also eager to challenge Gates, as I reported last November, the foundation’s ties to China could be a significant political liability right now. We’ve already seen Gates eagerly capitulate to Trump several times, including walking back commitments to DEI and climate change. Just last week, the New York Times reported that the foundation was ending a philanthropic partnership with a liberal dark-money group targeted by the political right.
Given this pattern of capitulation, one would expect the foundation to also scale back its work in China. My analysis of the foundation’s funding shows that a retreat may already be underway. In the first eight months of 2024, under President Biden, the foundation gave 17 donations to organizations working in China. In 2023, the number was 13. By contrast, in 2025—under Trump—the foundation has only given four.
A closer look at Gates’s donations often shows a blurring line between humanitarianism and helping expand Chinese economic and political interests. Some examples include:
-$300,000 to CCPIT Academy Limited Company “to conduct research to encourage effective delivery of Chinese investment in agriculture in Africa”
-$300,000 to China Technology Investment & Trade Asset Management (Beijing) Co. Ltd. “to help promote Chinese agricultural investment in Africa”
-$380,000 to Diinsider Co., Ltd (which calls itself a ‘content creator’) “to build an enabling environment for advocacy on China-Africa partnership in health and development through strategic communications”
-$28 million to Peking University, including projects “to leverage Chinese investment, technology and foreign aid to meet absolute health needs and reduce health inequities for the poorest and most disadvantaged people in African countries,” and “to identify and prioritize opportunities for engaging African smallholder farmers in agricultural trade with China” and “to develop global health strategies and contribute to the outcomes for the second Belt and Road Health Cooperation Summit in 2019 and to enhance China’s capacity in engaging in global health diplomacy and governance”
-$1.3 million to the China Chamber of Commerce, including for a project “to promote increased commodities exchange, investments and technology transfer which improves the accessibility, affordability and quality of healthcare products in Africa”
-$18 million to CanSino Biologics Inc., a pharma company, including one project “to expand CanSino’s capability to conduct clinical trials in Africa”
-$1.2 million to Zhejiang University “to engage China [to] play a bigger role in global governance” and “to strengthen China's aid and assistance to Africa” and other projects
Questions sent to the Gates Foundation generated no response. I also invited the foundation to sit for an interview to discuss its work with China for a future article. Again, no response.
The foundation’s relationship with China should raise questions that go beyond the America-first jingoism that Trump allies (and also many centrist-liberals) might bring to the table. As a non-profit philanthropy, the Gates Foundation is heavily subsidized by taxpayers—to the tune of billions of dollars. Why are American taxpayers helping fund Gates’s efforts to expand Chinese influence across Africa? Indeed, why are taxpayers subsidizing Gates, a multi-billionaire, to do anything? (The Gates Foundation spends far more money supporting U.S. economic and political interests across Africa as it does Chinese interests—a body of work that appears just as problematic and colonial.)
Another question to consider: if Gates is a humanitarian helping the poorest of the poor, as he claims, why is he giving so much to China—the world’s second largest economy? Instead of giving money to China (or the United States for that matter) to help Africa, why not just give the money directly to African institutions—so they can help themselves?
Perhaps the most puzzling question of all: why would China, famously resistant to foreign influence, allow an American billionaire to gain so much financial influence inside its borders? The Gates Foundation is even donating millions of dollars directly to Chinese government agencies, like this gift to the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture:
These are probably book-length (or chapter-length) questions, but here’s my quick take on Gates-China relations:
The Gates Foundation has global ambitions in its humanitarian work. This means it needs buy-in from nations all over the world. Gates looks to China, as a powerful funder and voting member of the World Health Organization (and other influential venues), to support (or at least not challenge) its global health agenda. Playing nice with China—by partnering with it on philanthropy, by publicly proclaiming Taiwan to be a province of China, by downplaying the lab-leak-from-China debate around Covid2—is one way for Gates to buy influence.
A second reason Gates wants to be so close to China is that the nation, unwittingly, plays a vital role in Bill Gates’s self-aggrandizing claims of success. Many, if not most, of the tens of millions of lives Gates endlessly, bombastically claims to have saved through his philanthropy actually have nothing to do with his interventions; they have to do things like China’s rapidly developing economy, which has lifted families out of poverty. Without China’s economic success, Gates’s philanthropic narrative (and his reported Nobel-Peace-Prize campaign) would be much diminished.
Another reason Gates is so friendly with China is because the country plays such a large role in development projects across the African continent, where the Gates Foundation also has a very big footprint. Invariably, as the foundation tries to influence public policy across Africa, it will find itself confronting China, so it needs to be on good terms.
Finally, it is important to remember that Gates has a very rich life outside of his work as a philanthropist. He controls a personal fortune worth well over $100 billion, which he is very keen to expand—including through private investments that overlap with Chinese national interests. Gates, for example, is backing a mining company named KoBold, which recently secured a deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo to exploit the nation’s lithium reserves. Gates’s investments in minerals puts him in competition with China, a major player across the African continent in mineral extraction. (This is actually a key reason China does so much development work building infrastructure across Africa—to exploit the continent’s natural resources.)
Just as many journalists and observers have long raised very credible questions about the ways that the Gates Foundation’s work may deliver rewards to the company Bill Gates founded, Microsoft, it is reasonable to raise questions about how Gates’s personal investments may color his philanthropic partnerships with China.
What does China take from working with Gates? It gets money—$600 million. But far more valuable than that, it gets political goodwill. Partnering with one of the world’s most admired and revered philanthropists gives China credibility and legitimacy on the global stage. It allows China to assert that its development work, like its Belt and Road Initiative, is humanitarian in nature, not colonial. One Gates Foundation grant is even aimed at helping China to brand itself as a “global public good provider” to the world.
China’s relationship with Bill Gates, one of the United States’s most wealthy and powerful political figures, could also be understood in terms of proxy power. In many places around the world, Gates often appears to function as a kind of unofficial American diplomat—someone with very close ties with the U.S. political class, including (historically) the U.S. Department of State. He’s also someone who spends much of his time flying around the world meeting government leaders, almost like a statesman. (For what it’s worth, there is also an interesting history of U.S. intelligence efforts to collaborate with American philanthropies.)
As a private philanthropist, Gates can function as an informal diplomat between the U.S. and China (and other nations where he operates). In June 2023, as an example—amidst tension between China and the United States—Gates personally traveled to China where he was welcomed by president Xi Jinping as “the first American friend I’ve seen this year.” Afterwards, the Chinese government issued a statement describing the meeting in terms of strengthening “China-US relations” (not China-Gates relations).
I’m scratching the surface with these explanations. There’s more that I could report. And much more that I don’t know. If there are any journalists working in, on, or around Taiwan and China who want to take a close look at this big, mostly untold story, I hope my reporting and my book can be a guidepost. And that’s where I’ll leave readers— with the amazing cover art of the new translation of my book, available for purchase here and here.
The total sum of money the foundation is giving to organizations in China could be much higher than what is reported in its charitable grants, $573 million. It is impossible to fully follow the money because significant sums flow from Gates through what are, essentially, dark-money channels. My book, “The Bill Gates Problem,” includes an entire chapter on these transparency issues.
In my email to the Gates Foundation, I asked for clarification: “I know that the foundation moves money to partners through many channels (not simply charitable grants), so I'm writing today to ask for the total sum of money that the foundation has given to organizations based in China---all money, all time.”
My question generated no response.
Given how aggressively Bill Gates has asserted himself as an expert on pandemics—even writing a book that purports to prescribe how the world can prevent future pandemics—his careful efforts to avoid weighing in on the origins of Covid is puzzling. How can we possibly talk about preventing the next pandemic if we can’t even agree on the origins of the most recent one?