Charity As Infiltration: The Tang Family and the Committee of 100
Relatively unknown philanthropists open the door to CCP influence over America.
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.
On January 27, the New York Times ran a seemingly apolitical story on Section C Page 1 of its Monday edition. The story reported, “with major gifts to leading arts institutions, Oscar L. Tang and Agnes Hsu‐Tang have recently landed in the center of New York cultural philanthropy.” It was titled “The Tangs, New Donor Royalty, Step Into the Spotlight.”
“Royalty” isn’t an American idea, but then big philanthropy isn’t either—they are foreign and political ones. Indeed, for more than two centuries, American philanthropy has been the project of operators, often linked to foreign interests, who want to turn America into something resembling a monarchy or an aristocracy rather than a constitutional republic. Investigating this history and the Tangs’ place inside it reveals them as the latest players in a long-revolving wheel. But they are arguably more dangerous than some of their predecessors.
Their danger comes not just from the Tangs’ American influence, which is more subtle than most philanthropic and political operators. It also comes from their ties to China, the single most powerful nation in the world outside of America, and how they use those ties to advance an agenda that favors the CCP.
The Originators of Political Philanthropy: Their Institutions and Aims…
Political philanthropy is almost as old as the republic. Beginning in the 1790s, financial operators tied to the government-backed First National Bank in Boston and New York used philanthropic ventures to encourage citizens to look away from self-rule and toward an elite government of the educated and cultured. Early moves included founding the New York Historical Society and the Boston Atheneum. Often the people funding these institutions were buying their way to respectability. The Lowell Family, significant players in the Atheneum, made much of its fortune off processing cotton picked by Southern slaves at its factories in Lowell Massachusetts. The Forbes Family, which was instrumental in the building of the Atheneum and other Boston philanthropies, got much of its fortune from running opium to China.
By the 1870s, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was being constructed for the same purpose by old-money WASP financiers. It was filled with European treasures by John Pierpont Morgan, after a career that had started with slave-backed cotton and ended with monopolies. The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts was created by the third generation of Rockefellers, the family whose first generation made its name in the oil wars and whose third generation funded the clearing out of Puerto Rican neighborhoods to build Lincoln Center. This clearing out began the rise in crime in New York’s poorer communities that plagues them to this day. It’s also the theme of the remake by Steven Spielberg of West Side Story.
By the 2010s, the process was continuing again, featuring new players. One was the Sackler Family, which stocked wings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art using profits from the addictive opioids it sold to working class Americans from the 1970s on. Another, this time donating to the home of the New York Philharmonic at the Lincoln Center, was David Geffen; who had made his name in part by mainstreaming rap music in L.A. then poured his fortune into Democratic or internationalist interest groups like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).
All of these donors had messages they wanted to send to the public. The Boston Atheneum was the site, in the populist Jacksonian heyday of the 1830s, of exhibitions dedicated to emphasizing the importance of respectability at populism’s expense. The Atlantic, which was founded by another level of the Lowell Family, was meant to allow Boston elites, left out of the country’s populism, to redefine the “idea” of America based on high culture, often from Europe. The Metropolitan Museum and Lincoln Center received funds from people like the Morgans and Rockefellers and Sacklers looking for legitimacy in the face of widespread criticism of their business practices.
The Tangs are the latest movers in this revolving wheel.
The Tang’s Giving, the Message it Sends…
The Tangs’ recent largesse is extensive. In the past four years alone, they have given $125 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; $40 million to the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center; and $20 million to the New York Historical Society for the Tang Wing for American Democracy, which “is scheduled to open next year in time for the country’s 250th anniversary.” And the Tangs’ status in this world of giving is correspondingly large. Oscar is a trustee emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and co-chair of the Philharmonic. Agnes is a former managing director on the Metropolitan Opera board and Chairwoman of the New York Historical Society.
What the Tangs are funding at these institutions, and have been funding even before the 2020s, seem to be a mix of internationalist art and art from what the Tangs call marginalized groups. According to The Times, the Tangs’ personal “gifts to the Met’s Asian department include 20 important Chinese paintings from the 11th to the 18th century as well as the Song dynasty hanging scroll, ‘Riverbank.’” The New York Historical Society featured the Tangs’ personal contributions for the “exhibition ‘Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion’ on the history of U.S.-China trade and immigration.” It also accepted Agnes Hsu-Tang’s donations for an exhibit “featuring the contemporary Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick,” who made her career off of government funding for multicultural art and is a regular participant in globalist events like the Venice Biennale.
One of Hsu-Tang’s goals seems to be to equate the history of Chinese Americans with the history of indigenous Americans, since she argues:
[D]escendants of the first Americans have been systemically enslaved, murdered, and banished from their ancestral land since the 1840s . . . [in a] systemic cultural genocide . . . Advocating for the inclusion of Indigenous and other historically marginalized heritages—our own included—in the modern and contemporary milieu, is a critical part of our donor intention.
These focuses on internationalism and marginalization don’t come by accident. According to Oscar, speaking to the Times about the reasons for their increased giving:
During Covid, with anti-Asian hate, we realized . . . that we can set an example, that we earned our right to be part of this society, that we are an integral part of this society.
The Tangs’ stance has significant reach, because institutions like the New York Historical Society and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have extensive connections to public education. The Historical Society reaches deep into New York schools, which can bring its lessons into classrooms for a small fee, thanks to the generosity of the National Endowment for the Humanities; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Judging by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website and its deep pockets, the Met’s reach into schools is even deeper and wider.
…and the Questions it Raises
Given the unique message the Tangs are sending, and its reach, certain details of the story raise concerns.
One concern is the haziness, if not unsavoriness, attending their donations.
The exhibition of Kay WalkingStick at the New York Historical Society, directly from Agnes Hsu-Tang’s collection, provoked controversy, since “for a museum to feature art owned by the chairwoman of that museum can raise ethical questions, given that the value of that art is enhanced by such an exhibition.” Oscar Tang’s initial involvement with the New York Historical Society also seems controversial, since he was approached by the Society’s director for “input” on the “Chinese American: Inclusion/Exclusion” exhibit, then ended up donating his own mementos to the exhibit as well as providing funding even as his ideas were incorporated into the exhibit.
Nor have the Tangs’ donations to the higher-profile Metropolitan Museum of Art escaped this haziness. Their donation of the Song Dynasty river scroll Riverbank, called by the Met “one of the most important Chinese landscape paintings in existence,” created a new “debate over its attribution.” The origins of this debate go back to Oscar Tang purchasing the painting (and promising it to the Museum) in the 1990s. At that time, one of America’s most prominent scholars of Chinese Art, James Cahill, argued that “the painting was not a work of the 10th century but a [20th century] forgery…” The Met now says that “scholarly consensus in…favor” of the painting’s authenticity has “grown stronger” and that “Professor Cahill’s minority opinion has grown increasingly marginal.” But the Met only made this statement, and accepted Tang’s donation of the painting, in 2017, three years after Professor Cahill died.
The Tang Operation
The other concern is the Tangs’ relatively unknown influence. This is especially the case considering that most people exercising their level of “soft power”—like Michael Bloomberg, with whom they are pictured in The Times’ article; not to mention David Geffen, the Sacklers, or the Morgans and Rockefellers, Forbeses and Lowells before them—receive regular and attendant public scrutiny.
The article explains this lacuna by presenting the Tangs as new arrivals to power, noting that “the center of New York cultural philanthropy…remains dominated by white donors.” But the Tangs are not new arrivals. Indeed, like most of our multicultural elite which has increasingly accrued political and corporate power since the 1970s, the Tangs are the products of longtime financial status and social connections. In the Tangs’ case, these connections lead back to New York, Cambridge, Hong Kong, Beijing.
Oscar Tang “came from an industrialist family in textile manufacturing in Shanghai.” His grandfather, Wen Bingzhong, was “one of the 120 young boys sent by the late Qing imperial court to study in America as part of the Chinese Education Mission in the late 19th century.” His father, Tang Ping-Yuan, attended M.I.T., which was part of the philanthropic boom funded by the Lowells and Forbes, and a hall there is named after him. According to The Times, Tang Ping-Yuan “later rebuilt the family business in Hong Kong.” Oscar Tang built on this heritage with a successful financial services firm he founded in New York in the 1970s, and also with two of his three marriages.
Oscar Tang’s first marriage was to the stepdaughter of Wellington Koo: a legendary Chinese diplomat to America who, improbably, managed to represent China during both its civil war and the aftermath, meaning he worked for the governments of both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. Through his marriage, Tang also become the brother-in-law of Wen Fong, an esteemed practitioner of Chinese Art History at Princeton University from 1954 until 1999, who more or less brought the subject to America. (It was Fong who seems to have been the initial link between Tang and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) Oscar Tang’s third marriage is to Agnes Hsu-Tang: the descendant of two grand ministers of the Chinese Empire.
On its face, two Chinese-American citizens with a history of ties to pre-CCP China and pre-CCP Hong Kong might suggest people with a deep commitment to constitutional democracy and American self-rule. But Agnes’s, and more to the point Oscar’s, histories suggest otherwise. At each inflection point in America’s relationship with China, Oscar Tang has acted in a way that, like Wellington Koo before him, benefits China regardless of who in China is calling the shots.
Specifically, he has co-founded an organization, the Committee of 100, which has worked for 35 years to deepen American ties with China. The Committee expands on the project Tang pursues through his philanthropy: to use his influence to spread narratives which function to benefit China into the American mainstream. As this report has shown, exhibits and catalogues and classroom materials accomplish the project for Tang via culture. As a follow-up report will show, the Committee accomplishes the project for Tang, and his allies, through explicitly political means.