Neville Roy Singham, the China-based Marxist businessman who funds a sprawling global activist network, stood before a Chinese Communist Party-backed forum in Shanghai last November and laid out a striking argument: the history of World War II is a Western lie, and dismantling that lie is essential to building the "new world order" proposed by Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Singham did not stop at remarks. He released a 174-page report to accompany his speech, a document that reframes the Allied victory over fascism as a propaganda construct designed to prop up American hegemony. The report argues that socialism, not Anglo-American industrial power, defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japan, and that the postwar international order rests on a foundation of deliberate falsehood.
The report and the forum appearance, first detailed by Just the News, amount to something more than eccentric historical revisionism. They represent a coordinated effort, timed to the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, to undermine the legitimacy of the American-led international system and replace it with a framework that serves Beijing's strategic interests.
Singham's report opens with a provocation. It claims the "Western powers spin their familiar tale" that "U.S. industrial might and British resolve saved the world from fascism," then flatly declares: "This is a lie."
The document goes further, asserting that fascism, colonialism, and capitalism are simply three faces of the same system. In Singham's framing, the real conflict was never among democracy, fascism, and communism but between socialism and capitalism, "with fascism as capitalism's emergency response to revolutionary threat."
At the Shanghai forum, Singham said as much in his own words:
"This fascist lie that the West says that there's a battle between fascism, democracy, and communism, they make a fake argument that there are three systems... In fact, fascism is actually a face of capitalism and imperialism, as is colonialism."
He then connected this argument directly to Beijing's geopolitical ambitions. Singham told the forum that the "international rules-based order", the phrase Western governments use to describe the postwar system of alliances, institutions, and norms, was "created by another lie." He said the United States protected fascists and installed them in power in Japan and Italy after the war.
His conclusion was explicit. As Fox News Digital reported, Singham declared at the forum:
"If we want to, therefore, have a new world order that is based on multilateralism that President Xi and CPC and China have proposed, we have to undo the ideological damage that has been done by the narrative of World War II."
That sentence deserves a second read. Singham is not merely offering a contrarian take on history. He is arguing that rewriting the accepted record of the bloodiest conflict in human history is a prerequisite for replacing the current international order with one shaped by the Chinese Communist Party.
A large portion of Singham's 174-page document is devoted to elevating the Chinese Communist Party's role in defeating Japan during World War II. The report claims that CPC guerrilla forces "tied down 60% of Japanese forces and 95% of puppet forces", figures Singham calls "not some vague 'bulk' but a precise, bleeding majority." He wrote that the CPC's Hundred Regiments Offensive of 1940 "shattered Japanese infrastructure."
He also acknowledged a dual-front structure, stating that Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces "engaged 36% of Japanese forces" through conventional battles while the CPC handled the rest through guerrilla warfare.
But historians cited in the Just the News report paint a different picture. The Taipei Times assessed that from 1937 to 1945, there were 23 battles in which both sides deployed at least a regiment, and that among 1,117 significant engagements on a smaller scale, the CCP fought in only one. A book cited in the report noted that Zhou Enlai told Stalin in January 1940 that more than one million Chinese soldiers had been killed or wounded, but "only 30,000 were from the Eighth Route Army and 1,000 from the New Fourth Army", meaning the Communists had suffered roughly 3 percent of the casualties.
Endo Homare, director of the Center of International Relations at Tokyo University, went further, calling it a "myth that CPC forces fought valiantly with the Japanese army during the Sino-Japanese War." Endo argued that Mao "concentrated his efforts on conspiring with the Japanese army to weaken the KMT forces... even going as far as to propose a truce between the CPC forces and the Japanese army."
Even Mao himself, in a 1972 meeting with the Japanese prime minister, reportedly said something that undercuts Singham's narrative:
"We must express our gratitude to Japan. If Japan didn't invade China, we could never have achieved the cooperation between the KMT and the Communist Party. We could have never developed and eventually taken political power for ourselves."
That is not the language of a leader whose forces bore the brunt of the war. It is the language of a strategist who exploited the war to seize power afterward.
Singham's report does not limit its revisionism to the Pacific theater. It also reframes the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the 1939 non-aggression agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, as an act of defensive necessity. Singham wrote that "facing isolation, Stalin signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939, not from choice but from necessity created by Western collusion with Hitler."
History tells a less charitable story. The pact, signed on August 23, 1939, contained a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east on September 17. History.com, as cited by Just the News, noted the secret protocol's role in carving up the region.
Historian Roger Moorhouse, author of The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939, 1941, directly challenged the defensive-necessity argument:
"Stalin was much more proactive and anti-Western in signing the pact than has conventionally been appreciated. His motivations were complex, of course, but on one level at least, he was seeking to exploit Nazi aggression to his own ends, to speed the fall of the West and capitalism's long-awaited collapse. An unwilling or passive 'neutral,' he was not."
Meanwhile, Singham's report compared Winston Churchill to Adolf Hitler, writing that Churchill's "genocidal impulses targeted communists and colonised peoples equally" and that "Britain venerates this man, who differed from Hitler only in his victory." He cited the Bengal Famine of 1943, claiming it "killed 3 million Indians through British policy."
Hillsdale College's Churchill Project, also cited in the report, pushed back, arguing "the true facts about food shipments to Bengal", noting that more than a million tons of grain arrived in Bengal between August 1943 and the end of 1944. The famine was a catastrophe. Equating Churchill with Hitler is not history. It is propaganda.
Singham is not a lone crank writing pamphlets. Fox News Digital has reported that he has funded a global network of roughly 2,000 organizations, including groups such as The People's Forum and efforts linked to Code Pink, the anti-war group co-founded by his wife, Jodie Evans. Just the News described him as leading and funding "a global far-left activist and financial network with links inside the U.S. and abroad." His wife, Evans, has been the subject of scrutiny in her own right; Congress has demanded answers about Code Pink's ties to the CCP.
That network has real reach. Chinese state media has amplified U.S. anti-war protests organized by activist groups linked to this same network, creating a feedback loop: American organizations funded by a pro-CCP financier stage domestic protests, and Beijing's propaganda apparatus broadcasts them back to the world as evidence of American decline.
Singham's report even lists among its sources a speech by Chinese Ambassador Zhang Weidong and a report delivered by Mao to a CCP National Congress, hardly the bibliography of an independent scholar. The Global South Academic Forum, which Singham referenced in his Shanghai remarks, appears to serve as an institutional vehicle for this kind of ideological output.
The broader pattern, leftist solidarity activism that functions as ideological tourism for authoritarian regimes, is familiar. What sets Singham apart is the scale of his funding, the directness of his alignment with CCP messaging, and the ambition of his project: not just to criticize American foreign policy but to dismantle the historical narrative on which the postwar order rests.
The U.S. War Department's report on China, released in December, assessed that "China's People's Liberation Army has for decades marshaled resources, technology, and political will to achieve its vision of a world-class military" and that "the PLA is a key component of China's ambition to displace the United States as the world's most powerful nation."
Singham's project fits neatly into that ambition. If the story of World War II can be rewritten, if the sacrifice of American servicemen can be dismissed as capitalist calculation, if the Holocaust can be folded into a broader indictment of Western civilization, if Stalin's pact with Hitler can be excused as self-defense, then the moral authority that underpins the American-led order dissolves. That is not an accident. That is the point.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has stated plainly: "Nazi Germany committed mass murder on an unprecedented scale. The Nazis and their allies and collaborators killed six million Jewish people." Estimates of total World War II dead, as cited from Encyclopedia Britannica in the report, range from 35 million to 60 million, with 15 million to 20 million in Europe alone.
Singham's report closes with a line that reads less like scholarship and more like a manifesto: "History is on our side. That is why they lie about who won the war. That is why we must tell the truth."
A request for comment was sent to Singham through Jodie Evans. The report did not indicate a response.
When a wealthy American citizen stands in Shanghai, at a forum backed by a hostile foreign power, and declares that the history of the war his own countrymen fought and died in is a lie, that is not scholarship. That is a choice. And it tells you everything about whose side he is on.
