Primary institutional, regulatory, procurement, platform, and tax records cited at the bottom of the article.
Correction, August 28, 2026:
This article now distinguishes Xinhua News Agency ( 新华通讯社; abbreviated 新华社 ) from Jonathan Choi's Sunwah Group (新华集团, sometimes rendered “Xinhua Group”) and separates the agency's 2021 capacity figures from TRS's direct 2019 agency contract.
X reported roughly 200,000 suspected China-origin inauthentic accounts and singled out about 200 that entered the American argument over AI data centers, electricity prices, grid stress, and capacity auctions. OpenAI went a step further. Its Data Center Bandwagon case placed the operator inside a private Chinese technology company serving provincial government clients. Internal materials showed a social-media team building fabricated American personas, aging accounts, maintaining backups, testing advertisements, measuring audience response, avoiding detection, and automating platform logins and interactions. [1,2]
OpenAI did not name the company. Chinese public records do identify the structure surrounding that kind of contractor. The relationships are formal and repeated: CICG directs national external communication; CICG's ACCWS turns that mission into platform requirements; ACCWS hires TRS; Fudan partners with ACCWS and buys from TRS; BNU and NJU maintain their own TRS relationships; Choi and Sun Wah connect those same universities through money, boards, centers, facilities, and long-running agreements.
The question is institutional structure, not private motive. Businesses seek contracts and access. Universities seek funding, data, and partnerships. Donors seek prestige and durable relationships. The common direction comes from the bodies that write the requirements, pay for the systems, and own the results.
From the Top
China International Communications Group, or CICG, describes itself as subordinate to the CCP Central Committee and responsible for Party and state external communication. CICG established and operates the Academy of Contemporary China and World Studies, or ACCWS. Fudan University's School of Journalism lists ACCWS as a core partner in its Ministry of Education International Communication Joint Research Institute. CICG is the supervising institution, ACCWS is the platform buyer, Fudan is an institutional partner, and TRS is the selected technology supplier. [15,16,17]
ACCWS has selected TRS more than once. TRS records an RMB 11.874 million platform award in 2018. On August 27, 2026, ACCWS awarded TRS another RMB 5.6616 million contract. The new tender requires collection from news sites, Facebook, X, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok; at least 50 million new records per day; and collection and translation across at least 100 languages. [18]
The tender calls the system a national "international communication intelligence pool." It requires profiles of foreign people and institutions linked to their social accounts and attitudes toward China, propagation tracing, real-time measurement of communication effects, configurable AI agents, model-training knowledge bases, and a "public-opinion struggle sandbox simulation" for testing responses to negative China-related issues and predicting what comes next. The contract assigns the collected and analyzed data, source code, and project intellectual property to ACCWS.
This is top-down planning written in procurement language. ACCWS defines the targets, scale, functions, users, and ownership. TRS is paid to make the system work. That relationship matters because TRS also appears inside the universities connected to ACCWS and Choi.
TRS appears across the same institutions
In July 2026, Fudan awarded Guangzhou TRS Big Data an RMB 778,000, twelve-month contract for managed collection from X, Facebook, and YouTube. Fudan supplies keywords, accounts, hashtags, URLs, and search expressions. TRS keeps the collection running and delivers the data inside China for international-communication research, public-opinion analysis, intelligence assessment, and decision support. [3]
The procurement file estimates routine annual collection of 12.56 million X posts and comments, 6.43 million Facebook records, and 2 million YouTube records. At least ten additional thematic batches would average three million records each, bringing planned volume to about 51 million records. The service covers at least 350 monitored overseas accounts and historical backfill. [4]
The contract specifies proxy addresses with second-level switching, maintained X and Facebook account matrices, automated account aging, CAPTCHA services, browser-fingerprint masking, simulated user behavior, and responses to new platform controls within 24 hours. The price includes overseas-platform account purchase and maintenance. Fudan bought a collection service; the specifications show the contractor possessing account-management and detection-avoidance capabilities that reach well beyond ordinary academic web research.
TRS was already embedded at Beijing Normal University. BNU and TRS established the BNU-TRS Network Public Opinion Research Center in 2019 to combine public-opinion analysis with intelligent-communication methods. A 2022 BNU report then identified TRS software and platform data among the laboratory's actual sources. [5,6]
Xinhua News Agency, which is separate from Jonathan Choi's Sunwah Group, documents comparable demand at state-media scale. Its 2021 final accounts describe working with outside data providers and professional teams to expand collection from overseas social-media accounts for communication analysis and publicity. The same project record reports at least 8.5 million internet records collected per day and 500 overseas social-media accounts. It does not name the provider or providers responsible for those reported capacity metrics.[22]
A separate 2019 record supplies the direct TRS link. TRS announced that it had won a RMB 5.754 million Xinhua News Agency internet-data-resource subproject covering collection, storage, processing, tagging, transmission, and monitoring of domestic and overseas mainstream and social media, plus editing and influence analysis.
TRS is therefore more than a name in one Fudan contract. The records show it as ACCWS's national-platform supplier, Fudan's overseas collector, BNU's joint-center partner, a documented NJU research collaborator, and a contracted data-service supplier to Xinhua News Agency. These are different relationship types: procurement, centers, appointments, research collaboration, and customer contracts. [3,4,5,6,12,18,22]
The universities connect the buyer to the technical work
Fudan is the clearest intersection. Its journalism school partners with ACCWS, it purchases overseas-platform collection from TRS, and Fudan-affiliated researchers published ElectionSim. That project reports collecting 171,210,066 X posts from 9,596,198 users, then processing 30,195,510 posts from 1,006,517 users. The researchers inferred demographic, ideological, party, and geographic attributes, created voter agents, and simulated U.S. presidential elections and reactions to events. The implementation is public. [14,15]
Now place that beside the ACCWS tender. ACCWS asks for foreign-person profiles, simulation, prediction, model training, and communication-effect measurement built from overseas social data. Fudan researchers demonstrate those functions at scale, while Fudan pays TRS to acquire the underlying platform data. BNU adds a formal TRS research center and documented use of TRS data. At NJU, TRS president Shi Shuicai's company biography lists an adjunct appointment, and NJU identifies him as a principal in public-opinion research conducted with TRS. [5,6,12]
The cooperation is visible without reading between the lines. ACCWS supplies the national mission and budget. TRS supplies collection and analysis systems. The universities supply researchers, methods, data work, and institutional legitimacy. The same organizations meet again through the Choi and Sun Wah relationships.
Choi and Sun Wah connect the university structure
In 2004, the Sun Wah Education Foundation signed a $5 million gift agreement with Michigan State University for a U.S.-China education-research center. Its four-member board was divided equally between MSU and Sun Wah appointees, with Jonathan Choi as the first chair. MSU described close work with a sister center at BNU; Sun Wah and a Hong Kong regulatory filing presented the paired centers as the "Sunwah Education Model." [7,8,9]
Program records show what that relationship funded. The X-Pacific project paired an American and a Chinese middle school and required weekly themed submissions from students, faculty, and administrators. Later work included comparative school research, media values, and China-U.S. mathematics and science studies. A Choi Foundation-commissioned BNU survey collected 18,645 valid household responses across 18 Chinese provinces, municipalities, and regions. This was an early, organized program of cross-national observation and data collection using modern communication technologies. [8,21]
At Nanjing University, Choi supported a Software R&D Center working in embedded systems, Linux, image processing, pattern recognition, and intelligent communication and control. In 2025, he donated RMB 10 million toward a Choi-named information-services building and the Jonathan K. S. Choi Data Center. NJU separately documents TRS personnel and public-opinion research relationships. [10,11,12]
At Fudan, Choi has served on the university board since 1997. A 2025 Fudan-Sun Wah strategic and donation agreement covers international platforms, journalism and communication, and global governance. The following year, Fudan Journalism hired TRS for overseas social-media collection. [13]
Choi and Sun Wah maintained an institutional presence across MSU-BNU, NJU, and Fudan. Those same Chinese universities later appear in formal relationships with TRS, ACCWS, or both. Choi's documented role is connective: funding, governance, research centers, buildings, data facilities, and agreements. Ordinary incentives built durable infrastructure that centrally directed programs can use.
Private money feeds the same policy field
Tricontinental's own website identifies Neville Roy Singham as chairman of its International Advisory Board. Its FY2024 Form 990 records a $2,196,176 payment to Shanghai Maku for research, analysis, and translation. East China Normal University's agreement with Maku establishes international-communication courses, joint research, Chinese- and English-language publications, and a talent pipeline involving Maku founders and Tricontinental researchers.[19,20]
The funding source is different, but the institutional output is familiar: research, translation, publishing, courses, and personnel in international communication. Public contracts buy systems; private organizations finance people and institutions.
What this says about the X operation
OpenAI places the operator in the commercial-contractor layer: a social-media team inside a private Chinese technology company serving government clients. TRS is the most fully documented contractor in this article, but the records describe distinct relationships: ACCWS and Fudan procurement, a BNU joint center, NJU research and personnel ties, and a 2019 Xinhua News Agency data contract. Fudan and NJU also maintain separate relationships with Choi/Sunwah Group and with Xinhua News Agency. [3,4,5,6,10,11,12,13,18,22,23,24]
Naming the exact August team requires transaction records linking accounts, credentials, billing, personnel, or work orders. X, OpenAI, and the contracting parties hold that evidence.
The available record already answers the larger structural question: the requirements come from the top, private contractors operationalize them, universities deepen the capability, and long-running business and donor relationships keep the institutions connected.
The Part They Can't Seize was about infrastructure that survives a takedown. Here it is visible in contracts, data centers, procurement relationships, personnel, and reusable models. Accounts can vanish while the institutions capable of replacing them remain funded and connected.
Primary Sources
Primary institutional, regulatory, procurement, platform, and tax records cited in the article.
Wayback links retain the original MSU document URL and use the earliest confirmed capture nearest publication.
[1] X Global Government Affairs, account disclosure, 27 Aug. 2026: https://x.com/GlobalAffairs/status/2093130747796148634
[2] OpenAI, "Data Center Bandwagon": https://openai.com/index/disrupting-malicious-uses-of-ai-data-center-bandwagon/
[3] Fudan award FW2026070301: https://czzx.fudan.edu.cn/ff/9e/c39575a786334/page.htm
[4] Fudan procurement file: https://xxgk.fudan.edu.cn/_upload/article/files/37/69/a8435075435b9c26d416b4580314/b80176bc-6282-48e8-9e9b-ddeca1d0b162.pdf
[5] BNU-TRS Network Public Opinion Research Center: https://www.trs.com.cn/fwyzc_755/sttx/cxyhz/202212/t20221223_9859.html
[6] BNU ECHI report, p. 9: https://sjc.bnu.edu.cn/docs/20221124114503508266.pdf
[7] MSU $5 million gift and shared governance: https://onthebanks.msu.edu/Object/157-544-992/meeting-minutes-february-13-2004/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201106074638/https://givingto.msu.edu/media/stories-archive/pdf/Developments_Summer2004.pdf
[8] MSU report describing the BNU sister center (Wayback capture): https://web.archive.org/web/20100612114136/http://www.educ.msu.edu/reports/annual-report/AR07.pdf
[9] HKEX prospectus, "Sunwah Education Model": https://www.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/20110620/LTN20110620005.pdf
[10] NJU Choi Data Center and RMB 10 million donation: https://www.nju.edu.cn/en/info/1057/15281.htm
[11] NJU record of the earlier Software R&D Center: https://sbc.nju.edu.cn/jb/sysyl/dzkxygcxy/20140606/i2060.html
[12] TRS and NJU personnel/research records: https://www.trs.com.cn/ljwm/xwhd/202004/t20200413_8967.html https://skch.nju.edu.cn/ef/b1/c21885a782257/page.htm
[13] Fudan-Sunwah Group agreements and Choi board history: https://fuedf.fudan.edu.cn/35/ea/c29767a734698/page.htm
[14] ElectionSim paper and code: https://arxiv.org/html/2410.20746v3 https://github.com/amazingljy1206/ElectionSim
[15] Fudan International Communication Joint Research Institute: https://xwxy.fudan.edu.cn/79/b9/c41234a686521/page.htm
[16] CICG description of ACCWS: http://www.cicgcorp.com/2022-04/27/content_41954330.html
[17] CICG official profile: http://www.cicg.org.cn/m/node_1005743.html
[18] ACCWS-TRS platform records: https://www.trs.com.cn/ljwm/xwhd/201903/t20190329_8812.html https://www.ccgp.gov.cn/cggg/zygg/zbgg/202608/t20260827_27212729.htm https://download.ccgp.gov.cn/oss/download?uuid=BACA34AD35B72156005B53DD266D8D
[19] Tricontinental team page and FY2024 Form 990: https://thetricontinental.org/team/ https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/822882135_202412_990_2026030223966357.pdf
[20] ECNU-Maku international-communication agreement: https://comm.ecnu.edu.cn/21/5c/c41509a532828/page.htm
[21] MSU X-Pacific/shared-governance record (Wayback capture) and BNU household survey: https://web.archive.org/web/20201106075101/https://givingto.msu.edu/media/stories-archive/pdf/partners_fall2004.pdf https://epaper.gmw.cn/gmrb/html/2010-02-04/nw.D110000gmrb_20100204_1-11.htm https://www.jiemodui.com/N/90657
[22] Xinhua News Agency 2021 capacity record, direct 2019 TRS contract, and customer corroboration: https://www.news.cn/xinhuashe/xxgk/2021bmjs.pdf https://www.trs.com.cn/ljwm/xwhd/201905/t20190523_8872.html https://static.cninfo.com.cn/finalpage/2020-04-23/1207556103.PDF GusQuixote Page 19CHINA'S OVERSEAS INFLUENCE SYSTEM GUSQUIXOTE | 28 AUGUST 2026
[23] Xinhua News Agency relationships with Fudan and Nanjing University: https://news.fudan.edu.cn/2026/0323/c1247a148492/page.htm https://www.nju.edu.cn/info/1056/310641.htm
[24] Xinhua News Agency and Sunwah Group entity profiles: https://www.news.cn/xinhuashe/jbqk.htm https://en.sunwahgroup.cn/column/268.html