Pennsylvania’s Janelle Stelson has raked in $8,000 in campaign cash from her mother’s brother, John W. Allen
The uncle of the Democratic nominee running in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, Janelle Stelson, is a New York businessman who has spent his career advancing Chinese interests, a Washington Free Beacon review found. He has routinely rubbed elbows with Chinese Communist Party members, holds significant ties to liberal megadonor George Soros, and has donated thousands of dollars to his niece’s political campaign.
John W. Allen, Stelson’s mother’s brother, has contributed $8,250 across Stelson’s two congressional bids, campaign finance disclosures show. He maxed out his contributions for her doomed 2024 campaign, plus another $500 that appears to have put him over the legal limit, as well as $1,150 toward her second attempt to unseat Rep. Scott Perry (R.). Stelson, a former local news anchor, is the only federal candidate to whom Allen has donated over the past two cycles and appears to be the only one ever to receive his financial backing.
The source of Allen’s income stems from decades of propping up China’s economy and promoting goodwill with the communist regime. He’s an adviser with ChinaWise USA, a Chicago-based firm aiming “to help North American and Chinese enterprises conduct business with each other.” And for more than a decade, he served as CEO of the Greater China Corporation, a New York-based investment firm that “utilizes its significant relationships in the U.S., China and around the world to assist its partners to benefit from China’s prosperity,” according to its now-defunct website. The Securities and Exchange Commission in 2008 revoked the firm’s registration of its securities for failing to file required reports after September 1998.
Allen is also a trustee for the Chinese Cultural Foundation, a nonprofit that is meant to promote Chinese culture and history. In that role, he has routinely fraternized with Beijing officials and CCP members.
In 2004, for instance, the Chinese Cultural Foundation held an event in the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square with CITIC Industrial Bank, which is owned by the Ministry of Finance. Allen was pictured with a Chinese ambassador. Two years later, he was pictured with Cheng Siwei, then the vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress.
He has also given several interviews to the CCP-run Xinhua News Agency, which Reporters Without Borders has described as “the world’s biggest propaganda agency” “at the heart of censorship and disinformation put in place by the communist party.” In 2019, for example, Allen called on the United States and China to “stick to multilateralism” and declared, “Let’s join forces and combat the threats and challenges we are commonly facing.” The outlet also reported that he “spoke highly of the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative,” a massive international economic strategy aimed at bringing foreign nations closer to Beijing and further from the United States.
Neither Stelson nor Allen responded to requests for comment. Chinese Cultural Foundation president Elizabeth Wang told the Free Beacon that Allen has “long been retired” from the group and that any “political contributions he may make are entirely personal and do not represent or reflect CCF’s views, activities, or mission.”
She also said Allen once mentioned “he had a relative who was running for Congress,” but she “did not catch the person’s name.” An obituary for Stelson’s grandmother, Bertha Wilson Allen, notes that she was survived by two children, Judith Allen Stelson of Stafford, Va.—the candidate’s mother—and John Wilson Allen of New York.
Stelson’s family ties to Chinese interests come as she faces a challenging bid to unseat Perry in Pennsylvania’s competitive 10th Congressional District, a race that could help determine which party controls the House. Allen’s ties to Soros could also pose a problem for the Democrat.
Allen served as a trustee for the Open Society Foundations, according to his staff bio on ChinaWise USA. Soros has long used Open Society Foundations to bankroll liberal causes, such as spending more than $40 million to elect scores of soft-on-crime prosecutors in half of America’s largest jurisdictions.
Allen and Soros were also trustees of the International Science Foundation, which was established by the liberal megadonor. The two-year project was intended to fund research labs in former Soviet states to prevent their collapse immediately following the communist regime’s collapse.
Stelson has also received funding directly from a CCP member, Pin Ni, an auto executive who lives in the United States but appears to still be an active member of the party. Ni, who has given Stelson’s campaign $8,500 this cycle, according to campaign finance disclosures, has been identified in corporate disclosures as a “comrade” of the CCP and serves as the top executive at automotive parts manufacturer Wanxiang America and luxury EV maker KARMA Automotive, both of which are subsidiaries of the China-based Wanxiang Group—a billion-dollar green energy company that states it “listens to the Party, follows the Party’s lead, holds high the banner, and prioritizes Party building.”
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