Funding Ties to the Rule of Law Society
The report was primarily authored by Yan and three other researchers who listed an affiliation with the Rule of Law Society on the cover page. The society is a political organization — not a research institution — that was founded by exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, who fled China in 2014 in advance of corruption charges, and Steve Bannon, an American businessman and political strategist who previously oversaw the far-right publication Breitbart News, and was recently arrested in connection to the "We Build The Wall" fraud scam.
Dr. Andrew Preston, a biologist at the University of Bath, highlighted in a statement that the authors' affiliation with a politically based organization rather than with a research institution was a conflict of interest and added that the "preprint report cannot be given any credibility in its current form," given its unsubstantiated claims that have not been peer-reviewed.