Chris Butler is the founder of the Science of Identity Foundation, which is a small religious organization. He is Tulsi Gabbard's guru, and he controlled her political life from the beginning.

In 1980, a Chinese state youth organization invited Butler to lecture across five Chinese cities about "the social problems of the Western world." Over the next several years he co-authored anti-Western books with his wife, writing under the Chinese pen name Bo Zhongyan (柏忠言), and toured with a rock band, all carried by state-owned Chinese presses and the national record label. A peer-reviewed study calls Butler "a propagandist's dream." That body of work is what earned the couple favor with the CCP.

The favor paid off for his family. His wife, Zhang Huilan, known professionally as "Wai Lana," a Hong Kong native, was given a daily slot on Chinese state television. Her show ran for 15 years on a network the study describes as "a well-known mouthpiece of the Communist Party," and on that platform she built the Wai Lana yoga empire.

The timeline: how it started

In 1980, the All-China Youth Federation invited Chris Butler to lecture in five Chinese cities: Shanghai, Beijing, Wuxi, Suzhou, and Nanjing. ¹ His topic: "the social problems of the Western world."

The All-China Youth Federation is not a cultural exchange program. It describes itself as a "patriotic united front organization," led by the Communist Youth League under the direct authority of the CCP. ² United front work is the strategy Western intelligence agencies have identified as central to the CCP's foreign influence operations. In 2024, Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council added the All-China Youth Federation to a blacklist of Chinese united front bodies, barring its own citizens from working there on national security grounds. ³

Within three years of the invitation, Butler was publishing through CCP state publishers. By 1985, his wife had a daily slot on state television.

The sequence matters. Butler established his anti-Western credentials first. The CCTV television deal came after. The timeline, documented by peer-reviewed academic research: ⁴

A scholar of Chinese yoga calls Butler "a propagandist's dream"

The documentation here is not from a partisan source. It comes from Marc Lagace, a doctoral researcher in religious studies at McMaster University whose dissertation is the first major academic study of devotional yoga in China. ⁴ His peer-reviewed analysis of Butler and Wai Lana's Chinese-language material, with original Chinese-to-English translations, was published in 2024 in the Journal of Yoga Studies.

The five CCP state publishers 五家中共国家出版社

Between 1983 and 2012, five state-owned Chinese publishing houses printed the couple's books. Butler wrote under the pen name Bo Zhongyan (柏忠言), co-authoring most of the Chinese editions with Zhang Huilan (Wai Lana). Each publisher sits under a different arm of the Chinese state. ⁵

Nothing reaches print in China without passing the CCP's censorship chain: local Press and Publication Offices, the Communist Party Propaganda Department, and the General Administration of Press and Publication. Butler's anti-Western content was reviewed and approved at every level. ⁵

What Butler actually wrote

The Chinese-to-English translations below come from Lagace's 2024 paper. ⁴ In the book Butler co-authored with his wife, the text dismisses Westerners who "surrender to the senses": ¹¹

On her television show, Zhang Huilan (Wai Lana) suggested HIV might spread wildly and destroy the Western world. ¹²

Their book declared that "economic development is a must" and drew an explicit connection between socialists laboring for the collective good and those who perform karma yoga. ¹³

Their 624-page yoga manual carried a dedication to the Chinese nation: ¹⁴

The book's opening goes further, calling China the authors' "ancestral homeland" (祖国). Butler, an American with no Chinese ancestry, co-wrote it. ¹⁴

Throughout all of this, Hare Krishna mantras were presented as secular "meditation techniques." Lagace documents that the religious identity was deliberately subdued for Chinese audiences, in what he calls an attempt to "covertly spread Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism" in China. ¹⁵

Fifteen years on Chinese state television

From 1985 to 2000, Zhang Huilan's 30-minute yoga show aired on CCTV in a run that lasted 15 years. ¹⁶ Lagace notes the program "indirectly received state subsidies" and ran on the most strictly censored network in the country. ⁴

By Chinese-language accounts, the show aired daily across CCTV's national channels and became one of the longest-running series in Chinese television history, on a network whose flagship channel reaches hundreds of millions of viewers. ¹⁷

Where the money went is unclear. The U.S. Wai Lana Productions LLC was not formed until April 2002, seventeen years after the CCTV broadcasts began. ¹⁸ For the entire 15-year run on Chinese state television, it is not known what financial entity was receiving the money. The show aired tens of thousands of times directly on CCP state media, and the CCP also allowed the sale of Wai Lana-licensed books, CDs, yoga mats, and other products.

CCTV airtime is not commercially available. It is allocated by the CCP Propaganda Department. Zhang Huilan received a daily slot for 15 years and built an entire product business empire on that access, an unusual business and propaganda alliance between American citizens and the CCP. ¹⁹

They tried to trademark the word "yoga"

In 2004, Wai Lana Productions LLC filed a Chinese trademark application for the word "yoga" itself, 瑜伽, through a Beijing IP firm (Registration No. 4159719). ²⁰ Yoga is a 5,000-year-old practice. They tried to own the word.

In 2007, the Chinese entity Huilan Production Co., Ltd. filed a 1-million-RMB lawsuit in Beijing's First Intermediate People's Court, suing Chinese companies for using the term. ²¹ They weren't sharing yoga with China. They were locking it down and profiting from it.

Nine entities tied to the CCP

Nine separate entities tied to the CCP promoted Butler and Wai Lana's work. Each operates under a different arm of the party-state: ⁵

1. The All-China Youth Federation (a CCP united-front organization led by the Communist Youth League) invited Butler in 1980. ¹

2. China Record Corporation (state-owned national record label) released four Morning Sun albums, 1982–1985. ²²

3. Sanlian Shudian (state-owned publisher, since 2002 part of China Publishing Group) published the Butler co-authored "Social Ills of the West," 1983. ⁶

4. Qunzhong Chubanshe (Ministry of Public Security press) published Wai Lana's "Talks on Western Society," 1985. ⁷

5. People's Sports Publishing House (state sports administration) published the Butler co-authored yoga manual, 1986. ⁸

6. China Youth Publishing Group (Communist Youth League) published a Butler co-authored edition, 2007. ⁹

7. Jiangsu Science and Technology Press (Jiangsu provincial government, via Phoenix Publishing & Media Group) published "Huilan Yoga," 2012. ¹⁰

8. CCTV (state broadcaster, described by the study as "a well-known mouthpiece of the Communist Party") aired Wai Lana for 15 years, 1985–2000. ¹⁶

9. China International Television Corporation (state TV's commercial arm) released DVD and music collections, 2006–2014. ¹⁰

Where did the money go?

The IP transfer. In 2009, the Wai Lan Yoga Trust (a 501(c)(4) nonprofit) reported $7,636,669 in gross receipts, with $4,098,844 in product sales. It had 3 paid employees and 90 unpaid "volunteers." All three trustees reported $0 compensation despite working 45–70 hours per week. ²³

On December 31, 2009, the last day of the tax year, the Trust transferred all of its intellectual property to Natural Product Holdings, LLC: every trade name, trademark, copyright, formula, customer list, and supplier list. Appraised value: $1,000,000. The sole member of Natural Product Holdings is Wai Lan Butler. ²⁴

After the transfer, the Trust's revenue collapsed, from $7.6 million in gross receipts to $174,917 the next year, then $42,198, then negative $118,942. By 2024: $19,818. The revenue-generating IP now sits inside a private LLC with zero public disclosure obligations. ²⁵

The invisible Chinese entity. A company called Huilan Production Co., Ltd. (蕙兰制作有限公司) filed a 1-million-RMB copyright lawsuit in Beijing in 2007, claiming ownership of all Huilan Yoga Chinese copyrights and five registered trademarks. This entity is the Chinese counterpart of Wai Lana Productions: same name (direct translation), same trademarks, same products, same person. Its registration jurisdiction, directors, shareholders, and financial records are unknown; Chinese business registries blocked access to its records. This is the entity that receives Chinese book royalties from the state publishers. ²¹

The church loophole. SIF received its "church" classification from the IRS in December 1978, allowing complete exemption from public financial disclosure; churches are not required to file the Form 990 that every other nonprofit must file publicly. Despite never building a single church, the Science of Identity Foundation has maintained tax-exempt "church" status with zero public financial disclosures for nearly five decades. The LLC that housed Butler's project office lists Jeannie Bishop, president of SIF, as its point of contact. ²⁶

The missing revenue. Baidu Baike (China's equivalent of Wikipedia) states Butler's yoga book has "millions of readers." At the 2007 reprint price of 25 RMB, even 1 million copies of one book from one publisher equals roughly $3.5 million in retail value. Add 15 years of daily CCTV airtime, DVDs sold in dozens of countries, and PBS distribution in the United States. The only entity with mandatory disclosure reported $19,818 in revenue for 2024. ²⁷

The national security question

Tulsi Gabbard was raised in the SIF community and has acknowledged Chris Butler as her guru. ²⁸ She was nominated as Director of National Intelligence in December 2024 and confirmed by the Senate on February 12, 2025.

Butler's wife, Zhang Huilan, launched and built her media and product business empire through CCP state sponsorship, and maintains active Chinese business operations through a Chinese entity that holds five registered Chinese trademarks. Campaign funds have flowed to SIF-controlled entities: $1.2 million from Senator Kyrsten Sinema's campaign committees to TOA Group LLC (controlled by Vrindavan Gabbard, Tulsi's sister), and $251,265 from Gabbard's own campaigns to Blue River Productions, another SIF-affiliated entity. ²⁹

Vrindavan Gabbard, a former U.S. Marshal, married Rupa Bellord, the son of Richard Bellord, one of three trustees of the Wai Lan Yoga Trust. ³⁰

An American religious leader spent the early 1980s producing anti-Western propaganda that the Chinese Communist Party was happy to promote, kept that history hidden for decades, and his disciple became the Director of National Intelligence.