By tied to the NED, they mean that Chuang on occasion has cited publications by NED funded outlets like China Labor Bulletin in some of their articles. There's no actual tie with any of writers or the site as a whole. TBH it's super smeary and dishonest to claim Chuang is tied to them and really serves to wholesale discount anything they say. Furthermore any good research that CLB may do, though it is tainted by being NED funded, immediately gets dismissed without looking at what they actually said. It really sucks, but CLB does collect information on chinese labor from social media and publishes it and it's usually not that bad to cite.