China’s Campaign to Infiltrate America Is Worse Than You Thought By Jim Geraghty
On the menu today: Tear your eyes away from campaign coverage for a few moments and contemplate a pair of bombshells regarding the Chinese government’s far-reaching efforts to influence U.S. policy and suppress critics of the regime — violently, on U.S. soil. First, the Washington Post unveils a shocking report, showcasing how agents of the regime in Beijing attempted to curb-stomp pro-democracy activists during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco last November. Then, federal prosecutors announced charges against Linda Sun, the former deputy chief of staff to Kathy Hochul, for being an agent of the Chinese government in exchange for “millions of dollars in bribes.”
You know whom I want to win the 2024 elections? American elected officials who work for Americans, not Xi Jinping. Apparently, they’re rarer than you would expect.
Who Runs the Streets of San Francisco? Apparently, the Chinese Government Does
It will not surprise you that I feel more warm and fuzzy toward the Washington Post than the typical conservative.
When the mainstream media does good and important journalism, I think conservatives ought to applaud and encourage more of it, and yesterday, the Post unveiled a doozy, showcasing the scale and range of violence during Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit to San Francisco for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November — violence that appears to have been directed and facilitated by agents of the Chinese government, targeting democracy activists and critics of the regime. Among the highlights:
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While there was aggression from both sides, the most extreme violence was instigated by pro-CCP activists and carried out by coordinated groups of young men embedded among them, verified videos show. Anti-Xi protesters were attacked with extended flagpoles and chemical spray, punched, kicked and had fistfuls of sand thrown in their faces.
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The Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles paid for supporters’ hotels and meals as an incentive to participate, according to messages shared in WeChat groups reviewed by The Post. At least 35 pro-CCP Chinese diaspora groups showed up to the APEC summit protests — including groups from New York, Pennsylvania and Washington state.
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Videos show at least four Chinese diplomats from the consulates in Los Angeles and San Francisco among the crowd of pro-CCP protesters, sometimes directly interacting with aggressive actors over four days of protests from Nov. 14-17. Some Chinese diaspora group leaders with ties to the Chinese state participated in some of the violence, the videos show.
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Chinese diplomats hired at least 60 private security guards to “protect” Chinese diaspora groups gathered to welcome Xi, according to seven people involved in the arrangement.
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The FBI is investigating the violence at the APEC summit, according to two officials familiar with the matter.
This isn’t over in Beijing or Hong Kong or Wuhan. This is on the streets of San Francisco — U.S. soil. This is America, where you have every right to say, “F*** Xi Jinping” without some Beijing-financed thugs leaving you bloody and unconscious in the street. That happened!
This isn’t really a foreign-policy issue anymore. This is a question of sovereignty, and whether the Chinese government gets veto power over certain American citizens’ rights to free speech and free assembly.
This is the sort of thing that ought to outrage every American, and none more so than the self-described “America First” nationalists. (My guess is that today you’ll hear them spending more time complaining about Brian Stelter returning to CNN.) I notice that, as of this writing, very few other publications or news organizations have picked up the report from the Post. I’ve heard the argument that modern nationalist populism is obsessed with “enemies within,” but can never get around to rousing itself over enemies outside our borders. How many people who perceive every temporary suspension of a social-media account as an assault on the First Amendment will even notice the Chinese regime’s assault — its literal, physical assault! — on the First Amendment rights of our fellow citizens?
Unsurprisingly, the Chinese government is saying that its people were the victims, and those big, mean, pro-democracy activists were the real bullies assaulting people:
In response to extensive questions from The Post, Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, and spokespeople from the Chinese consulates in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles sent identical emailed statements, stating that members of Chinese communities traveled to San Francisco voluntarily to welcome Xi and were instead the ones subject to “multiple incidents of provocations and violence.”
“A few U.S. organizations and agencies have been piecing together fabricated ‘evidence’ to make defamatory assumptions and groundless ‘investigations’ about the voluntary welcoming groups, as well as smearing allusions to Chinese diplomats and consulates in the U.S.,” the emailed statements said. “Such narratives are sheer political maneuvering, which China strongly opposes. The Chinese side urges the U.S. side to immediately stop the erroneous practices of hyping up falsehoods.”
Contacting multiple representatives of a regime and getting the same statement emailed back over and over again is perfect symbolism. The Chinese government might as well make its embassies and consulates look like giant windowless cubes.
This puts San Francisco’s herculean effort to clean up its streets before Xi Jinping’s visit into a new light, doesn’t it? It was always an embarrassment that the city government could “clear out the tent cities of homeless, remove the human feces and hypodermic needles from the sidewalks, and make the downtown look sparking clean and shiny in just a matter of days” for a visiting dictator, but couldn’t or wouldn’t make the same effort for its own citizens. The Chinese government acts as if San Francisco is de facto territory it controls, and apparently quite a few San Francisco city officials see the matter the same way.
But the Post story was only the second most egregious example of illicit and threatening Chinese government influence on American life to come to light Tuesday:
Linda Sun, a former aide to New York governor Kathy Hochul, acted at the direction of Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party officials while serving in state government, federal prosecutors alleged in an indictment Tuesday.
In a statement, the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York said that Sun was arrested Tuesday morning with her husband, Christopher Hu. They were expected to be arraigned later in the day.
Sun is a former deputy chief of staff to Kathy Hochul and has served in numerous roles throughout New York State government since her first post under the administration of former governor Andrew Cuomo in 2012. Before that, she served as Representative Grace Meng’s chief of staff, when the Queens Democrat served in the New York State assembly.
“As alleged, while appearing to serve the people of New York as deputy chief of staff within the New York State Executive Chamber, the defendant and her husband actually worked to further the interests of the Chinese government and the CCP,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said.
The federal government is alleging that Sun was an unregistered agent of the Chinese government and that her husband engaged in money-laundering while they benefited from millions of dollars in bribes from Chinese officials.
As I lamented yesterday afternoon, “Hard to get mad at the Chinese government for buying our elected officials when so many of them are for sale.”
When we see the Biden administration contradicting congressional findings and insisting that the People’s Republic of China is subsidizing the export of fentanyl analogues and precursors; when bipartisan leadership in Congress call the Biden administration’s response to escalating repression in Hong Kong “not adequate”; when we see the late senator Dianne Feinstein’s driver and Representative Eric Swalwell’s special friend “Fang Fang” . . . are we certain our elected officials still work for us?
Pound for pound, the very best reporter on the China beat is our Jimmy Quinn. He had the story on Chinese backing of the assaults in San Francisco back at the end of July, and the story on the FBI’s raid of Sun’s home a week earlier.
In just the past month, Jimmy has uncovered another example of Chinese diplomatic “private security” violently assaulting protesters:
A Chinese man who protested in front of China’s consulate general in Manhattan was allegedly knocked unconscious by a private security guard who pushed him last month. . . .
[Yonghong] Wang says he left China in 2019 after the authorities there detained and harassed him over his participation in a pro-democracy group and his decision to report corruption in the ranks of a state-owned railway corporation.
And have you noticed that as newspaper vending machines for big-name papers have disappeared from city street corners, the number of China Daily machines is growing like mushrooms after a heavy rain? Jimmy noticed:
They’ve become such an ordinary part of the streetscape in midtown Manhattan, downtown D.C., and a few other American cities that we’ve forgotten just how unusual this is: China has placed communist propaganda newspaper boxes on dozens of streetcorners. . . .
Chen Weihua, China Daily’s EU bureau chief and therefore a central propaganda department official, replied to my post and said that the newspaper boxes are intended “to keep you informed and not brainwashed by crazy warmongers in Washington.” Those are the words of a foreign dictatorship that knows it can get away with brazen propaganda campaigns on U.S. soil. So far, it has.
Who runs the streets of American cities? Right now, it kinda looks like the Chinese government does.
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