A prominent lawyer in Britain, accused of trying to advance Beijing’s interests in Parliament.
An aide to a far-right politician in Germany, suspected of passing information about the inner workings of the European Parliament to China.
A politician in Canada, accused of receiving help from the Chinese Consulate organizing busloads of international students from China to vote for him in party elections.
Even before Linda Sun, a former senior aide in the New York governor’s office, was charged this month with using her position to benefit the Chinese government, suspected cases of Chinese foreign meddling had been on the rise in Western democracies.
Allegations of Chinese political interference have also surfaced in Australia, New Zealand, France, Belgium and the Netherlands in recent years.
The clandestine activity usually follows a pattern, analysts said. China recruits members of Chinese diaspora communities to infiltrate halls of power, or to silence Chinese dissidents and other critics of Beijing.
Covert Chinese operations abroad have long centered on seizing industrial secrets and technology in sensitive sectors such as the military, aviation or telecommunications, with the aim of trying to erode the United States’ edge.
What Ms. Sun is accused of doing is part of a different side of Chinese intelligence work — one that is focused on influencing political discourse so that it leans more favorably toward China’s positions on contentious issues like the status of Taiwan, the self-governing island claimed by Beijing, or the repression of China’s ethnic Uyghur minority.
Federal prosecutors said Ms. Sun, who served as a liaison to the Asian community, blocked Taiwanese officials from having access to the governor’s office and removed references to Taiwan and Uyghurs from state communications. In return, prosecutors say, she and her husband, Chris Hu, received millions of dollars in benefits.
“These are classic tactics that we are seeing,” said Anne-Marie Brady, a political scientist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, who specializes in Chinese influence efforts, referring to the allegations against Ms. Sun. “China is very proactive at trying to make use of overseas Chinese communities and ethnic Chinese politicians and officials to get information and shape policy.”
Fanned by Geopolitical Tensions
China’s attempts to interfere with Western democracies are likely to grow more acute as relations between Beijing and the West fray, Ms. Brady said. Not since the Cold War have two powers like the United States and China competed so fiercely for global influence.
Finding it harder to sway national governments in such an environment, the Chinese government has instead directed its attention to local, county and state governments, which are not as savvy at detecting such efforts, experts say.
Chinese leaders and intelligence officials may feel emboldened if their interference efforts exact little cost to Beijing, analysts say.
No Chinese diplomats at the New York consulate, for example, have been expelled from the United States despite four officials being implicated as co-conspirators in the indictment against Ms. Sun and her husband. In contrast, as recently as 2019, two Chinese officials suspected of espionage were secretly expelled from the United States for driving onto a sensitive military base in Virginia.
“The point we should be making about this case is not that a Chinese American allegedly committed this crime, but that the P.R.C. Government, and its senior officials, intentionally sought to place an American citizen into this position,” said Matt Turpin, former director for China at the National Security Council and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, referring to the People’s Republic of China. Mr. Turpin said the Biden administration should have declared the four diplomats included in Ms. Sun’s indictment as persona non grata.
“Now they just look weak,” Mr. Turpin said.
China has said virtually nothing about Ms. Sun’s arrest, and has heavily censored discussions about it online. A spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry, Mao Ning, declined to comment on the case other than to say, “We oppose malicious associations and slander against China.”
Many other countries, including Australia, Canada and New Zealand, remain divided about how to deter Chinese interference. Some want law enforcement to be more aggressive. Others fear doing so will sow racism and result in racial profiling of Chinese diaspora communities.
Those debates play into what Ms. Brady said were growing divisions in free societies, fueled by partisanship and populism, that China views as irrefutable signs of the West’s decline. Beijing aims to exploit those fissures, much as Russia has been doing, to weaken its geopolitical rivals.
“China thinks its moment is now,” Ms. Brady said. “So instead of withdrawing, they’re going harder.”
Xi’s ‘Magic Weapon’
China’s assertive tactics reflect the leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Under his rule, upholding national security has required a “whole of society” mobilization. Ordinary Chinese citizens are encouraged to spy on one another and to be suspicious of foreigners and virtually everything else. Senior leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is stacked with officials with security backgrounds. China’s spy agency, the Ministry of State Security, has also raised its ambitions and public profile, going so far as to create a social media account to publicize its investigations.
“It’s a bit like the Venetian Republic at its apogee, where everyone was potentially engaged in some form of covert activity to further the interests of the state,” said Nigel Inkster, the former director of operations and intelligence for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.
“And of course, the Chinese Communist Party was forged in a crucible of clandestinity that is still very much part of its political culture,” Mr. Inkster added, referring to the party’s emergence more than a century ago as an underground revolutionary organization.
China has tried to apply the same furtive strategy to its relations with the outside world. It supplements its normal diplomacy with a covert network of party members, organizations and overseas Chinese groups that work to promote China’s policies abroad. Those efforts, which Mr. Xi has called one of China’s “magic weapons,” often come under the guidance of a party organ known as the United Front Work Department.
The group, which had an estimated budget of $2.6 billion as recently as 2019, serves as the party’s intelligence agency. It often works in conjunction with China’s other spy agencies, which fall under the control of the military and the central government.
In 2017, when Ms. Sun was in her early 30s, she traveled to Beijing to attend an event where she was celebrated as a Chinese youth living overseas. On that same trip, Ms. Sun made a side visit to the eastern city of Nanjing in Jiangsu province, where she was born, to meet with Wang Hua, the top official for the province’s United Front Work Department.
During the meeting, Mr. Wang told Ms. Sun she should “be an ambassador of Sino-American friendship” and “actively promote solidarity” among Chinese migrants in New York, Chinese state media reported at the time.
The United Front Work Department plays prominently in other suspected cases too. In 2022, Britain’s domestic security agency, MI5, issued an alert about a British Chinese lawyer named Christine Ching Kui Lee. The notice accused Ms. Lee of acting covertly through the United Front Work Department to “cultivate relationships with influential figures in order to ensure the U.K. political landscape is favorable” to the Chinese Communist Party’s agenda. Ms. Lee has reportedly denied the allegations and has filed a lawsuit against MI5.
The United Front Work Department is also linked to an Australian Chinese community leader, Di Sanh “Sunny” Duong, the target of Australia’s first prosecution under a new foreign interference law; and bands of pro-Beijing supporters accused of attacking protesters last November in San Francisco when Mr. Xi attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, according to an investigation by The Washington Post.
Diaspora on the Firing Line
Mr. Xi and the party have long considered overseas Chinese populations both an asset and a risk. An estimated 60 million people of Chinese origin live outside of China, including 5.4 million in the United States, and they have been called on by Mr. Xi to help with “telling China’s story well.” They have been encouraged to “actively participate in and support” the “peaceful reunification of China,” a reference to Taiwan coming under Beijing’s control.
At the same time, Mr. Xi’s supporters overseas have worked to silence and intimidate Beijing’s critics living abroad. That has grown more urgent with the expansion of Uyghur and Hong Kong Chinese diasporas escaping crackdowns on freedoms at home. Overseas Chinese student associations, for example, have played a central role in pushing back against open criticism of Beijing and its policies on college campuses around the world.
China’s embrace of overseas Chinese has left many members of that community feeling like there is a target on their backs. In the United States, Chinese Americans have been obliged to defend their loyalties — with a chilling effect on scientists of Chinese descent. In 2022, the Justice Department scrapped a Trump-era initiative aimed at Chinese theft of American intellectual property. The program came under fire from civil rights groups and was criticized for failing to win many prosecutions.
Researchers say the emergence of Ms. Sun’s case risks trapping the diaspora between a suspicious American public and Beijing’s desire to drive a wedge between ethnic Chinese and their adopted homes.
“The freedoms of Chinese diaspora communities and the health of multicultural democracies are at stake,” said Audrye Wong, an expert on Chinese foreign influence at the University of Southern California. “Beijing likes to claim to speak on behalf of all ethnic Chinese overseas, intentionally blurring the lines between Chinese nationals and those of ethnic Chinese descent who are citizens of other countries.”
The post In New York Case, Signs of a Familiar China Playbook appeared first on New York Times.
