The decision by New York prosecutors to charge a former aide to the New York governor this week with acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government has raised concerns about China’s efforts to influence U.S. politics.
Linda Sun held numerous roles in New York state government, including deputy chief of staff for Governor Kathy Hochul. She is accused of pushing Chinese interests at state functions, including allegedly blocking representatives from Taiwan from meeting the governor, in exchange for financial benefits worth millions of dollars.
Sun’s arrest on Tuesday is the latest, and perhaps most high profile, in a series of cases the U.S. Department of Justice has prosecuted in recent years to root out Beijing’s agents on U.S. soil.
While previous cases involved charges against suspected Chinese spies for reporting on and surveilling dissidents critical of the Communist Party, Tuesday’s case appeared to show how China is trying to directly influence U.S. politics in line with its interests, even at the local level.
Why State Level?
China sees it as important to cultivate state-level relationships with U.S. officials, and has always done so.
Although the bilateral relationship between the United States and China has become increasingly tense, the two countries had cultivated extensive regional-level ties in the 2010s, with U.S. governors frequently visiting China to boost trade and cultural ties.
That’s taken a sharp 180-degree turn in recent years, as the U.S. government’s relationship with China grows more confrontational and being tough on China has become a bipartisan point of consensus. The White House and Congress are leveling high tariffs on Chinese products and limiting export of high-tech products to China.
Some states are even passing bills to actively ban China’s presence. Georgia, Florida, and Alabama are just some of the states that banned Chinese “agents” from buying real estate.
Seeking influence on the state level has “increased in importance as relations at the federal level have soured,” said Mareike Ohlberg, senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, who studies China. “Something is better than nothing.”
How Does Beijing Cultivate Influence Abroad?
China’s Communist Party has a branch specifically tasked with overseas work, called the United Front. Under the United Front’s control are a multitude of groups that serve to engage overseas Chinese under the guise of social or industry groups. Well-known among these groups is the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, which itself oversees a number of smaller groups.
The groups seek to build membership overseas and engage with the Chinese diaspora, and has branches all over the world, from Africa to Southeast Asia to North America.
Willy Lam, a senior fellow at The Jamestown Foundation, said the Chinese government has a long history of targeting major U.S. cities and states with large Chinese populations such as New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, where Beijing’s operatives have been working with established, “well-built” associations and trade groups for overseas Chinese.
It pays for those local groups to work with Beijing, while the setup spares Beijing a lot of legwork on the ground, Lam said.
Sun was linked with Shi Qianping, who has described himself as a standing committee member of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, according to Chinese state media. Shi also held the role of the head of the U.S. Federation of Chinese-American Entrepreneurs, according to Xinhua.
Sun also engaged with regional-level branches of the Returned Overseas Chinese group, like in Jiangsu province, where Sun was born, according to the group.
Aside from these groups, there are also growing worries about overseas Chinese police stations, set up without the knowledge of the countries they operate in. Last year, New York police arrested two men for allegedly setting up a secret police station for a Chinese provincial police agency.
What Does Beijing Want?
Sun’s case, which at first glance may seem the stuff of spy films, showed that China was interested in cultivating influence on a subtle level – for example by promoting messages in line with Beijing’s views.
Prosecutors said Sun solicited talking points from a Chinese official for a video Hochul recorded when she was lieutenant governor to wish people a happy Lunar New Year. She specifically kept Hochul from mentioning Chinese human rights issues in that video, prosecutors say.
Sun also allegedly blocked representatives of Taiwan’s government from meeting with top New York state officials. China claims Taiwan, a self-ruled democracy, as part of its own territory and views any interaction between Taiwanese government representatives and other governments as an infringement of its sovereignty claim.
Speeches by Chinese President Xi Jinping and party documents have made it clear that one directive for the party’s overseas work is to rally overseas Chinese around the party’s goals, including urging them to “actively participate in and support” the causes of modernization and peaceful unification for their motherland.
The Chinese government also has been willing to exploit domestic U.S. issues, such as violence against Asian Americans, to boost its messaging. Sun had claimed to be a representative for the Asian American community.
“The Chinese government likes to claim to speak for all ethnic Chinese abroad,” said Audrye Wong, a Jeane Kirkpatrick Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She said the Chinese government sometimes blurs the lines between legitimate cultural and community groups and influence operations.
China is often able to set the agenda when it comes to engagement at the local level. “There’s been quite a mismatch in terms of resources on the PRC side vs US side,” Ohlberg said. For example, the city of Shanghai has hundreds of staffers dedicated to international engagement, while U.S. states may only have a handful.
“There needs to be more strategic thinking going into this, more resources and knowledge, and then once you have that, you can decide,” she said.
Wong added that local governments should reach out to communities of Asian descent instead of relying on one person as a community liaison, as what seemed to have happened in Sun’s case. Local officials should “really build infrastructure at the local community level working with legitimate Asian American organizations.”