China’s Influence Operations Show the Enemy Is Inside the Gates

With the world’s attention riveted to the summit between President Trump and Xi Jinping, it’s worth reflecting on a few other China-related stories that made the headlines this week. In the space of just five days, an American citizen was convicted of operating a secret Chinese “police station” to monitor dissidents in New York City; a California mayor admitted to spying for China; and it was revealed that a suspected Chinese operative sought to recruit a staff member on the House China Committee to reveal details of his work in exchange for cash.

For those of us who’ve been following this issue, it’s no surprise to see just how thoroughly China’s infiltration of our institutions has gone. CCP influence operations in the U.S. are pervasive, multi-layered, and deliberately exploit America’s openness – operating at the federal, state, and local levels of government, as well as across strategic industries in the private sector and academia, and in civil society and media.

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These efforts are part of its broader global strategy to weaken America from within and prepare the ground for China to seize the upper hand – a gambit the CCP is pursuing in democracies around the world, in addition to its more open strategy of co-optation pursued in developing democracies or authoritarian states.

I warned about this very threat years ago during my time as Secretary of State in a speech to the National Governors Association – an association chaired by then-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Unfortunately, neither Governor Cuomo nor his successor, Kathy Hochul, took my warnings seriously. 

Complacency has consequences. Just a couple of years ago, Linda Sun, an aide who had served in the offices of both Cuomo and Hochul, was charged with acting as an agent of the CCP. The indictment showed that Sun received millions in laundered cash from the Chinese Communist Party and, in return, “worked to further the interests of the Chinese government and the CCP.” Her efforts included blocking Taiwanese officials from contacting the governor’s office, aligning speeches and press releases with CCP messaging, and granting CCP officials access to high-level state government discussions on sensitive topics such as COVID response efforts.

Progressives often have had a blind spot for the CCP’s influence operations. A CCP spy worked for the late Senator Dianne Feinstein for 20 years. The execrable Rep. Eric Swalwell enjoyed a close relationship with CCP spy Christine Fang during his time as a local city councilmember. Minnesota Governor and former vice presidential candidate Tim Walz has an extensive history of engagement with CCP-backed entities – relationships that have never received the level of scrutiny they deserve.

Throughout my tenure in the first Trump Administration – first as CIA Director and then as Secretary of State – we were laser-focused on exposing this problem and pursuing offenders in the public and private sectors with all the tools at our disposal. That included closing down the Chinese consulate in Houston, which functioned as a hub for espionage and IP theft, and cracking down on front groups for the CCP in American universities and civil society.

Given the extent of the problem, we were only able to scratch the surface, but it was a start. Unfortunately, those efforts lapsed under the Biden Administration, which shut down our anti-espionage initiatives and defaulted to appeasement. This only emboldened China to ramp up its efforts to intimidate, harass, and silence Americans who protested Xi Jinping’s policies – especially among the Chinese diaspora.

This enemy is inside the gates. If China succeeds in its efforts to continue to steal our dual-use technology and valuable intellectual property; or to influence our institutions so that they bend to Beijing’s will; or to warp the minds of American citizens so that they don’t see the threat clearly, we may not be prepared to win the contest of systems that Xi Jinping is set upon. America will never be secure if we are not clear-eyed about the nature of this threat, and prepared to do what is necessary to tackle it at each and every level.

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