The mayor of a Seattle-area city praised China’s government for “safeguarding” religious liberty after she visited the country, in a private letter she addressed to Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) last year. In the missive, Victoria Woodards, then mayor of Tacoma, Washington, also revealed that during the May 2025 trip, which was likely funded by Beijing, she had toured the Shanghai production site of a Chinese state-owned aviation giant blacklisted by the Pentagon.
“The temple’s thriving incense offerings and continuous stream of devotees gave me a profound appreciation for the vibrant development of religious activities in China, which fully reflects the Chinese government’s policy of safeguarding residents’ freedom of religious belief,” she wrote, referring to a stop at Shanghai’s Jade Buddha Temple.
The mayor’s characterization of Beijing’s handling of religious freedom contradicts federal warnings about the Chinese government’s brutal crackdowns on several groups, including Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims and Falun Gong. China has been listed as a “country of particular concern” — a State Department designation for governments engaged in severe religious repression — since 1999.
The city of Tacoma disclosed the document in response to a request under the Washington Public Records Act. The text of the letter was attached to an email in which Woodards instructed city officials to proofread it, mount it on gold foil letterhead paper at Tacoma’s City Hall, then pass it along in digital and physical formats to China’s consulate in San Francisco.
While the records furnished by the city do not confirm whether Woodards’ staff sent out that version of the letter, the former mayor referred to it as a “final draft” in her email, which used the subject line “Final Xi Letter for Review.” In response to an emailed inquiry, a spokesperson for Tacoma’s government said that the city did not have a written response to the letter on file.
The spokesperson also said that city funding did not appear to have been used for the trip and that the former mayor’s staff indicated to the city government that “it was likely covered by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and/or the Shanghai Foreign Affairs Office.” Woodards, though, did not respond to an inquiry submitted via a social media page that her team is known to monitor.
The June 2025 letter would not be the first time Woodards addressed such a letter to Xi. Woodards received a response from the Chinese leader in 2022 when she wrote him a similar note celebrating the Winter Olympics in Beijing that year.
The latest letter, and other records, shed light on China’s robust decades-long subnational diplomatic relationship with the municipal leadership of Washington’s second-most populous city, which is also home to a U.S. Army base. The city also houses the Port of Tacoma, one of the busiest deepwater ports in America and a federally designated Strategic Seaport, a status which directs it to coordinate with the military installation, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, in a national defense emergency.
Woodards left office at the end of 2025 after wrapping up her second term as mayor. Throughout her eight-year tenure at City Hall, she deepened Tacoma’s participation in the city’s active and long-running sister city program with Fuzhou, the coastal city over which Xi presided earlier in his career. The Chinese leader has visited Tacoma twice, in that former capacity as Fuzhou party secretary in 1993, then in 2015, during his state visit. Beijing’s external propaganda organs and paradiplomatic influence agencies have frequently played up Beijing’s relationship with Tacoma. In his 2022 response to Woodards, Xi noted his two visits to the city and namechecked Tacoma’s Lincoln High School, which has sent numerous groups of students to China to participate in exchange programs organized by Beijing.
The documents disclosed by Tacoma confirm that many of the exchanges involving the city are organized via the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, or CPAFFC, a Chinese Communist Party paradiplomacy organ. The U.S. intelligence community and State Department have warned that the association co-opts unwitting state and local officials to promote China’s foreign policy goals. A public bulletin issued in 2022 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned that China uses its sister city programs to the same ends.
In her 2025 letter to Xi, Woodards acknowledged that this engagement-focused policy toward China cut against the federal government’s hawkish posture.
“While tensions at the federal level are high, it is the people to people connections that are vital to our continued prosperity. As a Mayor, I believe that we must focus on collaboration and cooperation and not confrontation when it comes to our US – China relationships,” she wrote. She added that the two countries must find “mutually beneficial opportunities for trade, for youth, and for culture.”
In addition to cultural exchange, Woodards advocated deeper U.S. integration with China’s aerospace industry.
Woodards wrote that she toured production lines for aircraft produced by the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, or COMAC, China’s state-owned aviation powerhouse and an aspiring competitor to Boeing and Airbus. In 2021 the Pentagon added COMAC to a blacklist of Chinese military companies, a label for firms that supply Beijing’s military-industrial complex.
The C919, Woodards wrote, “stands as a significant achievement of China’s independent innovation strategy and a prime example of practical cooperation between China and the United States in high-tech fields.”
“We believe that collaboration between COMAC and Boeing working in concert to advance the global aviation industry will benefit of all mankind.”
The rollout of the company’s C919 jet made a splash in 2024, with Chinese officials touting it as a triumph of Beijing’s supposed self-sufficient industrial policies. Experts pointed out, though, that the jet was produced using a significant number of components from U.S. firms — and COMAC was dogged by allegations of intellectual property theft. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi said that media reports and federal court documents reveal the Chinese Communist Party’s “vast industrial espionage campaign at COMAC’s behest.”
Woodards’s signature on the letter appeared next to that of David Chong, who identified himself as founder of a group called the U.S.-China Youth and Students Exchange Association, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization.
The group does not have a public social media or digital presence, though Chong has appeared in state propaganda reports, which credit him as a key organizer of Beijing-backed student exchange programs for students at K-12 schools in Tacoma.
Chong did not respond to an inquiry addressed to the email through which he communicates with Tacoma officials and the city’s schools.
During a 2024 visit to China, Woodards credited CPAFFC with laying the groundwork for her travels in the country, according to the draft of a speech that she planned to deliver at a luncheon with the association. Later the same month, she spoke at a U.S.-China sister city conference that CPAFFC co-organized in Tacoma.
During the 2024 summit, Woodards signed an agreement to develop friendship ties with another municipality, Ningbo. That document called on the two cities to cooperate on “port development” and science and technology exchanges, according to a copy provided under the records law.
Woodards wrote in an email to city officials that the agreement would be for a “friendship city” relationship, instead of a “sister city” agreement so that “Fuzhou understands it is not the same relationship.”
After Woodards returned from her May 2025 Shanghai trip, CPAFFC’s U.S. affairs director emailed the mayor to follow up after meeting her in the city and to invite her to another sister city conference, in Hangzhou, a city just outside Shanghai, in October. He said that the association would cover a five-person delegation’s expenses in the city. Woodards attended that event.
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