As New York City Mayor Eric Adams stood accused of receiving “improper valuable benefits” from wealthy foreign businesspeople, including a Turkish government official, in an indictment unsealed on September 26, alleged undisclosed agent for China Linda Sun (孫雯) had just the day before exited a Brooklyn federal court after a preliminary hearing on charges of money laundering, alien smuggling and visa fraud. She had pled not guilty during arraignment earlier in the month.
A former deputy chief of staff for New York Governor Kathy Hochul and deputy diversity officer for former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, Sun is suspected of having leveraged her position to facilitate China’s access to sensitive communications, derail opposition to its repressive strategies for Taiwan and Turkic peoples and sneak members of the Chinese government into America.
Given that Sun’s activities are thought to be the tip of Beijing’s Cold War II iceberg, the focus has long switched to how they came to pass, and figures like Mike Pompeo have offered an answer. “Taking advantage of woke policies is a common tactic in the Chinese Communist Party’s vast espionage campaign,” he tweeted.
Pompeo wants to tell it straight. Sun was born in Nanjing, and tip-toeing around her background is a national security risk. Campaigns like #StopAsianHate are defocusing attention from a very real problem: Beijing is reshaping U.S. politics from the inside via diaspora communities, whom authorities fear to investigate in case they are branded as racist.
These points cannot be casually discounted. For decades, repressive regimes have sought to cancel everybody’s opinion but their own by cynically taking advantage of legitimate rights movements and people’s sensitivity to injustice, and certain Chinese American groups are working hand-in-glove with the CCP to further its interests.
The violent welcome given to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) during his visit to San Francisco last year is a case in point, as are embeds in anti-racism campaigns that echo Beijing propaganda, CCP piggy-backing on genuine racial grievances to aggravate divisions in democracies and its reflex cries of “Sinophobia” to deflect attention whenever its crimes are highlighted. A long line of U.S. espionage incidents traces back to ethnic Chinese individuals, too.
So lazy efforts at inclusivity are an open invitation to Beijing’s espionage crew, and that cannot be denied. However, telling it like it is should also mean the full story, which is not an end-to-end Chinese one.
Recent China-centered political espionage and foreign agent cases in Belgium, Czechia and the U.K. all involved white men, as have U.S. convictions of a soldier and a retired police officer who were acting at Beijing’s behest. Plus, the interface through which the CCP can blend its narrative into protest movements is not always Chinese.
Returning to San Francisco 2023, the political influence of the American business elite of various backgrounds who paid $2,000 a head for the honor of Xi’s company and gave him a standing ovation during dinner presumably outweighs all the diaspora groups dancing in red put together, and even freedom “absolutists” like Elon Musk run a sideline in China-friendly soundbites when their Shanghai investments reach a certain level. Apple’s Tim Cook censors a lot more than the odd political speech for which Sun stands accused.
Here, the essence of wokeness as an attitude of fairness to all is extremely useful. The criminal spotlight is rightly falling on Sun, but that should not allow New York politicians to exit the stage without answering awkward questions first, regardless of heritage. Adams, Hochul and others keep up regular appearances either in person or via aides at events organized by the Hong Kong government or United Front groups, a CCP cover.
But it is not just that an anti-woke approach to combating Beijing’s espionage tactics could see one or two prime nodes of Xi Jinping influence fly under the radar. Rather, military-grade wokeness through an embrace of #StopAsianHate is one of the sharpest weapons with which to skewer him.
For CCP China is racism central. Aside from its xenophobic vendetta towards the Japanese and the backlashes its actions create against Asian communities in the U.S. from idiots seeking excuses to vent their violent tendencies, it propagates racist stereotypes for all those it self-identifies as ruling.
Beyond minoritizing, exotifying and finally vanishing the authentic culture of Tibetans and Uyghurs, it even dehumanizes and others the Chinese themselves by untruthfully presenting them as homogenous and uniform in their fealty to the motherland’s party-state. It then asserts de facto ownership of all ethnic Chinese anywhere in the world by blood and implies that basic rights are not universal, so some people are weirdly different in terms of their need to not be tortured, express themselves or choose their leaders.
Moreover, breaking down Beijing’s distractionary tropes means ensuring that a multiplicity of views is politically potent from both the Chinese and non-Chinese groups whose land, cultures, religions and even families have been appropriated by the CCP.
That’s wokeness to the extreme, and it involves cutting off the supply line for transnational repression such as by moving forward with the proposed closure of Hong Kong trade missions, making it abundantly clear that diplomatic staff will become persona non grata when there is reasonable suspicion that they are orchestrating intimidation and ensuring an effective, enforced legal framework, whereby anyone of any race or ethnicity cashing in on the influence trade for non-democratic regimes is transparently registered.
Then, if Xi or one of his high-level minions must be allowed to visit the U.S. again, the police should be well-trained in advance to ensure that everybody’s voice can be heard without reprisal in its full, diverse glory, including by the officials themselves. That way, it can be widely understood that the vast majority of Chinese are casualties of the CCP, not its spies.
The alternative, i.e. blanket suspicion of ethnic Chinese, denial of key roles to them and racial profiling, is to be resisted, not just because it walks the U.S. back in the direction of abusive episodes like the mass internment of ethnic Japanese and transforms it more toward the Beijing model of governance itself, but precisely because of the openings the CCP perceives itself to have with the diaspora.
If Chinese Americans live under stigmatized conditions of closed doors, hate crimes and state distrust, they may well feel that the best protection is not offered by Washington, but by Xi’s gang-like operations instead. The next time he tries to swing a New York primary, he might just succeed.
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