Spy vs Spy: Claims On China Global Infiltration

[grarpamp]

https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/inside-chinas-long-game-to-infiltrate-us-politics-5505749

https://www.theepochtimes.com/china/portman-report-exposes-chinas-subversive-recruitment-program-aimed-at-us-federal-reserve-4619848
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/feinsteins-close-china-ties-under-scrutiny-after-chinese-spy-discovery-2614840
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/house-ethics-committee-concludes-probe-into-rep-eric-swalwells-associations-with-alleged-chinese-spy-5287430
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/fbi-arrests-2-for-operating-secret-chinese-police-station-in-nyc-5200542
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/house-passes-first-ever-us-bill-to-punish-ccps-forced-organ-harvesting-5153155
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/sen-hawley-responds-to-ccp-letter-on-covid-origins-5111473


As Chinese authorities escorted the senior Federal Reserve official
from his Shanghai hotel room, they demanded he “say good things about
China" when back in the United States.
(Illustration by The Epoch Times, Getty Images, Shutterstock)

The atmosphere was “frightening,” the official, who remained unnamed,
recalled to the Fed.

That was the first of four times the official was detained and
interrogated during a 2019 trip to Shanghai. Chinese authorities
threatened his family, tapped his phones and computers, and copied
contact information of other Federal Reserve officials from his
account on Chinese social media app WeChat, according to Senate
Homeland Security Committee Republicans who made public the details in
a report last July.

The U.S. official recounted Chinese authorities trying to pry
“sensitive, non-public economic data” out of him and insisting that he
“advise senior government officials” on sensitive economic issues such
as trade tariffs while the United States and China were embroiled in a
trade war. They forced him to drink liquor and attempted to make him
commit to future meetings to allow them to gather economic
intelligence.

Unsettling as it is, the incident was but part of a “long-running and
brazen” malicious campaign from China over the course of more than a
decade to undermine U.S. economic policy and advance Beijing’s
ambition to supplant the United States as the global superpower.

Coercion and threats represent only a sliver of the regime’s toolbox
used to target the Western political sphere. A Chinese think tank
based in Beijing, in partnering with the state-affiliated Tsinghua
University, in 2019 rated White House advisors and U.S. governors by
their friendliness to Beijing. The group labeled officials as
“friendly,” “ambiguous,” or “hardline” after combing through metrics
such as age, work history, public statements, trade activities with
China, and length of term.

Time, patience, and thoroughness—these are attributes that Michel
Juneau-Katsuya, former Asia Pacific chief at the Canadian Security
Intelligence Service in the 1990s, sees in the Chinese regime’s craft
of infiltration.

“They've been capable to work in a very holistic way,” he told The Epoch Times.

China, he noted, doesn’t have a democratic election process that could
displace the leadership from power. “So they know that they can plant
today something that will be capable to be harvested in five, 10 or 15
years.”

Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), who has advocated for a tougher stance on
China, agreed.

“They're playing the long game,” he told The Epoch Times.
Biding Their Time

Few if any U.S. leaders, from the federal, state, local, tribal, and
territorial levels, are immune to the risk of the Chinese regime
manipulating them to bolster its hidden agenda, warned the National
Counterintelligence and Security Center in July last year.

By leveraging relationships with U.S. officials—called “using the
local to surround the central” in communist slogan terms—Beijing can
pressure Washington to back policy outcomes favorable to the regime,
such as deepening bilateral economic ties and tamping down criticism
of the regime’s abysmal human rights record.

A Chinese spy reportedly drove for the recently deceased Sen. Dianne
Feinstein (D-Calif.) for 20 years.
Christine Fang with then-Dublin City Councilmember Eric Swalwell at a
student event in October 2012. (Screenshot/Social media)

Christine Fang, an alleged Chinese spy working for China’s top
intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, reportedly used
campaign fundraising, networking, and romantic relationships with at
least two Midwestern city mayors to gain a footing in their spheres of
influence.

Ms. Fang also approached Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) when he was a
member of the Dublin City Council, raised money for his 2014
reelection campaign, and facilitated an intern’s placement in Mr.
Swalwell’s office, according to Axios.

The connection prompted a two-year investigation from the bipartisan
House Ethics Committee, which in May ultimately decided not to take
any action against the California lawmaker, but cautioned Mr. Swalwell
to remain aware of “the possibility that foreign governments may
attempt to secure improper influence through gifts and other
interactions.”

The United Front network, which helps the Party control the Chinese
diaspora, also plays a role in co-opting well-placed individuals for
Beijing’s interests.

Lu Jianwang, one of the two alleged operators of a secret Chinese
police station in New York, together with his brother, has given tens
of thousands of dollars to New York politicians in recent years,
including vice chair of the Democratic National Committee Rep. Grace
Meng (D-N.Y.), New York Mayor Eric Adams, and New York Gov. Kathy
Hochul, campaign finance records show.
People walk by a building (C), which is suspected of being a secret
police station on behalf of China's regime, in New York's Chinatown on
April 18, 2023. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

“Local level officials, state officials are just not going to be as
aware of or as attuned to some of these influence efforts—they're just
trying to create jobs,” Sarah Cook, a senior China analyst at the
Freedom House, told The Epoch Times.

“The CCP is very good at taking advantage of that, to get people to
side with them, to get people in the United States to have a stake in
what the CCP also wants. Then later, that can be activated to create
situations that are more problematic.”

“I think people at the earliest part of that relationship, don't
realize that,” she added.

As with Ms. Fang’s case, the Chinese influence operations begin early
in the local leaders’ careers.

“They're very, very patient, they have time on their side. Their
determination and their focus is remarkable,” Mr. Juneau-Katsuya said
of the regime.

He said that Chinese intelligence officers-turned-defectors had
detailed to him how they were instructed to be model citizens in the
Western world for five to 10 years, working their way up the ladder in
society before being “activated.”

“When the security service or the police tried to do a background
check, they find absolutely nothing,” he said. “So they are extremely,
extremely deep undercover agents in that perspective," Mr.
Juneau-Katsuya said.
‘Lie in Plain Sight’

Taiwan, Uyghur, Falun Gong, Tiananmen Square. The list of the Chinese
Communist Party’s trigger words goes on. And the regime has made it
clear that no one—in China or anywhere else—should go against its
will.

Late at night on March 28, a day after the House overwhelmingly passed
Rep. Chris Smith’s (R-N.J.) Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023,
a furious email from the Chinese embassy’s minister counselor Zhou
Zheng arrived at the inbox of an aide to the congressman.
Doctors carry boxes containing fresh organs for transplant procedures
at a hospital in Henan Province, China, on Aug. 16, 2012. (Screenshot
via Sohu.com)

The email, written from a Gmail account registered under Mr. Zhou,
declared the bill “absurd” and claimed the “so-called ‘forced organ
harvesting’ in China is a farce.”

The bill was the first ever such legislative piece to curb the
state-sanctioned killing of prisoners of conscience for their organs,
an atrocity that an independent London tribunal in 2019 concluded has
taken place in China for years “on a significant scale.”

A number of whistleblowers, including eyewitnesses, have come forward
to The Epoch Times to share testimony of the grisly act.

Mr. Zhou, in true Beijing fashion, demanded that the United States
stop "baseless hype and anti-China moves and stops preceding [sic]
this legislation.”

Mr. Smith said the claims in the email were "a big lie in plain sight."

“The Falun Gong practitioners and the Uyghurs are being killed for
their organs, and it's tens of thousands every single year, as we
know,” he told The Epoch Times.

“Perfectly healthy people being put down in a gurney drugged in order
to effectuate two to three of their organs being taken out
involuntarily—and they kill them—that is murder. That's crimes against
humanity.”

The New Jersey Republican on April 14 wrote to the Chinese embassy
requesting a visa to visit Xinjiang, the northwestern Chinese region
where an estimated 1 million Uyghurs are being held in detention
camps. He hasn’t heard back.

A few weeks before the email to Mr. Smith, counselor Li Xiang with the
Chinese embassy wrote to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), insisting he
retract his bill ordering the declassification of information
surrounding COVID-19 origins, which had been signed into law on March
20.

Mr. Hawley shrugged it off. “The Chinese government wrote to me and
demanded I withdraw my Covid origins bill,” he wrote in a social media
post on March 9. “Hahaha. Not a chance.”
An Uyghur woman protests in front of policemen on a street in Urumqi,
the capital of Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region, China, on July 7,
2009. (Guang Niu/Getty Images)

Mr. Li also hit a wall when he tried to block a scheduled
congressional hearing on the origins of COVID-19. Nor was he
successful with his warning to House lawmakers not to meet with
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen during her visit to Los Angeles.

The audacity of the regime in making demands of an elected member of
Congress “incensed” Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa), one of the recipients
of the threatening letter.

“Basically, I just said, ‘No, you can't tell me who I can and can't
meet with and I'm going to go ahead and meet with her,’" Ms. Hinson
told The Epoch Times. "And that's what we did."

"The fact that somebody was bold enough to assume that they could send
me an email like that, and threaten and bully me—incredulous.”

“I will not be bullied, my mind is not going to be changed on an email
like that, where you are deliberately trying to undermine my ability
to do my job.”

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