The America ChangLe Association in Manhattan's Chinatown, which closed down after an FBI raid last year, has just reopened with a grand ceremony celebrating... July 4! This is China's new form of political warfare, brazen in the extreme.
It is way past time to end the ability of the Chinese regime to conduct political warfare against the United States from American soil. America's defense begins with closing down the America ChangLe Association.
On April 17, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrests that day of two individuals for "conspiring to act as agents" of the People's Republic of China and obstructing justice. The pair — "Harry" Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping — had "worked together to establish the first overseas police station in the United States" for the Fuzhou branch of China's Ministry of Public Security.
The branch was a "clandestine police station" operated under the cover of the America ChangLe Association in Manhattan's Chinatown. The facility that closed last fall, after an FBI raid, had been operated by the United Front Work Department of the Communist Party of China.
China's actions were outrageous — but Americans should be asking why did the Chinese regime think it could, without permission, establish a police station on American soil?
The answer is: American presidents for decades have known that China's diplomats and agents were violating American sovereignty and did either nothing or virtually nothing to stop these activities. Therefore, China's Communists naturally thought they could get away with even more blatant conduct.
It is good that the FBI closed down the Chinatown police station, but as Radio Free Asia reports, that station was "a mere sliver of Beijing's U.S. harassment push."
For one thing, the United Front Work Department, one of the regime's "magic weapons" — operates "Overseas Chinese Service Centers" in other cities. The Daily Caller News Foundation reports that these OCSCs, as they are known, are located in San Francisco, Houston, Omaha, St. Paul, Salt Lake City, St. Louis, and Charlotte. The New York Post believes there are other Chinese police stations in New York and Los Angeles.
The United Front Work Department, the Party's organ to interface with foreign organizations and individuals, often functions as an intelligence service, especially when it operates with the intelligence operations of the People's Liberation Army, another Party organ, and the Chinese central government. The closed New York police station was used as a base targeting those legally in the United States.
Americans may think they are at peace, but the Communist Party believes it is locked in an existential struggle with America. People's Daily, speaking for the Party, declared a "people's war" on the United States in May 2019. The Chinese regime has been conducting "unrestricted warfare" against America for decades.
"Communist China's primary means of defeating America is political warfare," Kerry Gershaneck, a NATO fellow for Hybrid Threats, told Gatestone. "While it is fair to say that the CCP prefers to win this war without fighting, it is more accurate to say that the CCP intends to win without us fighting back. Through political warfare, the CCP disarms us intellectually and psychologically as it co-opts, corrupts, and ultimately controls key American elites, particularly political and foreign policy decision makers."
The Communist Party's political warfare campaign is comprehensive and effective. Beijing has almost certainly purchased most of the Biden family. In March, a spokesperson for Hunter Biden's legal team admitted that Hunter had received "good faith seed funds" from an energy company in China. That was essentially an admission of bribery because, in the absence of corruption, no Chinese business in these circumstances would pay seed money.
The Chinese certainly think Biden has been purchased. In November 2020, Renmin University's Di Dongsheng gave a lecture publicized widely inside China. Di claimed that China, with Biden in the Oval Office, would control outcomes at the highest levels in Washington. He argued that China could make offers that could not be refused and that every American could be bought with cash.
Di got his biggest laugh when he mentioned two words: "Hunter Biden."
In addition to the Bidens, China has purchased hundreds — if not thousands — of politicians, academics, businesspeople and law enforcement officials at the federal, state, and municipal levels.
How do we know this? China's Ministry of State Security first contacted Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Ca.) not when he was serving on the House Intelligence Committee — where he would be of great value to Beijing — but when he was on the city council of Dublin City, California. Swalwell could not have been the only aspiring politician that Beijing had been grooming then.
Swalwell was enticed by the sweet Christine Fang, now known to be a Ministry of State Security agent. "The Chinese Communist Party uses three color-coded 'political-interference tactics' to gain influence over American citizens at home as well as those who naively travel to China," Charles Burton of the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute tells this publication. "Blue refers to sophisticated cyberattacks on target computers, smartphones, and hotel rooms for possible blackmail. Gold refers to bribes, while yellow means 'honey pots,' sexual seduction."
As Burton, a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing, points out, these color-coded tactics "are part of a sophisticated engagement coordinated by the agents of the Communist Party's massive United Front Work Department working under diplomatic cover at China's embassies and consulates."
China's agents work out of, among other places, Beijing's four consulates and large Washington, D.C. embassy as well as nine or so police stations, many state banks and enterprises, Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms, and organizations such as the Chinese Students and Scholars Association. China's regime, over the course of decades, has penetrated just about every organization of influence in the United States.
The United States faces a challenge it is now underestimating. As Gershaneck, also author of Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China's Plan to 'Win Without Fighting, warns, "Today, with its modern technology and massive political, military, and economic power, the political warfare of the People's Republic of China presents a totalitarian challenge unprecedented in human history."
What should the United States do in the face of such challenge? The regime uses every point of contact to destroy America, so America needs to sever every point of contact with the regime.
Americans cannot afford to leave any Communist Party member or any Chinese saboteur, agent, official, banker, or corporate officer in America. There should be no Chinese consulates in the U.S., and the embassy staff of hundreds should be cut down to the ambassador, his personal staff, and family.
Extreme? By no means. Why should we ever allow China to attack America from America?
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.
Barb M