Chinese Communist Party spies, schools spreading their propaganda and influence campaigns against politicians are rife across the US.
In just the past week before President Trump landed for a summit with Chinese premiere Xi Jinping, the mayor of Arcadia, California, Eileen Wang, resigned after pleading guilty to working as a foreign agent for China.
In New York City, Lu “Harry” Jianwang, a Chinatown community leader, was convicted in Brooklyn federal court for operating a secret CCP police station. Meanwhile, Chinese divorcee Changli “Sophia” Luo was charged with blackmailing the billionaire owner of a basketball team.
Luo — who allegedly attempted to shake down Milwaukee Bucks owner Wes Edens for more than a billion dollars — was arrested after booking a flight to Hong Kong then bailed out of jail by Robin Mui, a Chinese foreign agent, according to court papers. She has pleaded not guilty.
Mui is the New York-based CEO of Sing Tao, a pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) newspaper. He traveled to China in 2014 with Eric Adams, who would later become New York City mayor, and his controversial former Asian affairs advisor Winnie Greco, whose Bronx home was raided by the FBI in 2024. She has never faced charges following the raid.
“This is just the tip of the of the iceberg,” said Kevin Hecht, a retired FBI agent who spent 20 years investigating Chinese counterintelligence.
Here are the tactics the totalitarian Chinese regime employs in the US, both legal and illegal:
Honeytraps
It is yet to be proven if Luo is a Chinese spy. Although it must be noted similar apparent extortion schemes are deployed in the US every day against high powered businessmen by Russia, China and any number of other governments.
AMC cinema boss Adam Aron fell victim to one of those traps, while actor Jeremy Renner has fought back against claims from a Chinese filmmaker, Yi Zhou, who said he sent her nudes and threatened to have her deported — claims Renner denies.
Suspicious of honeytrapping, the Biden administration prevented any US government officials in China from having sex with Chinese women. President Trump has continued the same prohibition.
Political appointees
Wang faces up to ten years in prison for promoting Chinese propaganda in the US and promoting the communist party’s interests. She and her handler and co-conspirator, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, promoted People’s Republic of China (PRC) content on a website they created aimed at the local Chinese community from 2022 to 2024, according to plea deals they both reached with US prosecutors.
Other influence operations are more subtle, such as that of Linda Sun. The former director of Asian-American Affairs for New York’s ex-governor Andrew Cuomo and a top aide to his successor Kathy Hochul, is accused of forging Hochul’s signature on official letters in an attempt to steer state policy in favor of Chinese national interests. He case ended in a mistrial last year.
“If a group in Long Island was going to have a Taiwan day, it was her job to make sure that it fell through and that the governor would not recognize it,” Hecht told The Post.
Sun also allegedly encouraged Hochul to film a Lunar New Year video advertising China’s New York consulate, and told her handlers in a Jan. 25 2021 letter the then lieutenant governor “is much more obedient than the governor,” according to the court documents.
In California, Christine Fang stands accused of being a Chinese spy. She allegedly infiltrated the office of disgraced Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who suspended his campaign for governor of the state last month.
Fang, also known as “Fang Fang,” allegedly developed “extensive” ties with Swalwell starting when he was a Dublin city council member, bundling donations for his 2014 reelection campaign and even recommending staff for his office, according to reports.
“Nothing even makes me blink anymore,” said Hecht. “If you are anybody in politics, China is going to send a Chinese woman to try to blackmail you.”
Hacking
China has a huge state-sponsored computer hacking operation. Last year, US federal authorities in New York City charged ten Chinese nationals with a hacking operation targeting media companies and the New York State Assembly, as well as foreign ministries in Taiwan, India and South Korea.
The years-long campaign was committed at the direction of the CCP by China-based companies, including i-Soon, a Shanghai private cybersecurity firm, according to the Department of Justice.
From 2016 through 2023, i-Soon and some of its employees engaged in “the numerous and widespread hacking of email accounts, cell accounts, cell phones, servers and websites” at the direction of the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and other Chinese government agencies, legal papers say.
The Chinese government targeted the hacking victims because they had been critical of the government, and had been in communication with the US government, according to a Department of Justice press release.
Confucius Institutes
Since 2004, China has funded educational Confucius Institutes at US colleges which teach Chinese language and culture classes. By 2020, there were 75 operating in the United States, 65 of which were active on US university campuses. Those groups sponsored over 500 classrooms on K-12 campuses too, according to the US Department of State.
The American Association of University Professors in 2014 said the institutes “function as an arm of the Chinese state.”
The National Association of Scholars also found Confucius faculty are pressured to self-censor, and some universities are given financial incentives not to criticize China. They also present a “selective” knowledge of Chinese history, avoiding Tibet, Taiwan, the Tiananmen Square uprising and state human rights abuses.
The state department claimed the centers “push out skewed Chinese language and cultural training for US students as part of Beijing’s multifaceted propaganda efforts.”
Although the official number of US Confucius Institutes has dwindled to 10, sources warn they have simply re-branded.
Operation Fox Hunt
Beijing began Operation Fox Hunt, the CCP’s massive effort to repatriate dissidents around the world, in 2014. The CCP set up more than 100 police stations in foreign countries and tried to use local law enforcement and private investigators to crack down on Chinese dissidents.
In New Jersey, retired NYPD sergeant and private investigator Michael McMahon was convicted of acting as an illegal agent for China in a scheme to harass an anti-regime New Jersey resident. After serving 18 months in prison he was pardoned by Trump last year.
“The CCP knows exactly what our vulnerabilities are and embedded themselves in every aspect of our justice system and political landscape,” said McMahon’s wife Martha, author of “How My NYPD Hero Cop Husband Turned PI was Falsely Prosecuted by the FBI.”
In Manhattan, The Post was first to reveal Harry Lu’s nonprofit, America Changle Association, operated an overseas police station above a noodle shop on East Broadway.
“The Chinese police stations are nothing compared to everything else the CCP is doing,” said Hecht. “[The police stations] were never a threat to our national security, but when you get to spies getting into governmental entities, the military and tech sector, spying, there’s a lot.”
Espionage
In addition to trying to influence politicians, Chinese operatives have been convicted of industrial espionage. Earlier this year, Linwei Ding, a former Google software engineer, was found guilty of seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets – including thousands of pages of Google trade secrets that were stolen to help China’s AI sector, court papers say.
Last year, Yunhai Li, a Chinese doctor, was arrested at a Texas airport for allegedly trying to smuggle US-funded cancer research out of the country. Li was employed as a researcher at MD Anderson Cancer Center since 2022, and had been working on a vaccine to prevent breast cancer from spreading to other parts of the body before abruptly resigning in July, 2025, and allegedly uploading the research to a Chinese server on his computer. He pleaded guilty to the theft and was sentenced to a year in prison earlier this year.
In January, Chinese-American Navy sailor Jinchao Wei was sentenced to 16 years in prison for selling national defense information to an intelligence officer working for China for $12,000, according to federal court filings.
“It’s all low hanging fruit,” said Hecht, referring to the instances of CCP espionage and theft that have been made public over the years. “The stuff that China is doing that hasn’t made the press is far more complicated, and far worse.”
Farmland
Chinese investors have also been rushing to buy US farmland close to military installations. In 2024, The Post identified up to 384,000 acres of Chinese-owned land in close proximity to at least 19 bases across the country.
Those include some of the military’s most strategically important bases: Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina; Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas; Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in San Diego, California, and MacDill Air Forcebase in Tampa, Florida.
“These locations can be used to set up intelligence collection sites and the owners can be influential in local politics, as we have seen in the past,” Robert S. Spalding III, a retired United States Air Force brigadier general told The Post at the time.
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