The Chinese Communist Party is operating everywhere across the globe but those of us outside the Beltway should really come to understand the threats. Congressman Mike Gallagher heads a very important committee in the House that is doing outstanding work but the flow of that work is not getting to us as it needs to. So, this is summary is here to help. The enemy is inside the wire, meaning right here embedded in our every day lives.
The committee published an easy to read and understand 6 page introduction for your use. It includes social media, universities, policy demands, manufacturing and trade. Civic groups, public schools, theft and espionage. In fact as an aside, you can’t even play Candy Crush without being forced to watch a Temu ad (Chinese) or be secretly tied to Tik Tok which steals your all you data from your electronic devices in places like Facebook.
You are being manipulated every hour of every day by misinformation, propaganda and influence and you need to see and understand the consequences including election interference. We have major power brokers and industry leaders as well as politicians such as Governor Newsom that simply love all things China, so take extreme caution.
President Xi arrives in San Francisco
Newsweek has done some good independent work in this area including exposing 600 United Front linked civic groups.
It is important to pay attention to Congressman Gallagher’s production and for sure former CIA Director and former State Department Secretary Mike Pompeo. Below is a sample of the work:
In February, for example, Pompeo warned the National Governors Association at a meeting in Washington D.C. that the CPC was identifying and grooming state and local politicians who would support its interests. A Chinese think tank had already graded governors on their “friendliness,” Pompeo said. Newsweek obtained and translated a copy of the 2019 report, which labeled 17 governors as “friendly;” called 14 “ambiguous,” deemed six as “hardline” and the rest “unclear.” Pompeo told the governors, “Whether you are viewed by the CPC as friendly or hardline, know that it’s working you, know that it’s working the team around you.”
Six months later, at a meeting of economists and sociologists in Zhongnanhai, a secretive leaders’ compound in Beijing, Xi told more than a dozen top economists and sociologists that China would double down on seeking “cooperation” with U.S. politicians and business leaders at the states and local level, exactly what Pompeo had warned about. “We must actively develop cooperation with all countries, regions and enterprises willing to cooperate with us, including states, localities and enterprises in the United States,” Xi said, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.
In his talk, Pompeo gave several examples that he said reflected an uptick in CPC interference at the state level. In 2019, he said, diplomats at the Chinese consulate in Houston wrote to the Mississippi governor, Phil Bryant, threatening to cancel a Chinese investment in his state if he traveled to Taiwan, the de facto independent island nation that Beijing claims and says no one may have official ties with. Bryant went anyway.
In another example, Chinese diplomats at the consulate in Chicago wrote to a Wisconsin lawmaker, Republican Roger Roth, asking him to sponsor a bill they wrote praising China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wisconsin Examiner reported. Roth initially ignored the request thinking it a joke. The Chinese diplomats sent it again. Roth replied with one word: “nuts.”
Those two attempts may have faltered in the face of pushback, but outreach often works, especially on the business level. Speaking on background, one official described the pattern: “Say you are governor of a state that has tremendous economic investments in China, or that has a good relationship with China exporting soybeans or grain. China can use that relationship,” say, by asking their political or business contacts to make calls to Washington to try and influence policy. It sounds like U.S. political lobbying, “but you have to know, it’s a foreign government playing this game,” the official says.
He is asking you, the reader to challenge your own knowledge and then challenger your own local leaders.
Furthermore from Newsweek:
A three-day summit that took place in mid-October at the China Institute, a New York City non-profit, provides a classic example of how the United Front works. The event, titled “Finding Success in an Age of Crisis,” promised to help participants figure out how to “achieve success in the face of strained U.S.-China relations and a volatile world.”
The event featured an illustrious line-up of panelists from U.S. business, academia, technology, media, diplomacy and politics, including Rick Snyder, former governor of Michigan, and Stapleton J. Roy, a founder of the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute. Yet what participants likely didn’t know: Three of the four “knowledge partners” are directly or indirectly part of the United Front.
The Beijing-based Center for China & Globalization, a think tank, is one of them. The organization was co-founded by Wang Huiyao, who is also a deputy chairman of the Western Returned Students Association, a United Front Work Department group, according to Joske, who has documented Wang’s multiple connections to the United Front. The other were the China General Chamber of Commerce USA and the China General Chamber of Commerce USA Chicago, both among the 600 or so American groups Newsweek has linked to the CPC system.
Asked for comment, the China Institute replied that it “chose to engage with these organizations because of their large memberships and connection to the issues and topics that are a priority today. We wanted to ensure they were engaged in the conversation.” In an emailed statement, the China General Chamber of Commerce–USA denied it was linked to the United Front system, saying it was “a non-profit and non-governmental organization representing Chinese enterprises in the U.S.,” with a mission “to create value, generate economic growth, and enhance cooperation between the U.S. and Chinese business communities.”
Shame on the Biden administration and for sure shame on Governor Newsom.
