As the COVID-19 virus spread across New York in March 2020, state officials met in private to talk about how to handle the pandemic. But there was someone else on the call who shouldn’t have been there: a woman from the Chinese government.
Prosecutors say that the official was added to the call without her knowledge by Linda Sun, who at the time worked for Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration.
According to prosecutors, Sun told the Chinese official in a written message, “Keep your phone off,” while they were on the call.
Police say that after the 32-minute talk, the official sent Sun a review with only two words: “very useful.”
The call was one of the events that were emphasized in a 64-page accusation that said Sun used her jobs in the New York state government to help the Chinese government. Taiwanese officials were locked out of the government and messages were changed to reflect Chinese goals. In exchange, she and her family got millions of dollars in kickbacks, free travel, and more than a dozen salted ducks made in the Nanjing style.
Sun, who is 41 years old and worked for Humphrey and his replacement, Gov. Kathy Hochul, has pleaded not guilty.
U.S. counterintelligence officials have been worried for a long time, both in public and in private, about China’s complex efforts to spy on and affect American society, such as paying off people in the military and the tech industry.
Officials say that Beijing’s long-term plan has also included going after local and state officials in the hopes of getting more support for China and learning more about how political decisions are made as those officials move up in the ranks.
Former top CIA official Dennis Wilder, who worked on China while he was there, says that China’s actions in the Sun case are typical of the country’s behavior.
Wilder said, “This is a classic Ministry of State Security operation.” The Ministry of State Security is China’s top intelligence agency. “You go after naturalized Americans who have a lot of ties to China.” Chinese is what they say. In China, they have family. Their goal is to do business in China.
According to Wilder, one of the main goals of China’s intelligence services is to “disrupt Taiwan” anywhere, even in Chinatowns in U.S. cities or state governments.
“Someone who works for Hochul would be very helpful in that case.” “She would be able to push the pro-Beijing case and shut down the Taiwan case,” said Wilder, who is now an assistant professor at Georgetown University.
Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank in Washington, D.C., said the case showed how China tries to use hidden players to influence American politics at all levels of government.
“This situation shows how far China is willing to go to get into and control American institutions from within,” Singleton said. “TikTok has also raised concerns about data collection and influence operations.”
“The charges against Linda Sun show that China is trying to get into and have an effect on all levels of U.S. government, from the local to the federal level, by using political connections and trust,” he said.
There have been a lot of people in New York who have been accused by federal officials of being Chinese agents. Sun is the most recent one.
Yuanjun Tang was accused of spying on Chinese pro-democracy activists and dissidents last month. He became a U.S. citizen after being given political refuge. Federal prosecutors say Tang, 67, helped Chinese police break into a group chat on an encrypted messaging app that many Chinese dissidents used.
A Chinese American researcher named Shujun Wang was found guilty earlier this month of using his fame to gather information on political opponents and give it to the Chinese government. Wang helped start a pro-democracy group in New York. Wang, 75, will be given his sentence in January.
Prosecutors said that both guys did what the Chinese Ministry of State Security told them to do.
The Justice Department said that Lu Jianwang, 61, and Chen Jinping, 59, were arrested last year on charges that they ran an illegal police station in New York to “monitor and intimidate” people who were critical of the Chinese government. The station was in an office building in Chinatown. After it closed in the fall of 2022, FBI agents searched the building.
The Chinese government has denied the accusations made by federal investigators many times.
Mao Ning, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, wouldn’t say anything about the charges against Sun on Wednesday.
At a regular meeting in Beijing, she said, “I won’t say anything about cases that are happening in the United States.” “However, we are against any malicious attempts to blame, smear, or slander China.”
Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese mission in Washington, D.C., said he didn’t know much about the Sun case.
“But in the past few years, the U.S. government and media have pushed the so-called “Chinese spies” stories a lot, and many of them have turned out to be false,” he said. “China expects its citizens living abroad to follow the rules and laws of the host country, and we strongly reject the false accusations of wrongdoing against China.”
Sun is an American citizen by birth but used to live in China. He worked for the New York state government for about 15 years. Her husband, Chris Hu, was also charged. They lived in a $3.5 million home in a Long Island neighborhood with gates.
Federal officials say that they bought a $1.9 million home in Honolulu, Hawaii, and luxury cars, including a 2024 Ferrari, with the money they got from the Chinese government.
The Chinese government might be interested in hiring Chinese-Americans with a lot of family in China, “because you can threaten families and you can incentivize families,” said Wilder, the former CIA officer. He said, “The message from Beijing is that your family will have a lot better life back home if you work with us.”
Experts say that the effort is not just about the U.S. A lot of people in Canada and Europe, like those in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, have said that China is spying on them. China has rejected all of the charges.
One of the people who works at the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and is an associate fellow said, “Of course, Western states are also spying on and in China. That’s just the way things are.”
He said that the difference is that “there are many cases in which people of Chinese descent or Chinese citizens are massively threatened, intimidated, and pressured by Chinese secret services.”
Blancke also said that the Sun case was “extremely serious” because it showed “how the Chinese secret services now have direct or indirect access to political levels.”
A report from the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center, which is part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in 2022 warned that China was stepping up its efforts to affect people in the U.S.
The report said, “The PRC knows that U.S. state and local leaders have some freedom from Washington and may want to use them as go-betweens to push for national U.S. policies Beijing wants, such as better economic cooperation with China and less criticism of China’s policies toward Taiwan, Tibetans, Uyghurs, pro-democracy activists, and others.”
The indictment says that Sun was able to get Hochul to stop talking about the plight of the Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim group that has been persecuted in China for a long time, in public comments in early 2021.
Hochul said at an event Wednesday morning that the claims against Sun were “absolutely shocking.”
“Anyone who thinks that a foreign government would have the nerve to infiltrate a government agency like the state of New York needs to be dealt with,” she said.