In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.
Scores of people linked to the Chinese government, sometimes card-carrying members of the Chinese Communist Party and intelligence assets, have cut large checks to officials occupying posts at the local, state, and national levels in recent years.
Efforts by the federal government to combat these influence operations have been limited and have failed to stop Beijing’s policy of changing U.S. policy with cold hard cash.
In just the last couple of weeks, investigations from the Washington Examiner and the Washington Free Beacon have revealed that members of the CCP are injecting cash into competitive gubernatorial races in New Jersey, Virginia, and Arizona to assist Democratic candidates.
“Federal campaign finance law strictly prohibits foreign nationals and foreign governments from contributing any money or making any independent expenditures in American candidate elections,” former Federal Election Commission member Hans von Spakovsky told the Washington Examiner. “And it doesn’t just apply to federal elections, but that statute also applies to state and local elections … So if someone in the state of Virginia, a candidate, is getting a donation from someone who is not a U.S. citizen, that’s a violation of federal law.”
In the case of Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed a slate of legislation aimed at curtailing China’s influence in the state, including bills that would have banned healthcare and research institutions from using genetic sequencing equipment manufactured by Pentagon-designated “Chinese military companies,” prohibited the use of Chinese-manufactured telecommunications hardware, and blocked infrastructure contracts with Chinese-owned entities.
After these vetoes, Pin Ni, an automobile component executive identified in corporate documents as a member of the CCP, cut a $10,000 check to the Democratic Governors Association of Arizona — one of the main political committees poised to support Hobbs financially as she stands for reelection in 2026.
Wanxiang Group, where Pin serves on the board of directors, has been praised by Chinese President Xi Jinping for being “in line with the Party Central Committee” and “always actively [doing] what our Party committees and governments at all levels advocate.”
“It’s a pretty fishy kind of thing that the Democratic Governors Association takes that kind of donation,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), who is challenging Hobbs for the governor’s mansion in 2026, said of the story. “That same organization has identified this election, the governor’s election, as their No. 1 [to] protect.”
The same kind of behavior that Biggs called “fishy” has led to legal complaints elsewhere.
The Chinese executive also cut checks in support of Reps. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) and Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) to support their runs for governor in their respective states.
Pin, who has been recognized as an “outstanding Communist Party Member” 15 times, would likely be forbidden by Chinese law from holding citizenship or permanent residency in the United States — the statuses legally necessary to make campaign contributions — due to his CCP membership.
National Legal and Policy Center counsel Paul Kamenar said his group would file complaints with the FEC following the reports of donations in New Jersey and Virginia.
The FEC may have its work cut out for it, as previously unreported federal campaign finance records show that executives at Wanxiang Group have donated nearly $1 million since 2000 to federal political committees, with the bulk of their spending occurring in the last five years. Beneficiaries of the Chinese cash include big names such as former President Joe Biden, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT), various state Democratic Parties, and Mike Pence’s 2024 presidential campaign. While some of the contributions were directed toward Republicans, the vast majority were made out to Democrats.
Despite the troves of evidence, the FEC and Justice Department have historically been criticized for inaction regarding foreign influence campaigns.
“The FEC, the regulatory agency charged with administering and enforcing federal campaign finance laws, suggested it would prioritize cases implicating the ban on foreign election spending,” Campaign Legal Center director of campaign finance reform Saurav Ghosh wrote in 2022. “Yet the FEC’s repeated failure to enforce the laws banning foreign money in our elections belies that commitment. The FEC recently deadlocked and closed a matter where a U.S. company, American Ethane Co., used money from Russian oligarchs to support federal candidates and PACs during the 2018 election cycle.”
Ghosh was referring to a bipartisan FEC investigation in 2019, which found that a company 88% owned by foreign nationals with no domestic income made campaign contributions. Despite the prior uncontested finding, the FEC deadlocked once it came time for enforcement.
The FEC’s enforcement powers come in the form of civil penalties like fines. Although criminal charges from the DOJ are a possibility, the standard for conviction is relatively high, requiring proof that a political committee accepted foreign funds knowingly and willingly.
Understaffing at the DOJ is another possible reason why so few investigations related to China-linked campaign finance infractions seem to be occurring.
“Federal election crimes, and that includes campaign finance violations, are the responsibility of the public integrity section of the criminal division of the Justice Department,” von Spakovsky, who now serves as a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. “The last time I checked, they only had two lawyers, two, inside the public integrity section in what they call the election crimes unit, whose job it is to investigate election crimes, which includes these kind of campaign finance violations. Two lawyers, which is frankly ridiculous and a misapplication of resources.”
Indeed, the unit referenced by von Spakovsky was slashed from 36 lawyers when President Donald Trump took office in January to just two as of September.
Kamenar, whose organization has considerable experience trying to get the FEC to enforce campaign finance law, told the Washington Examiner that short staffing and inaction are problems at the agency as well.
“Unfortunately, the FEC takes their time to investigate these kinds of cases, especially when they were shorthanded in terms of the number of commissioners,” the lawyer said. “Everything was put on hold back a couple of years ago during COVID and so forth. And even if they have a requisite number of commissioners, they’re still slow in acting on it and getting back to the complaining party about what they did.”
Kamenar said that multiple of the National Legal and Policy Center’s complaints issued to the FEC appear to have gone into a “black hole,” including one concerning Virginia Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s 2021 gubernatorial campaign accepting $350,000 from a company owned by a British national and another alleging that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) “failed to properly disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in fundraising expenses and violated campaign contribution limits.”
The FEC and DOJ did not respond to requests for comment.
Wanxiang and its donors are just one piece of a much larger story involving Chinese donations and apparent inaction from the relevant authorities. While Chinese money has a clear presence in state and national politics, state-linked actors also have a strong interest in impacting local politics through campaign contributions. Donors with ties to the Chinese government appear to concentrate their activities in major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Boston.
Earlier this year, the Daily Caller News Foundation released a pair of reports showing that individuals involved in China’s United Front Work Department — a global network of party loyalists that the Chinese government has tasked with gathering intelligence and exerting influence — had bankrolled the mayors of Los Angeles and Boston and secured influence in their administrations.
In the case of Los Angeles, Dominic Ng and Simon Pang, a pair of bankers who held positions with the United Front Work Department, donated over $1 million to Democratic Mayor Karen Bass’s campaign account and the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles, a nonprofit organization where she serves as an adviser to the board of directors. Following those contributions, the two men were appointed to her mayoral transition advisory team in December 2022.
Democratic Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, meanwhile, saw a United Front Work Department official named Gary Yu raise over $300,000 in support of her mayoral campaign. Wu and Yu have been photographed together on numerous occasions, signaling his proximity to her administration.
A 2023 Newsweek investigation similarly found that organizations and community leaders with close links to China’s United Front Work Department had donated over $1 million to New York politicians at all levels of government since 1990. The report implicated big names in New York politics such as Mayor Eric Adams (D), former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D), and Rep. Grace Meng (D).
Some localities, seeing federal enforcement as insufficient, have passed their own laws aimed at curbing foreign influence. Colorado, for instance, prohibits contributions by majority foreign-owned corporations. Seattle, taking it a step further, bans donations by companies with even minor foreign ownership stakes.
While Chinese influence efforts appear to target Democrats more often than not, that is not always the case.
Chinese donors have attempted to make inroads with Trump, with some success. After he took office in 2017, CCP-linked donors began cutting hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of checks to his reelection campaign, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2020. Following these payments, donors with links to the Chinese state secured meetings with Trump and GOP lawmakers and access to a closed-door Republican strategy meeting.
One such donor, Xinyue “Daniel” Lou, faces federal prosecution for campaign finance violations. Luo is accused of routing money from a foreign national through otherwise legal donors in what is called a straw donor scheme. According to prosecutors, he did this to secure tickets to an exclusive event at Mar-a-Lago for a Chinese national, who was legally ineligible to make donations and therefore get tickets himself.
Chinese-backed straw donor schemes have received attention from Congress, with the Republican-led House Administration Committee claiming in 2024 to have discovered evidence suggesting that purportedly lax security on the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue has enabled foreign adversaries such as China to make donations in the names of citizens without their knowledge.
When these straw donor schemes lead to convictions, the consequences aren’t what one might expect.
Hui Qin, a Chinese entertainment magnate, was sentenced to time served, satisfied by the seven months he spent in pre-trial detention after he pleaded guilty to running a straw donor scheme that illegally funneled cash into congressional campaigns in New York and Rhode Island, and an undisclosed municipal election in New York City in 2021. Hui had initially faced up to 27 years in prison.
Though the FEC and DOJ have attracted criticism for, in the telling of some, not being aggressive enough in the face of foreign influence, the Trump administration has signaled that the issue is on its radar. In April, the president ordered an investigation into the alleged straw donor scheme flagged by congressional Republicans last year.
Kamenar was also optimistic that the new administration would bring increased enforcement activity against foreign influence efforts.
Sometimes, to the ire of national security hawks, donations linked to the CCP are made in unambiguously legal ways.
Corporations with well-established links to the Chinese government, like Alibaba or Pentagon-designated Chinese military companies such as drone manufacturer DJI Technology and tech conglomerate Tencent, hire U.S. lobbyists to influence policy on their behalf. These lobbyists, often themselves U.S. citizens or permanent residents, can then make campaign donations to the lawmakers they’re attempting to influence — a practice academic research suggests improves their access to power brokers.
Employees of CCP-linked corporations with U.S. citizenship or permanent residency can also make campaign contributions. BYD Americas President Ke Li, who corporate documents identify as a Chinese national with permanent residency in the U.S., for instance, made headlines in October 2024 when it was reported that she donated $40,000 to Biden’s reelection effort on the same day his administration approved a subsidy for her firm, which has been accused of working with the Chinese government to accomplish its strategic goals.
Direct campaign contributions are just one vector through which actors linked to the Chinese government seek to influence U.S. policymaking. Entities with links to the CCP support domestic advocacy groups, spend tens of millions of dollars on lobbyists, prop up pro-China media outlets that degrade the U.S. while touting the alleged achievements of Beijing, pay social media conglomerates to boost their propaganda, utilize party loyalists employed by Western companies to steal trade secrets, cut massive checks to universities, exploit “sister city” programs to sway local politics, and work to secure positions at standards development organizations, which set industry regulations that affect the entire world, among myriad other operations.
“Xi Jinping’s ambitions for ideological control are not limited to his own people,” then-national security adviser Robert O’Brien said in 2020. “The CCP’s stated goal is to create a ‘Community of Common Destiny for Mankind,’ and to remake the entire world according to the CCP. The effort to control thought beyond the borders of China is well underway.”
