China is already waging war on American soil

The Chinese Communist Party is fighting an undeclared war on American soil. Recent events prove as much, showcasing the CCP’s success at both subversion and sabotage. Regrettably, they also illustrate how poorly positioned the United States is to confront these growing threats. 

On Jan. 31, Las Vegas police and the FBI executed a search warrant in an east Las Vegas Valley residence. The details of what they found are shocking.

Police found a “possible biological laboratory” in the home, including “refrigerators with vials containing unknown liquids.” This might sound innocuous. It’s not.

The incident mirrors a horrific discovery in California two years earlier. In October 2023, the Justice Department announced the arrest of Jia Bei Zhu, a Chinese citizen. The Reedley lab that Zhu and others operated has become infamous. A subsequent investigation by the House Select Committee on China provides some of the gruesome details.

Thousands of vials with labels such as COVID-19, HIV, malaria, dengue fever, Ebola, and other infectious diseases and viruses were discovered, along with no fewer than 1,000 transgenic mice “specifically genetically modified and bred to simulate the human immune system for the purpose of laboratory experimentation.”

Suffice to say, these are very deadly pathogens. Ebola alone has a mortality rate of 25% to 90%. Individuals later identified as Chinese nationals were found on site wearing white lab coats, glasses, masks, and latex gloves.

Zhu was “part of an ongoing transnational criminal enterprise with ties” to the CCP, the select committee noted. Zhu received “millions of dollars in unexplained payments from Chinese banks while running the lab.”

Property records show that the LLC that owned the Reedley lab also owned the makeshift lab in Las Vegas. This raises the question: How many other labs are out there?

AN ALLEGED ILLEGAL CHINESE BIOLAB WAS FOUND NEAR VEGAS

Indeed, Zhu’s presence in the U.S. itself raises questions. Zhu was a wanted fugitive from Canada with a $330 million judgment against him for stealing U.S. intellectual property. Further, he was a “top official at a state-controlled company and had links to military civilian fusion companies,” according to the office of Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA). Yet Zhu and his associates were ensconced in a warehouse in California, seemingly manufacturing and testing viruses that could murder thousands.

Notably, the Reedley lab was discovered by sheer accident, when a code enforcement officer happened to notice a hole drilled into the side of a warehouse. Reedley is a small farming town with a population of 26,000 people. Were it not for the initiative of a proactive code enforcement officer, the entire plot might have gone unnoticed. As Rep. Jim Costa (D-CA) observed, Reedley “is the last place that you would expect to find a case like this.” This is precisely what China was counting on.

Unfortunately, the discovery of another lab in Las Vegas suggests there may be other Reedley-like labs that each potentially store thousands of unseen deadly pathogens.

In response, Costa, Kiley, and Rep. David Valadao (R-CA) have introduced the Preventing Illegal Laboratories and Protecting Public Health Act, which aims to “strengthen federal oversight of highly pathogenic agents and high containment laboratories.” The federal government, Kiley said in a statement after the Las Vegas revelation, “must do more to stop illegal labs from operating in our communities.”

The congressman is right. Both federal and local governments must do more to thwart growing threats from China on American soil.

Unfortunately, many in the West are particularly ill-equipped to understand how China operates against its perceived enemies. After all, the strategies and tactics are profoundly different.

HOW MANY SECRET CHINESE BIOLABS CALL AMERICA HOME?

The CCP has been amassing the ability to wreak havoc on the American homeland. Chinese communist-linked entities and operatives have been caught trying to perpetrate agroterrorism by destroying precious crops, buying farmland for nefarious purposes, and setting up shop near American military bases and other critical infrastructure. The purpose seems clear: create chaos in the event of a conflict between the U.S. and China. It is also an additional leverage to wield against America should China carry out its stated ambition of seizing Taiwan.

Indeed, the Las Vegas lab, reportedly attached to an Airbnb, is near the Nellis U.S. Air Force Base. As Michael Lucci, the founder and CEO of State Armor, an organization that seeks to root out CCP influence, pointed out: “How do you cripple an Air Force base and catalyse a nationwide outbreak in one stroke? You seed diseases into Vegas tourists around Nellis AFB.” It is, Lucci warned, “hybrid war with CCP characteristics.” 

This preference for sabotage isn’t new. Nor is it unique to the CCP. Indeed, it’s inseparable from the rise of communism itself. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had agents on foreign soil who were equipped with arms caches and ready to strike if need be. Yet, the scope and scale of China’s ambitions seem to be on another level altogether.

The CCP’s plans for sabotage coincide with their growing efforts to subvert American society from within.

CCP doctrine emphasizes subversion. Like other totalitarian regimes, Beijing is particularly adept at exploiting free and open societies. And the United Front Work Department, which operates outside mainland China, is a key part of its strategy.

Mao Zedong, the founder of the CCP, described United Front work as China’s “magic weapon.” And everyone is expected to pitch in. The regime’s leader, Xi Jinping, has described it as “the work of the entire party.” The Central United Front Work Department reports directly to the CCP’s Central Committee, and virtually every government ministry in China has some element that focuses on United Front work and influence operations.

As the House Select Committee on China has noted, the CCP uses United Front work to “shape its political environment, including to influence other countries’ policy towards [China] and to gain access to advanced foreign technology.”

A ‘NEW WORLD ORDER’ IS HERE, AND IT’S HERE TO STAY

The U.S., the committee observed, has “no direct analogue” to United Front work, which Washington has “struggled” to counter with “traditional counterintelligence, law enforcement, and diplomatic tools.”

On Monday, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, a California political operative and campaign adviser, was sentenced to four years in prison for acting as an “illegal agent” of the CCP. Sun “knowingly acted” as an agent for China while working on local political campaigns, helped identify targets, and surveilled the president of Taiwan, according to the Justice Department.

Jaqueline Deal, president of the Long Term Strategy Group and a noted expert on China’s intelligence apparatus, has observed that there are more than 1,000 United Front-linked groups operating in the U.S. This is an astonishing figure.

Such organizations have been caught doing everything from carrying out protests against visiting Taiwanese officials to assisting the CCP in harassing and intimidating Chinese dissidents on American soil.

But influence operations are the United Front’s real bread and butter. China has long sought to convince its opponents that its rise is both peaceful and inevitable. Neither is true.

On a more tactical level, the United Front works to pressure sovereign nations to accept policies more inimical to Beijing’s bottom line. It can also include sowing disorder.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has called for the Justice Department to investigate whether any foreign funding has gone to the coordinated anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests that have taken place across the country. The protests, Hawley noted, are too organized to be grassroots.

“If foreign linked funders are providing funding, direction, or material support for political activity aimed at undermining federal immigration enforcement … such conduct may amount to racketeering,” Hawley said in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

On Wednesday, the House Ways and Means Committee held hearings on foreign influence on American nonprofit organizations. Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) observed “that the CCP is taking advantage of our tax-exempt sector to poison our dialogue and cause division in our political system.” It should, Smith said, “alarm every single person, whether you are a Republican or a Democrat.”

For its part, the State Department submitted a report titled “Countering Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference,” which alleges that nonprofit organizations such as Code Pink and other groups linked to tech mogul Neville Roy Singham push CCP propaganda.

This might seem far-fetched. But it’s not, and history says as much.

In 1992, an archivist for the KGB named Vasily Mitrohkin fled the Soviet Union with his family. Mitrohkin defected to the United Kingdom, and he brought with him a treasure trove of documents from the Soviet intelligence services that were later authenticated by both U.S. and British intelligence.

Later known as the Mitrohkin Archives, the documents showed that communist agents were active throughout the world, taking special care to sow discord in democracies such as the U.S. Soviet agents backed environmental and civil rights causes, among others, for this express purpose.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that these movements weren’t organic. But it does tell us that the Soviets viewed them as an opportunity to create divisions and fissures in American society. It stands to reason that their brethren in Beijing would do the same.

WHY CHINA IS FUELING RUSSIA’S WAR ON UKRAINE

The Mitrohkin Archives, along with the release of the Venona Project, a U.S. Army signals intelligence effort aimed at decrypting Soviet communications, also showed how thoroughly Moscow’s agents had penetrated the upper rungs of Western society. Dozens of U.S. government employees, including top advisers such as President Franklin Roosevelt’s deputy treasury secretary, Harry White, were spying for the Soviets. This, too, should provide pause.

The CCP excels at fighting in what analysts call “the Gray Zone,” the space between peace and war. America must fight back.