Chinese communist officials are targeting state officials and local communities for influence operations designed to offset the hawkish policies emerging from Washington, according to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“We’ve seen them at PTA meetings,” Pompeo said during an address at the Wisconsin state senate. “They’ve been at full-swing for years, and they’re increasing in intensity.”
That statement punctuated an extended warning about Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping’s recent call for party operatives to bypass disputes with President Trump’s administration in favor of outreach to state governments. Those efforts, which range from political propaganda to espionage, are “being orchestrated out of” Chinese diplomatic facilities with the goal of manipulating state and municipal officials unaccustomed to foreign influence operations.
“It seems soft when there’s an approach, when someone from the consulate shows up and says, ‘We’ll give you money to build a park in your community,’” Pompeo told the Washington Examiner earlier this week. “But make no mistake about it: The cumulative impact that is desired is to change the nature of the way America thinks about the Chinese Communist Party, and to convince these people to underestimate the threat that is presented by the Chinese Communist Party.”
Wisconsin lawmakers have recent experience with such efforts, as the wife of China’s top diplomat in Chicago emailed the state Senate leader repeatedly urging him to offer a resolution praising Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Pompeo applauded their rebuff of that proposal, but he also emphasized that her effort was just one of many initiatives with understated national security significance.
“He thinks local leaders may well be the weak link,” Pompeo said of Xi. “The federal government can’t police every bit of this predatory and coercive behavior.”
The speech raised the curtain on an issue that U.S. intelligence officials regard as a central component of a “cold war” waged by Beijing against the United States.
“They are fundamentally trying to encourage those of us, the Chinese diaspora more broadly, those with whom they have influence, to think their way about governance,” the CIA’s Michael Collins said in 2018. “And not perhaps the way we would advocate or we would prefer, the United States would prefer, we think about things like the liberal international order.”
Pompeo noted that some influence operations could involve Chinese officials or even Americans. “When you’re approached by a Chinese diplomat, it is likely not in the spirit of cooperation or friendship,” he said. “If you’re offered a trip to China when the pandemic travel restrictions are lifted, then you should ask who’s paying for the trip and if that person is linked, directly or indirectly, to the Chinese Communist Party.”
U.S. officials have attempted to curtail such encounters over the last year, first by requiring Chinese officials to report their meetings in advance to the State Department, a requirement that hardened into a rule earlier this month that they must seek permission from the federal government before meeting with Americans.
“Know, too, that these approaches may happen from Chinese nationals or Americans working with CCP-linked interests,” he said.
Pompeo emphasized the need to draw distinctions between “the leaders of China and those who want to live in China as free peoples in peace and prosperity and take care of their families, in the same way that we all do here in the United States.”
He put a spotlight on financial ties between the state of Wisconsin and Chinese state-owned enterprises — the pension fund, he noted, invests in telecommunications companies that form “an integral part of [the] Chinese Orwellian surveillance system” — and sister-city relationships overseen by China’s United Front foreign influence department.
“It may have friendly in its title, but it is not so when it comes to American interests,” he said.
