By Kelly Sloan | Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
When Alger Hiss, a well-placed official in the U.S. State Department, was revealed to be a Soviet spy in the late 1940s, it shook Congress (and the American public) hard enough for them to take the matter of Soviet penetration of U.S. governmental entities seriously.
One can hope that the arrest of Linda Sun, a top aide of New York Governor Kathy Hochul, on charges of working as an unregistered agent of the People’s Republic of China while in the governor’s office will have a similar impact on all levels of American government today.
The details unveiled in the unsealed indictment are quite extraordinary. Among many other things, Sun (allegedly – because that’s how we do things in free countries) clandestinely allowed a PRC diplomat to eavesdrop on private government conference calls; worked Beijing’s provided talking points into an official speech by then-Governor Cuomo on the COVID pandemic, and provided her PRC handlers a preview of the speech for approval; struck mentions of the Uyghur genocide; and blocked engagement between Taiwanese and New York officials.
The latter allegation encompasses some of the most disturbing actions. It seems that in 2019 Ms. Sun got wind of an invitation to then-Governor Cuomo to attend a banquet in honour of then-Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who was visiting New York City that summer. Sun alerted Beijing officials to this horror with an email stating: “I sent you an email / Just an FYI / I already blocked it.” Which she had done, offering the flimsy excuse that the governor had to be at a staff appreciation event – which was taking place the day before the planned banquet with the head of state of a free democratic nation. Good grief.
This was not some copy editing intern in the communications office, mind you. This was the deputy chief of staff, someone with the ear of the governor of one of the most populous and important states in the union, actively pushing the Chinese Communist Party’s agenda from within. And apparently paid rather handsomely for it.
These details are, or at least ought to be, disturbing, but they are not terribly surprising. The PRC’s… shall we say, euphemistically, assertiveness… on the global state is swelling, as their expansionist tendencies become bolder. Earlier this year, for instance, the China Coast Guard (CCG) issued something called “Regulation 3”, a regulation encompassing 92 pages, 16 chapters, and 281 articles, within which is buried a rather chilling authorization for CCG commanders to seize and detain foreign vessels that they say encroach on “waters under China’s jurisdiction” – a purposely vague and ill-defined term that means waters in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea that are disputed or in any way dubiously claimed by PRC – for up to 60 days. Trust a communist country to blithely ignore international law and unilaterally expand its maritime jurisdiction by ordering its apparatchiks to generate a 92-page state regulation declaring it so. A country that does that is not going to have any compunction about installing its moles in a state government to make sure no one mentions the word “Uyghur” or dares meet with a Taiwanese official.
The extent of Chinese diplomatic aggression and bullying against Taiwan borders on the pathological. The PRC goes out of its way to keep Taiwan out of any international organization, no matter how innocuous (like the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization) or useless (like the UN). It continuously blocks trade agreements between Taiwan and anybody else. And it relentlessly bullies and threatens the few little countries in the world who have had the moral courage to foment full diplomatic relations with Taipei. They even blocked a Denver High School (Regis) from sending some of its girls to the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women because one of the school’s newsletters a few years back referred to an international swim meet that some of their students had attended, which included competitors from Taiwan. Their unforgivable crime? Not referring to the independent democracy as “Taiwan, Province of China.”
For the record, Taiwan has never been a part of the PRC. From 1895 to the end of WWII it was colonized by Japan, became part of the Republic of China following liberation, and when the communists took over the mainland after the civil war, the ROC pulled back to Taiwan, where it has been ever since. Britain has a more legitimate claim to Connecticut than Beijing has to Taiwan.
But given their obsession with the myth that Taiwan is theirs, and their expansionist inclinations, it should come as little surprise that they would be willing and eager to place their vassals in positions of American government, at whatever level, to help with their dirty work. That it apparently did come as a surprise is cause for concern. Probes have been called for, and those should proceed. And we should not allow ourselves to be lulled into the thinking this was an isolated anomaly. American – and other Western – governments, at all levels, need to recognize the seriousness of the threat, and prepare accordingly.