USA

Chen Weihua, China Daily’s European Bureau Chief, threatened U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with the same fate of groups persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party, promising he “surely won’t be spared.”

Recent revelations about Eric Swalwell’s relationship with a Chinese spy are another reminder of the power of the Deep State.  Nancy Pelosi picked Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) for the House Intelligence Committee.  Swalwell’s relationship with Fang Fang began sometime after Fang arrived in the U.S. as a student in 2011, before Swalwell was elected to Congress.  He was a city councilman.  It ended in 2015 when the FBI informed him that Fang was a spy and she suddenly left the country.  Fang targeted young ambitious politicians who had the potential to gain national prominence.  According to one U.S. intelligence official, Fang engaged in “romantic” relationships with at least two mayors of Midwestern cities.  This program is designed to pay off several decades in the future.  There were 369,548 Chinese students in the United States in 2018–2019.  These figures suggest that the number of Chinese agents may number in the thousands.

In early 2013, as Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping prepared to assume the Chinese presidency, very few people in the West had any idea what kind of leader he was. In January of that year, the New York Times’ Nick Kristof, an experienced China correspondent, wrote that Xi “will spearhead a resurgence of economic reform, and probably some political easing as well.”

It was a radically mistaken assessment. But even inside the U.S. government, knowledge of China—and its intensions—was at a low point. During the 2000s, U.S. intelligence had operated with relative confidence against Beijing. But during China’s biggest political transition in decades, American officials were looking through an increasingly opaque glass.

The Chinese regime “struck paydirt” when one of its alleged spies got close to U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), said Bill Gertz, who is the national security correspondent for The Washington Times and author of the book “Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy.”

The alleged Chinese spy, Fang Fang, was the subject of an investigative Axios report detailing how she allegedly posed as a U.S. university student to focus on up-and-coming U.S. officials in the San Francisco Bay Area between 2011 and 2015. She was allegedly working for the Ministry of State Security, China’s chief intelligence agency.