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Acting as a spy for the Chinese Communist Party

1 - Hochul aide charged with taking money, travel and poultry to help China

New York Times. Sept 3, 2024.

In July 2021, six Nanjing-style salted ducks, prepared by a Chinese consulate official’s private chef, were delivered to the New York home where the parents of a senior aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul lived. About four months later, another six ducks arrived. Another four months later, there were more salted ducks. Eight months after that: still more salted ducks.

Prosecutors say that the poultry shipments, described in a federal indictment unsealed Tuesday, were a small part of a yearslong series of payoffs to the aide, Linda Sun, in exchange for actions that benefited the People’s Republic of China and its Communist Party. The 65-page indictment also described travel benefits, event tickets and the promotion of a close friend’s business.

Prosecutors say that Ms. Sun blocked Taiwanese officials from accessing the governor’s office, interceded to eliminate references to Taiwan from state communications and quashed meetings between Taiwanese officials and state leaders, including Ms. Hochul. She also ensured that state officials did not publicly address the persecution of Uyghurs, a primarily Muslim ethnic group that for more than a thousand years has lived in a region of what is now China, prosecutors said.

Ms. Sun, 40, was charged on Tuesday with 10 criminal counts that included visa fraud, money laundering and other crimes. Her husband, Chris Hu, 41, a businessman, is charged in the indictment with money laundering.

Both pleaded not guilty in federal court, were released on bond and required to surrender their passports.

Linda Sun’s lawyer, Jerrod Schaeffer, said that Ms. Sun was looking forward to addressing the indictment in court. “Our client is understandably upset that these charges have been brought,” Mr. Schaeffer said.

The accusations, if true, would represent a brazen manipulation of New York’s state government at the highest level, covering several years of the administrations of Ms. Hochul and her predecessor, Andrew M. Cuomo, both Democrats.

The charges are the latest in the Justice Department’s initiative — driven especially in recent years by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn — to stop efforts by the Chinese government to control its diaspora through intimidation and harassment.

Last month, Shujun Wang, 75, a Queens man who billed himself as a democracy activist and scholar, was convicted in Brooklyn federal court of acting as a spy for the Chinese Communist Party. Last summer, prosecutors won a case in the same court against three men who stalked a family in New Jersey on behalf of the Chinese government. In another case, two men were accused of running a secret police station for the Chinese government in a building in Lower Manhattan.

The push by prosecutors comes as escalating tensions between the United States and China over wars, trade and technology have damaged their diplomatic relationship. China’s claims over portions of the South China Sea and the island of Taiwan have been bitterly disputed and were at the center of the allegations against Ms. Sun on Tuesday.

Ms. Sun served as a deputy chief of staff to Ms. Hochul after holding a series of state government positions. In those jobs, according to the indictment, she used her sway to steer state officials away from actions that could have implied support for Taiwan. Nationalists established their own government on the island in 1949 after a civil war, and the People’s Republic of China has laid claim to it ever since.

“No meeting please,” she wrote to an Assembly member who had invited the governor to meet with the ambassador of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office. “Kindly decline. Do not want her to wade into this China/Taiwan sensitivity.”

Prosecutors also accused Ms. Sun of providing unauthorized invitation letters from the governor’s office to make it easier for Chinese government officials to