All (Espionage) is Local
CCP Influence in American State Politics
State and local government is the soft, ugly underbelly of the American political system and national security. It is simultaneously what makes America so dynamic and resilient and also what makes necessary national policy so difficult to implement. It is also the minor leagues for the next rising stars of American politics. For all their misperceptions of American democracy, the CCP understands this structure quite well. And so we were reminded this week how vulnerable those at the state and local levels are to foreign influence operations, this time in the Empire State.
In the past decade, the Feds have charged numerous persons with acting as foreign agents of the CCP and associated crimes. Some are involved in rendition and intimidation, others with influencing the policies of the United States, and even some with very lazy surveillance attempts of US military facilities. The Ministry of State Security (MSS) and United Front Work Department (UFWD) have wide latitude and funds to conduct operations in the United States and they are willing to cast a wide net from targeting Wall Street billionaires to junior enlisted sailors. To most Americans, targeting members of the military and the extremely wealthy makes some sense…but why Midwest mayors and state government staffers? It being the start of American football season, allow me to use a sports metaphor to explain.
Let’s say I’m drafting my fantasy football team, I need my defense, a solid starting quarterback, a couple standout receivers, and a capable running back. If I run my draft correctly, I’ll get some strong picks that’ll earn me some points every week, guaranteed. But what happens if Jalen Hurts gets injured or my defense is on a bye week, who do I call on? Well, I bring in the backups. At the state and local level, that is essentially what the CCP is doing when it runs influence campaigns and intelligence operations in Albany, Kansas City, or Sacramento. The CCP is building a depth chart of politically reliable assets that may or may not pay off until far off down the line. Hell, some may pay off today, but they’re not scoring franchise player-caliber points for Beijing’s ambitions. And for the most part, these folks aren’t real agents of the CCP…they’re just folks that have been influenced to be China-friendly on policy issues. That’s all it takes.
The CCP makes this work because it has a few things the Soviets did not during the last cold war: lots of money, commercial interests which they can launder influence through, it recognizes that not all power is concentrated in the Beltway, and its intelligence services have a long-stablished presence in the diaspora and other communities going back decades, manipulating and leaning on innocents to their advantage. (I cannot emphasize enough that the diaspora is the victim, and not the perpetuator, of the CCP’s crimes and operations). San Francisco/Silicon Valley and New York City have long been hotbeds for CCP influence and intelligence gathering operations (in addition to countless other nations), but the issue here is the operational focus on local and state government, not simply diplomats in New York or tech entrepreneurs and diaspora communities in San Francisco.
At the local and state level, it’s less about catching the single big fish than it is casting a dozen lines. The CCP’s operatives are looking here to influence rising political stars, hunt dissidents, and generate commercial influence in politically vulnerable but strategically relevant industries like steel, chemical manufacturing, tech (obviously), and emerging, booming industries like electric battery production. The CCP does not care about your mom and pop shop or your elementary school teacher, it is not here for your precious bodily fluids. It cares about the underpaid, ambitious staffer to the popular mayor in the Rust Belt state, the human rights activist that fled persecution that has now set up camp in the local district attorney’s office, or the graduate student working on groundbreaking metamaterials at the state university’s lab. It will, however, attempt to cultivate relationships and generate influence in a way that makes the CCP appear to be a friend of that mom and pop shop or the teachers’ union. A single fellow traveler may not turn the tide of China policy in the United States, but a thousand minor actions of CCP-sympathetic policy may discourage or confound action at the federal level where it really matter.
It’s important to note that while the CCP may leverage Marxist-sympathizers in the United States for visible protests in the form of Code Pink and others, it’s not the most effective line of effort. In this case, the CCP is ideology agnostic, so long as that ideology is disruptive and opposed to democracy and good governance. It is looking for agents of chaos, doubters, and bureaucratic blockers or enablers. It can paint the DPP in Taipei as woke to slow right wing support for defending Taiwan and it can lean on half-hearted climate agendas and anti-racist rhetoric to stoke the progressive base of the Dems to slow hawkish policy. By stoking hyper partisanship in the United States, we have made ourselves vulnerable to foreign influence again and again.
Of course, the harshest lever the CCP can pull to influence or conduct espionage against the United States is to threaten the families and loved ones of the diaspora. Occasionally it offers a carrot, but most often it attempts to threaten, terrorize, rendition, and outright harm those with family back in China or in some cases, abroad. In some cases, it’s not even about influence or espionage, it’s simply punishment if the dissident does not return home (to likely receive a similar punishment!). Rather than isolating communities vulnerable to CCP influence and infiltration, we should focus more on integrating and working with community members to combat foreign influence. This is a tried and true strategy from counterterrorism operations to community policing. Remember, the CCP is the main enemy and an existential threat, but it is also not ten feet tall…we’ve just been really dumb about all this and extremely slow to react.
But simply working with the diaspora is not enough. As listed above, there are dozens of other vulnerable targets that the CCP can work to its advantage. And no, mass surveillance is not an operationally nor ethically viable solution here. So let’s talk about what actually works:
Borrow from the cybersecurity playbook. When the USG made a big push to secure the ever-expanding list of internet connected devices that enabled facilities from water filtration plants to nuclear reactors, it realized it wasn’t working with a single entity but rather hundreds (if not thousands) of state and local entities all with different priorities, levels of understanding, and capabilities. Running education and messaging campaigns, trainings, and threat-intelligence fusion centers were required to make the USG’s goals for defending critical infrastructure feasible. Local officials face the same shortfalls in defending against foreign influence and espionage. Anytown, USA probably has three cops for 100 square miles and an FBI office 200 miles away. The State House that represents Anytown, USA is probably in session for a few weeks every year, each rep has one staffer on a shoe-string budget, and the local newspaper and its one dogged reporter died out a decade ago. Fighting the CCP in your hometown requires an educated public and an informed governing body that can coordinate or at least communicate with higher agencies. This requires a sustained, responsible messaging campaign that starts with bringing state and local leaders into counter-influence discussions in the same way we brought them into cybersecurity discussions to protect vulnerable critical infrastructure. Local officials often have a much more reliable voice for the people they represent and serve than random federal officials.
Foreign malign influence is harder to talk about than cybersecurity because it can sometimes be painful to extract CCP-crafted messaging from domestic political lines. We learned that during the Russian influence scandals. It is also hard to tell someone from Anytown, USA, that the person/policy enabling their livelihood is evil when they haven’t done anything personally to them (even when they’re holding the neighbor’s cousin in Shanghai hostage.) Rather than trying to extract the malign from the uninformed one on one, public messaging must focus on how CCP actions negatively impact the average American and in ways that are specific to a given region or city in the United States. I wrote a bit about that in “Why We Fight” a few weeks ago. However, there is no one-size-fits-all slogan for shining a spotlight on the evils of the Chinese Communist Party. And writing about it in the Atlantic or Foreign Affairs will not reach most Americans. There is a time to talk to the policymaker, and there is a time to talk to the voter that put them in power. Treat both like adults.
Borrowing again from the cybersecurity and foreign investment playbook, documenting the relevant threat actors (like front organizations for the UFWD) in easily publicly accessible websites and databases makes it a lot easier for compliance departments in government and the private sector to *comply* with guidance on foreign influence. Not everyone has the time and knowhow to dig through every report and rumor to figure out who they can and can’t interact with.
Step up the fight against corruption. The more corrupt an institution, the easier it is for a foreign actor to slip in undetected. Machine politics without a muckraking spotlight is a recipe for disaster. Follow the money.
Push for legislation to require security briefs for all new state house staffers and state reps on counterintelligence threats. Consider bringing large and medium-sized city mayors into those briefs as well.
Message on the costs of CCP investment in the United States and in US companies. The FBI has done a lot of outreach to American companies, particularly Silicon Valley, but by then it’s usually too late. The messaging needs to take place in State Houses and even more so, in business schools. The sooner the lot of MBAs understand that the CCP will cost them money, not make them rich, the sooner we have to keep fighting shareholder value as a threat to national security.
Federal legislation against foreign influence, such as enhanced CFIUS measures, data protection, and TikTok divestment is still very much necessary. It takes all of us.
Finally, you can’t force this. The cybersecurity community has made great strides in securing our local and state assets but it remains a struggle every day. The CCP’s influence and espionage threat will continue to evolve as our defenses evolve, and that requires constant vigilance. We will continue to uncover new plots and the CCP will continue probing our society for new relationships to cultivate and discord to exploit, but raising the cost of doing business for the MSS and UFWD can mean the difference between confounding Beijing’s global ambitions and getting caught with our pants down at the start of a war. It can mean the difference between the Rust Belt recovering and remaining disparate, or whether your neighbor from Hong Kong ever gets to see their family again.
Finally, there are others who have done far better and more detailed work on CCP influence in the United States, I recommend the following for further reading on how the MSS, MPS, and UFWD operate (and for some good spy stories):
Alex Joske’s Spies and Lies.
Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil on Chinese Communist Espionage
Former FBI counterintelligence agent Holden Triplett’s interview on The Team House.
Zach Dorfman’s The Brush Pass and his many related works on Chinese and Russian espionage campaigns in the United States.
If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict, check out my novel, EX SUPRA, about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! If you have any suggestions for topics for future newsletters, please send them my way on Twitter @Iron_Man_Actual. And don’t forget to subscribe!