Abstract
On December 19, 2024, FBI agents arrested Yaoning “Mike” Sun, 64, on federal charges of acting as an illegal agent of the People's Republic of China (PRC) while he was a campaign manager for a political candidate elected in 2022 to the city council of a Southern California city and of conspiring with another man, Chen Jun, already sentenced to federal prison for acting as an illegal agent of the of the PRC government. Chen Jun, allegedly told his cellmate that he worked for the 610 Office, an extralegal CCP police agency created in 1999. He claimed the Chinese regime paid him $250,000 to emigrate to the United States decades ago and then sent him $50,000 a month.
It's not just an isolated incident. There are literally hundreds of them. The level of infiltration and subversion in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia is beyond anyone's comprehension. ... The Chinese have been building these operations and networks since the 1980s.” The case Chen it's just a case where someone got caught. This is just the tip of the iceberg of espionage and influence operations throughout the United States and Western countries. The fact is deeply worrying: the defendant is accused of having acted on behalf of the People's Republic of China to influence the US political system.
But it is not an isolated case because this happens in all Western countries. The Chinese Communist Party has the power to inculcate false information into the American (and Western) public debate, to the point that it becomes public knowledge.
The FBI defines this phenomenon as “information laundering”. Information laundering falls into the category of “covert influence operations.”
Information is used as a weapon of “disinformation”. Disinformation is an “information war”, which is part of the “cognitive warfare”. A part of its military doctrine of “unrestricted warfare,” of the Liminal Warfare that Beijing has been waging against the West for years.
Although the CCP has aggressively strengthened its military for decades, its plan is to never have to resort to conventional warfare—that is, if forced, to fight against an already greatly weakened enemy. The first thing the United States and Western countries need is a government-wide strategy. To date we have nothing; we have no way to counter the PRC's covert political influence operations. Even worse, we don't even have the slightest understanding of it. Our government agencies have no understanding of this. There is no understanding of how China is carrying out its political warfare and, as a result, there is no strategy to deal with it. and awareness must also be extended to the state level, where the CCP has been active.
The other thing that must be done immediately is that the members of the government, the parliamentarians, must be assisted and correctly informed. Businesses also need government support when dealing with the CCP. Western companies are subject to pressure placed on them by the CCP to support Chinese policies or to remain silent about them. They cannot be expected to resist this on their own. They must have the government's support in order to resist the CCP's coercion.
by Gabriele e Nicola Iuvinale
On December 19, 2024, FBI agents arrested Yaoning “Mike” Sun, 64, on federal charges of acting as an illegal agent of the People's Republic of China (PRC) while serving as a campaign manager for a political candidate elected to the 2022 city council of a Southern California city.
The investigation and arrest stemmed from a criminal complaint accusing Sun of acting as an illegal agent of a foreign power. Sun is also accused of conspiring with another man, Chen Jun, already sentenced to federal prison for acting as an illegal agent of the PRC government and for plotting to target US-based practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice banned in China.
"The reported conduct is deeply troubling: the defendant is accused of acting on behalf of the People's Republic of China to influence our political system. We cannot allow hostile foreign powers to meddle in the governance of our country. This case highlights the breadth of the PRC's relentless intelligence and malign influence activities targeting the United States," said Akil Davis, the deputy director in charge of the FBI's Los Angeles field office.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has the power to instill false information into American public discourse, to the point where it becomes common knowledge.
For the FBI this phenomenon is defined as "information laundering".
It primarily refers to the spread of false information online to the point where it is then adopted by more mainstream sites in an attempt to legitimize it.
Ronald Rychlak, a law professor at the University of Mississippi and an expert on Soviet disinformation, told The Epoch Times that information laundering is a key component of disinformation, a term used by the communist regime in the former Soviet Union.
"A key component of disinformation is that it has to come from a reliable source. It's not legitimate if it came from the Chinese communist government. It wasn't legitimate if it came from the Soviet newspaper during the height of the Soviet Union. It has to be published in a news agency, with a source, with a person who people accept as legitimate. A true disinformation operation requires a gradual process: you have to get it from multiple sources. The Soviets often spread false information through industry newsletters, local magazines and newspapers in the United States, always hungry for content.
You get it to six or seven different sources of information. Pretty soon, a reliable source or a reliable person reads it in three different places and repeats it,” Rychlak said.
"Those early stories wouldn't have gotten to the level of what the Soviet intelligence office would have considered disinformation because they weren't really reliable or trustworthy. They were laying the groundwork to get to the level where people would accept that it was reliable."
Another step is to gradually influence journalists from major media outlets, predisposing them to accept the false narrative.
“The journalist may very well think that he is just a good journalist, investigating leads, investigating things, without realizing that someone is leaving breadcrumbs, trying to lead him in a particular direction,” Rychlak said.
"They don't want the American reporter, the Western reporter, to collaborate with them. They want them to believe in their hearts that they are good journalists who do the right thing and who report accurately.
“It's a long game,” he said. “It's about planting seeds, letting them grow, putting people in positions, letting them grow into leadership positions.
Nicholas Eftimiades, a CIA veteran of the State Department and Defense Intelligence Agency and an expert on CCP operations abroad, told The Epoch Times that information laundering falls into the category of “covert influence operations”.
Ensuring that the manipulation goes unnoticed by the target is, in fact, typical practice, Eftimiades noted.
"This is the hallmark [of] Chinese behavior forever. Very sophisticated, compared to us, compared to the West, very sophisticated, very calculating, very patient, and they actually do a very good job of that," he said.
According to Eftimiades, this tactic is on full display when US officials travel to China, and the more important the target, the more sophisticated the operation becomes, so much so that the individual's entire experience seems natural but in reality has been carefully planned. Those conducting the operation hold a meeting with representatives from each agency to coordinate the person's visit to China and plan what show you, what messages they want to convey and who will sit next to them to have specific conversations “over the course of the four or five days the person was there, carefully orchestrating what you saw, what you heard and… how they wanted to shape that person's opinion,” Eftimiades said.
“So this kind of thing is very, very common when the Chinese are dealing with senior officials.”
People who allow themselves to be influenced by the CCP end up becoming its unwitting pawns.
Information as a weapon
For the Soviets, the main purpose of the disinformation was to destabilize the United States, Rychlak said. But the CCP is using the same tactic for various purposes, from manipulating officials to support pro-CCP policy positions to attacking the party's enemies abroad.
Politically, the CCP's priorities include economic prerogatives, such as the flow of investment and know-how from the United States to China, and issues geostrategic, particularly Taiwan, the democratic island nation that the Chinese regime has long threatened to annex.
The CCP mainly targets Chinese democracy activists, Tibetan and Uyghur activists, underground Christians, and Falun Gong practitioners abroad.
According to Casey Fleming, managing director of BlackOps Partners and a counterintelligence expert, the scale of such attacks appears proportional to the resistance to infiltration. The CCP sees its influence operations as a component of its military doctrine of “unrestricted warfare,” they said.
Beijing has publicly acknowledged its “three wars” doctrine: psychological warfare, public opinion warfare and legal warfare.
Eftimiades said there is evidence of at least six or seven other areas of warfare persecuted by the Chinese regime.
Disinformation is an “information war”, which is part of the “cognitive warfare”, Fleming said.
Although the CCP has aggressively strengthened its military for decades, its "plan is to never have to resort to conventional warfare," he said.
According to reports from The Epoch Times in December 2024, the CCP is increasingly active in legal warfare, or using the law as a weapon, to achieve its goals.
“Researchers, entrepreneurs and academics who reveal the truth about a Chinese company, whether the Party's theft of genomic data, forced labor or malign business practices, have suddenly found themselves hit with baseless lawsuits,” said Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, during a September 2024 hearing on “how the CCP uses the law to silence critics and enforce its domain".
In recent years, an American with long-standing business ties to China has repeatedly filed baseless environmental lawsuits against Shen Yun's campus in upstate New York. The last one was thrown out by a federal judge in September 2024, this time "with prejudice," so it can't be refiled.
In July 2024, two Chinese Americans, John Chen and Lin Feng, they pleaded guilty that they acted as agents of Beijing after attempting to bribe an IRS agent to open a bogus investigation into Shen Yun.
According to court documents, Lin told the FBI that he and Chen also surveilled the Falun Gong community in Orange County, New York, where the Shen Yun campus is located, to gather information for an environmental lawsuit aimed at inhibiting the growth of the Falun Gong community in the area.
It's just 'the tip of the iceberg'
After Chen's arrest, according to investigation documents, he told his cellmate that he worked for the 610 Office, an extralegal CCP police agency created in 1999 to carry out the persecution of Falun Gong.
He said the Chinese regime paid him $250,000 to emigrate to the United States decades ago and then sent him $50,000 a month.
Fleming said these figures are probably not exaggerated.
"It's not just one isolated situation. There are literally hundreds of them," he said.
"The level of infiltration and subversion in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia is beyond anyone's comprehension. ... They have been building these operations and networks since the 1980s."
The Chen case is just one case where someone was caught.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg of espionage and influence operations throughout the United States,” he said.
Court documents suggest the FBI accessed Chen's text messages through his iCloud account. In an exchange with another Chinese American man in California, Chen described writing a report for his CCP handlers, reporting operations to the CCP, and accepting an operation as “official registered work.” This designation, he said, meant they would receive monetary support, according to court documents.
Chen urged the man to "add content" to the report about their "past fight against Taiwanese independence forces in a named California city over the years and fight against 'FLG' [Falun Gong] influences in that city," according to court documents.
The other man, Mike Sun, was indicted in December 2024 for acting as an unregistered Chinese agent after working as a campaign manager in 2022 to install a pro-CCP candidate into a city council position, according to the indictment. Sun was a campaign treasurer for an Arcadia city council member in California that year.
Chinese agents' introduction operations to the CCP seem novel in the context of influence operations, but they are well-known in the CCP's intelligence gathering, Eftimiades said.
“We see it from the intelligence side,” he said, describing how Chinese hacking organizations, both private and government, know what the CCP is looking for and proactively hack that information and then sell it to the regime.
“It becomes an intelligence bazaar, if you will.”
Fleming also noted that the topics of intelligence and influence are interconnected.
“They have extensive intelligence networks that feed information to their intelligence group,” he said. “But at the same time they also use incoming intelligence to create disinformation and misinformation, to destabilize the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and so on.”
According to Rychlak, the answer requires a paradigm shift.
“When we think about intelligence operations, we tend to think about people, enemies stealing information from us, copying our information, getting our secrets, things like that,” he said.
“The real problem, the real biggest issue since Soviet times, has been the introduction of false information.”
"I think our intelligence services, our police authorities, international and national authorities are waking up to this issue. I hope they do. I mean, they need to. It's incredibly important."
Both Eftimiades and Fleming acknowledged that there is still more to do.
“The first thing we need before anything else is a government-wide strategy,” Eftimiades said.
"We have nothing; we have no way to counter the PRC's covert political influence operations. Even worse, we don't even have the slightest understanding of it. Our government agencies don't have the slightest understanding of it. There is no understanding of how China is waging its political warfare and, as a result, there is no strategy to deal with it."
Eftimiades said awareness must also be extended to the state level, where the CCP has been active.
“And the other thing is that members of government, members of Congress, need to be looked after,” he said, adding that when someone shows up at a congressman's door representing a business in his district, the congressman has no idea who that person is or what affiliations he has.
"There has to be a [better way to support] politicians at the federal and state levels, so that they truly understand who they are dealing with and what their affiliations are. Otherwise, we are at the mercy of China."
For example, it is common for U.S. officials to associate with various Chinese expatriate associations, viewing them as mere connections to the Chinese American community. However, Eftimiades warned that such groups are usually part of the CCP's United Front influence network.
What to do right away?
"The politicians just go, shake hands, do what they normally do, until someone says, 'You know, by the way, do you realize that representatives of this group work under the United Front Work Department [of the CCP] and that its individuals attend those political meetings in Beijing, those political propaganda meetings?' And most of the time, US politicians have no idea,” he said.
"Our political apparatus must have the information available so that they understand who they are dealing with. Who are they actually supporting and serving? Is it the Americans and America's interests, or is it, in this case, China's interests and the CCP's interests?"
According to Eftimiades, US companies also need Washington's support when dealing with the CCP.
“US companies are subject to pressure placed on them by the CCP to support Chinese policies or, at a minimum, to remain silent about them,” he said. "And they cannot be expected to [resist] this on their own. They must have the government's support to be able to resist the CCP's coercion."
Washington must be able to "retaliate," Eftimiades said, and whether the response is economic, political or otherwise, it must be coordinated with allies. This cannot be a unilateral effort by the United States, he said.
Source: The Epoch Times
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