How Chinese Spies Are Operating In America

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Now you have a lot of money. ID,etus, phia, and... When Americans think about Chinese espionage, they often picture spy balloons, cyber attacks, or stolen military secrets. But some of the most concerning cases are happening much closer to home.

Local officials accused of acting on Beijing's behalf, covert police stations allegedly operating on US soil.

Decidents, being monitored, and investigations involving everything from fentanyl to biological materials. Investigative author Peter Schweitzer says these are not isolated incidents. Instead, they're part of a much broader strategy, when aimed at weakening America without firing a shot. He joins us to explain how China's operations inside the US actually work,

and why the threat may look less like a spy novel, and more like every day American life. I'm Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howl. This is a Weeknd Edition of Morning Wire. There's a strange trade happening online right now. We use apps, websites, rewards, programs, and in exchange pieces of our personal information,

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whose work is focused on political corruption and China's growing influence inside the United States. He's the author of Red Handed and Blood Money. Peter, great to have you on. Great to be with you. Thanks for having me. So, Peter, we had a bunch of questions for you on China and us buying allegations. Agents here in the U.S., including elected officials, in the U.S., in fact, I wanted to start there. We had a recent case at a Southern California.

Arcadia Mayor Eileen Wang, she's now resigned, pled guilty to acting as an unregistered agent for China. At the same time, federal authorities are investigating and convicting all kinds of individuals from China when operating secret police stations inside the U.S., others smuggling toxic fungus to America to ruin crops. So, how significant are these cases and are they isolated incidents or part of something larger? Well, if you look at each individual case, you might not think it

amounts too much. You know, she's the mayor of this town in California, but it's a cumulative

“effect that I think presents the challenge. And it also highlights the fact that while we want to”

focus a lot of times on espionage or influence operations at the national level, China does a lot at the state and local level because they can advance their interests very aggressively. This is by far the most sophisticated challenge that we've ever faced from a foreign adversary. The Soviet Union was not very good at this, certainly Nazi Germany either. China is very good at it. They use a combination of inducements. They appeal to those that might have an ethnic bond. They're Chinese

American, for example, but they also use money. And unlike the Soviet Union, they have a lot of money to toss around and they're quite effective in recruiting spies and causing problems

goals like this, I lean wing? Is she just generally trying to defend the Chinese communist

“party in front of the American public? What is the goal there? And does it connect to some of”

these other apparent operatives? Yeah, I just like during the Cold War, some people would say they were motivated to help the Soviet Union out of a naive sense of peace. You can say that about some of these individuals. Some of these individuals say they just want to promote greater cultural understanding between China and the United States. The motivation is to make sure that these two countries are friendly. That's certainly possible. It's hard to look inside

somebody's mind and know exactly what their motivation is. But the fact of the matter is that they know they're dealing with a foreign adversarial power. They're either dealing with people that are part of the Chinese government apparatus or part of what's called the United Front. These are associated groups with the Chinese government. And they're literally no excuses. Whatever they think their motivations are, if you are taking money or doing the bidding of a foreign

nation like China, you are required to register with the U.S. Department of Justice so they can assess what you're doing. Make sure it's not anything illegal. And the mayor in this case failed to do that isn't as now suffering the legal consequences. What is China's interest in getting some of these low level political appointments? Do we have any sense of what their goal would be with something like a mayor ship? Well, mayors can have a lot of influence in terms of issues

related to zoning. China of course is trying to acquire a real estate in the United States that is

being used for various purposes. But ultimately, the goal is political influence. And they will

try to identify people that are active on the local level that may get appointed to a state position or they may actually run for federal office. They wanted to develop a relationship early. That's certainly what happened in the case of Eric Swallwell, who was a city commissioner in northern California when the relationship with Fang Fang began. What they're looking for is elite capture. That's the desire to sort of capture members of the American political

elite. They recognize that they're not going to be robust to China. They're willing to accept what they call big help with a little badmouth. They know that these people may have to criticize China from time to time. But they expect them to help them advance their interest, which means access to American capital markets, access to our overall consumer market, to advance their

commercial and political interest in the United States. That's ultimately what they're looking

for from these political actors. Now, we just saw with this Beijing summit, a lot of security issues from the Trump team using burner phones, a lot of surveillance reported, including from Fox News, right? What kind of spying would you expect from the Chinese during events like this, particularly involving the U.S. President? Yeah, I mean, China's a surveillance state and they know that

“information is power. That's how they govern. They use that information to exploit”

and monitor their political opponents. They're going to try to do the same thing with the United States. That means that they're going to try to monitor communications. They're going to try to encourage members of the diplomatic team or of the advanced team to maybe go drinking in bars. Maybe they're going to compromise them politically in some way. This is vitally important to maintain security in this kind of situation because sometimes they're negotiating very complex

deals and to know what the U.S. team is discussing or what they're willing to give away could provide a huge advantage. So the United States does some of this itself. Obviously, we have spy agencies like the CIA and the NSA, but China being a surveillance state, they have a lot more latitude and a lot more resources to bring to the table in terms of trying to fair it out secrets from opposing countries. Now, one thing that's stood out in the patterns is that some

of this buying doesn't look like traditional espionage. So we have some intimidation of dissidents when it comes to Chinese diaspora. There of course, the propaganda campaigns. And then also there's influence when it comes to universities and local leaders. What are China's

“primary goals in the United States when you are taking a broader view of all of those efforts?”

Yeah, they really fall into a couple of baskets. One is they want to advance their technological and economic capabilities. So they're interested in obtaining a lot of intellectual property, stealing it from American companies, stealing it from laboratories. And you have a lot of students, 600,000 Chinese students are studying at American universities. They're generally not studying comparative literature or gender studies. They're studying hard sciences. They're working in laboratories.

And if you're a Chinese student, even if you don't want to spy for your country, even if you're not

into the Chinese Communist Party, the problem is they can pressure your family. You have family

potential recruit. So they want those technological secrets, those economic secrets to help China win the AI war to advance technologically more than the United States. But then you have the political side, which is the decision-making side. This notion that I mentioned earlier, elite capture. This is a Chinese strategy, which is to get decision-makers. They can be in politics. They can be on Wall Street to have a sympathetic view towards China. It doesn't mean that they like the

Chinese Communist Party, but it means they're incentivized to have good relationships. So they'll seek commercial relationships with members of prominent political families to help make them rich in China. That will make them feel beholden to Beijing, et cetera. And here they're looking

for, of course, political information, but ultimately political influence. They are absolutely

paranoid about China hawks. They're calling for a hard line against China. China knows that that would compromise a lot of their operations and make their climb to the top much more difficult. So they devote a lot of resources to trying to recruit and exploit political assets that can advance China's interests politically by muting criticism of their country. You've also seen concerns about cyber attacks and intellectual property theft you just mentioned.

TikTok, a fitness trafficking, cases even involving biological materials being smuggled into the country. Or is it fair to say that this actually is part of a coordinated effort

“from the Chinese? Yeah, now this is a really important point, John. We in the West tend to think”

of war and peace as separate categories. If you're not fighting a war, you are at peace. If you're

fighting a war, you are at war. China has a different view. It's not black and white. They believe in something that is sometimes called unrestricted warfare or at other times it's called disintegration warfare. And what this means is war that does not involve a kinetic shooting war. You're not firing missiles at each other. You're not doing what happened in Iran. But you're engaging in non-lethal military operations designed to weaken your enemy. So take fentanyl for example. The Chinese

press is filled with accounts of how fentanyl is an opportunity to sort of switch the opium wars of the 19th century to cause havoc in the United States socially. And when you look at the fentanyl crisis in America, it's really fueled more by China than it is by the Mexican drug cartels. The

Chinese provide the precursor chemicals. There are 2,000 Chinese nationals that help the cartels

in Mexico create this deadly cocktail. The money proceeds from these fentanyl drug sales are laundered to Chinese state on banks. That would be an example of unrestricted warfare. And it was actually a book written in 1999 by two military officials that's highly influential today that actually mentions that as a form of warfare, not fentanyl specifically, but drug warfare. Certainly biological warfare potentially something like COVID or something involving things that can affect our

crops in the United States are other examples of this kind of warfare that's below a kinetic shooting war, but is nonetheless designed to weaken and undermine the United States and give China a strategic advantage. And that's a brilliant strategy. And to a lot of extent, you could argue it's working. Now, looking back at the 2023 incident where we had the Chinese spy balloon,

“I think a lot of people were a little bit alarmed at how nonchalant. We were about that going on.”

So, why do you think there's so much hesitation to really act when we see these threats? And do you think that's changing under the Trump administration? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, as we saw in the summit, there are a whole cluster of issues that are on the table. You have the situation in Iran. You have trade issues. You have intellectual property issues. You have the export of American products like beef to China, which have been banned. You have questions about

Chinese investment in the United States. You have questions about electric vehicles and Chinese cars being sold in the United States. So, there's a huge collection of issues that challenge that any president faces, certainly including this one is, what are your priorities? What is most important to you? So, you know the Chinese are going to spy. You know they're going to conduct

“influence operations. Is it getting out of control to the extent that you need to raise it as an”

issue and risk coming up with a good deal for the United States in another one of these areas? And I think the Trump administration calculation has been so far that we are going to expel spies. We are going to arrest people as happened with this mayor in California, but we're not going to put the overall relationship at risk because we're trying to advance these other areas of interest to us, whether it's trade, agriculture, or fentanyl. Certainly,

the politics are really complicated on sort of a global scale. But meanwhile, here at home,

Glad to be with you. That was Peter Schweitzer, and this has been a week in addition of one of one of