As Covid-19 was spreading across New York in March 2020, state officials held a private conference call to discuss their response to the pandemic. But there was someone else listening in who had no business being on the call: a Chinese government official. 

The official, according to federal prosecutors, had been surreptitiously added to the call by Linda Sun, who was then an officer in the administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo. 

“Keep your phone muted,” Sun admonished the Chinese official in a written message during the call, according to prosecutors. 

At the close of the 32-minute discussion, prosecutors say, the official sent Sun a two-word review: “[v]ery useful.”

The call was one of the episodes highlighted in a 64-page indictment accusing Sun of using her positions in New York state government to benefit the Chinese government. In return for shaping government messages to align with Chinese priorities and freezing out Taiwanese officials, she and her family received a range of benefits including millions in kickbacks, free travel and more than a dozen Nanjing-style salted ducks. 

Sun, 41, who worked under Cuomo and his successor, Gov. Kathy Hochul, has pleaded not guilty.

U.S. counterintelligence officials have long harbored concerns, publicly and privately, about China’s elaborate efforts to try to spy and exert influence across American society, including bribing members of the military and the tech industry. 

Part of Beijing’s long-term strategy has also involved targeting local and state officials with the hope of securing more support for China and gaining insights into political decision making as those officials rise to higher office, officials say.

The case involving Sun is typical of China’s tactics, according to Dennis Wilder, a former senior CIA official who focused on China at the agency.

“This is a classic Ministry of State Security operation,” Wilder said, referring to China’s main intelligence agency. “You go after naturalized American citizens with large connections to China. They speak Chinese. They have family back in China. They want business opportunities in China.”

A top priority for the Chinese intelligence services is to “disrupt Taiwan” in any location, including in Chinatowns in U.S. cities or state legislatures, Wilder said.

“Somebody working for Hochul would be very useful in that regard. She would be in a position to press the pro-Beijing case and to muzzle the Taiwan case,” said Wilder, now an assistant professor at Georgetown University.

Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, said the case illustrated how China tries to use covert actors to shape political decisions at all levels of government in the United States.

“Just as TikTok has raised concerns about data collection and influence operations, this situation underscores the lengths to which China is willing to go to infiltrate and manipulate American institutions from within,” Singleton said.

“The charges against Linda Sun illustrate a broader strategy by China to infiltrate and exert influence at all levels of U.S. governance, from local to federal, by exploiting trust and access within political circles,” he said.

A sustained influence campaign

Sun is the latest in a series of people living in New York to be accused by federal prosecutors of being a secret Chinese agent.

Last month, Yuanjun Tang, who gained U.S. citizenship after being granted political asylum, was accused of spying on Chinese pro-democracy activists and dissidents. Tang, 67, helped Chinese authorities infiltrate a group chat on an encrypted messaging application used by numerous Chinese dissidents, according to federal prosecutors.

Earlier in August, Shujun Wang, a Chinese American scholar who helped found a pro-democracy group in New York, was convicted of using his reputation to gather information on dissidents and share it with the Chinese government. Wang, 75, is set to be sentenced in January.

Prosecutors said both men were acting at the behest of China’s Ministry of State Security.

Last year, Chinese nationals Lu Jianwang, 61, and Chen Jinping, 59, were arrested on charges of operating an illegal police station in New York to “monitor and intimidate” Chinese government critics, the Justice Department said. The station, located in an office building in Chinatown, was raided by FBI officers after it was closed in the fall of 2022.

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied the allegations leveled by federal prosecutors.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning on Wednesday declined to comment on the charges against Sun.

“I won’t comment on domestic cases of the United States,” she said at a regular briefing in Beijing. “However, we oppose any malicious attempts to implicate, smear or slander China.”

Liu Pengyu, the spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said he was not aware of the details of the Sun case.

“But in recent years, the U.S. government and media have frequently hyped up the so-called ‘Chinese agents’ narratives, many of which have later been proven untrue,” he said. “China requires its citizens overseas to comply with the laws and regulations of the host country, and we firmly oppose the groundlessly slandering and smearing targeting China.”

A naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in China, Sun worked in New York state government for roughly 15 years. She and her husband Chris Hu, who was also charged, lived in a $3.5 million home in a gated community in Manhasset on Long Island. 

With the millions they made from the Chinese government, they also purchased a $1.9 million home in Honolulu, Hawaii and luxury cars, including a 2024 Ferrari, according to federal prosecutors. 

Chinese-Americans with extensive family connections in China are potentially ripe for recruitment by the Chinese government “because you can threaten families, you can incentivize families,” said Wilder, the former CIA official. The message from Beijing, he said, is “‘your family is going to have a lot better life back home if you cooperate with us.”

The campaign is not focused solely on the U.S., experts say. There have been a series of allegations of Chinese espionage in Canada and across Europe, including in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. China has denied all the accusations.

“Of course, Western states are also spying against and in China, that’s just the normal old game,” said Stephan Blancke, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, or RUSI, a London-based think tank.

The difference, he said, is that “there are numerous cases in which people of Chinese descent or Chinese citizens are massively threatened, intimidated and pressurized by Chinese secret services.”

Blancke added that the Sun case was “extremely serious because it shows the political levels to which the Chinese secret services now have direct or indirect access.”

In 2022, the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center, part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, released a report warning that China was stepping up its influence campaign in the U.S. 

“The PRC understands U.S. state and local leaders enjoy a degree of independence from Washington and may seek to use them as proxies to advocate for national U.S. policies Beijing desires, including improved U.S. economic cooperation with China, and reduced U.S. criticism of China’s policies towards Taiwan, Tibetans, Uyghurs, pro-democracy activists, and others,” the report said. 

According to the indictment, Sun succeeded in getting references to the plight of Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group that has long faced persecution in China, removed from Hochul’s public statements in early 2021.

Hochul, at an event Wednesday morning, called the allegations against Sun “absolutely shocking.” 

“To think that any foreign government has the audacity to infiltrate a government organization like the state of New York has to be addressed with,” she added.