By Audrye Wong

As the 2025 New York City mayoral race heated up, front-runner candidate and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo recently appointed a relative newcomer with ties to the Chinese government and Beijing’s foreign influence apparatus as his Asian community liaison. This was just the latest in a repeating pattern across the United States of individuals linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) serving as political aides, fundraising and networking with national and local politicians, and even running as candidates and getting elected into office.

Taken together, these incidents embody the long-standing yet evolving tactics of Beijing’s malign influence and political interference in democratic societies. Alongside classic examples of blatant espionage and transnational repression tactics often used by authoritarian regimes abroad, the Chinese government is also actively trying to reshape the political landscape from the ground up. The modes and methods of China’s foreign influence efforts fundamentally threaten not just US national security but also the healthy functioning of US democracy and the rights and liberties of ethnic Chinese communities.

Much of these activities fall under the umbrella of a CCP organ known as the United Front. The United Front can be thought of as a diffuse system comprising official, quasi-official, and grassroots organizations linked together by a shared organizing principle—to promote Beijing’s interests, coopt allies at home and abroad, and suppress regime critics. In addition to seeking to influence foreign decisionmakers, the Chinese government also prioritizes shaping—or controlling—the views and behavior of overseas Chinese communities. United Front work draws on multiple arms of the Party-state, ranging from state security (China’s civilian intelligence agency) and foreign affairs to education and propaganda. Embassies and consulates abroad help to coordinate these activities and certainly play an active role in reaching out, managing, and intervening in overseas Chinese communities.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has articulated ambitious concepts of Great Overseas Chinese Affairs (da qiaowu) and Great United Front Work (da tongzhan gongzuo), underlining the Party’s renewed emphasis on using these instruments of influence to safeguard China’s increasingly expansive view of national security across multiple domains and assert Beijing’s clout globally. Xi himself has added a more overtly geopolitical and ideological bent to managing the overseas Chinese. He describes Chinese culture as the “common spiritual gene of Chinese sons and daughters,” with unification of the Chinese nation as a shared root for ethnic Chinese abroad and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation as a shared dream. In other words, overseas Chinese are seen as playing an important role in achieving strategic goals such as the “China Dream” and “telling China’s story well.”

The United Front has developed a sophisticated strategy of influence that rests less on overtly pro-CCP positions and more on tailored appeals to local contexts. A 2009 article by the then-director of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office explicitly mentioned getting overseas Chinese to participate in politics and make their voices heard, ostensibly to benefit minority group rights and promote harmony and stability in host societies. As I have written elsewhere, the Chinese government does not hesitate to play identity politics and exploit contentious social and political issues—such as anti-Asian hate, public safety, homeless shelters, or affirmative action and standardized testing—in order to gain currency among overseas Chinese populations and legitimize CCP-linked individuals and organizations as grassroots leaders defending the community’s interests and rights. This goes hand in hand with propaganda messaging of longstanding racial discrimination against ethnic Chinese and Asian-Americans (as well as touting the flaws of democracies). Such mobilization in turn serves as a foundation for Beijing’s political machine to field preferred candidates and rally votes to get them elected. This means that United Front actors are not just rubbing shoulders with people in power but also getting into power.

Patronage politics make fertile ground for foreign influence. Especially in areas with large ethnic Chinese populations, politicians seeking election are eager to tap on Chinatown networks to secure votes. This leads to a reliance on political fixers and community liaisons, who by nature of their position as a community leader also often have close ties to the Chinese government. In some cases, politicians may know relatively little—or exercise willful ignorance—about the role of the United Front in local politics. Yet, these activities have been going on for a long time. As one example, in the greater Los Angeles area, an overseas Chinese elite jockeying for community leader status almost two decades ago was recently sentenced as an agent of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and also worked closely with another alleged PRC agent to influence local politics. Many of these individuals hold positions in recognized United Front organizations and frequently meet with CCP officials...

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