Conrad Black: The West Must Recognize That Beijing Is an Enemy of Western Civilization

The arrest of Linda Sun, a former chief of staff to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and an aide to the previous governor, Andrew Cuomo, and of her husband, Chris Hu, as undisclosed agents of the People’s Republic of China, has again raised very serious questions about the depth and extent of Chinese espionage and interference in Western countries.

Ms. Sun is accused of repeatedly intervening to prevent Taiwanese officials from meeting Gov. Hochul and of using her office to advance the interests in the United States of the Chinese Communist Party specifically, and of a great many official and private Chinese clients seeking access and preferments.

The spectacle of an American criminal prosecution always has its amusing aspects, and as a practical matter, it is doubtful that the chief of staff to the governor of New York could provide the Chinese regime with information or services of very great use to them. But this case has dramatically raised the issue of improper Chinese official meddling in the West. It came to light that long-serving Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein had a Chinese agent on her staff for many years, and that Congressman Eric Swalwell (who may have conducted the most unsuccessful campaign for presidential nomination in history), had a sexual affair with an outright communist Chinese female agent.

In Canada, there has been an extensive investigation into Chinese attempts to influence the election of the mayor of Vancouver and several federal members of Parliament. Though there has been no official response to it, it is generally recognized that much of the rise of the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei was based on comprehensive industrial espionage against the formerly great Canadian telecommunications company Northern Telecom, in consequence of which Nortel descended from a vastly successful corporation into bankruptcy.

The Chinese technique appears to be to focus on well-placed people of Chinese ancestry with relatives in the People’s Republic and implies with a minimum of subtlety that the relatives in China could benefit from the cooperation of targeted Chinese Americans, and similarly could suffer from the non-cooperation of the relatives in the United States with the wishes of the Beijing regime.

There does not appear to be much evidence, or at least publicized evidence, that the Chinese penetrated areas of maximum national security sensitivity in the United States. The closest that seems to have come to light, as alleged by the Republicans, is the claim that the Clinton administration had authorized the sale of sensitive defence technology to the People’s Republic, possibly in consideration for substantial Chinese contributions to the Democratic presidential campaign of 1996 and the Clinton Foundation. These charges could never be seriously investigated because the Chinese individuals involved returned to China (as did Congressman Swalwell’s chum Fang Fang), and the Chinese declined to make them available for questioning by American officials.

The Chinese agents seem to be doing exactly what the U.S. and Canadian governments wrongly believed the Japanese government was doing in the early 1940s when approximately 150,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians were confined to camps. They were adequately fed and sheltered, not mistreated or overworked, but their property was confiscated and sold at unrealistically low prices, yet there was never one jot of evidence that any of them was guilty of anything and they were all citizens entitled to due process which they did not receive.

It is a little repeated fact of American history that the chief advocate of these mistreated Japanese Americans was the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who said that he had honeycombed their organization with agents and that none of them was conducting espionage, sabotage, or any other inappropriate activity. The detentions and confiscations were proceeded with anyway in a climate of national hysteria after Pearl Harbor. It was nonsense, as the Japanese Americans, who comprised the majority of the population of the Hawaiian Islands, were not bothered since they provided most of the employees for the military bases there. It was not the finest hour for the icons of American liberalism such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, John McCloy, and Felix Frankfurter.

This subject is going to have to be taken a great deal more seriously than it has been. Our governments will have to devise some combination of insulation for those people of Chinese ancestry subject to blackmail, and retaliation directly against China, to bring this intolerable activity to an end. The great Western campaign to befriend China has been an almost complete failure, and it is time for the Western nations to revise their policies in these matters to account for the fact that China aspires to be not only our rival, but the victorious rival to Western civilization.