C onfusion reigned last week when the State Department, Governor Kathy Hochul, and the Chinese consulate general made competing claims about the status of China’s top diplomat in New York. A federal indictment had just tied him to the alleged scheme of a former Hochul aide to subvert the state governor’s office for Beijing’s purposes.
Hochul said on Wednesday that she convinced the State Department to expel Huang Ping, Beijing’s consul general in New York. But State denied that and said Huang had left when his term ended as scheduled in August. The consulate, meanwhile, said that Huang was performing his duties as usual.
So where was he really? The answer emerged later, when it became known that Huang appeared the following day at a swanky function hosted at the Plaza Hotel. The Chinese consulate general and the China Daily CCP propaganda outlet both publicized his appearance there. Just two days after the arrest of Linda Sun, who allegedly acted at the direction of an unnamed “high-ranking government official” at the consulate, Huang delivered a cloying address calling for cooperation between the U.S. and China.
“If we would enhance people-to-people communication, if we could have more contacts, more people flow across the Pacific, having more face-to-face chatting, we will get to know each other better,” he said, two days after the Justice Department alleged that China’s government sought to infiltrate and subvert the New York governor’s office. Also at the event, for the China Institute in America — a New York nonprofit that often hosts Chinese officials for meetings — was the CEO of MSCI, Henry Fernandez.
Hochul is not the only official who was caught flat-footed. Hours after her comments on Wednesday, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said: “Our understanding is that the consul general reached the end of a regular, scheduled rotation in August, and so rotated out of the position — but was not expelled.” When a reporter asked him when Huang left, Miller said: “It was the end of August, is my understanding.”
But Huang also appeared in public on September 3, the day that the indictment dropped, at a farewell party hosted by the overseas Chinese community in Philadelphia, according to Radio Free Asia. The outlet translated his remarks from that event, with Huang saying that he was ordered to return to China.
“This whole situation is a mess,” said Michael Sobolik, senior fellow in Indo-Pacific studies at the American Foreign Policy Council. “The State Department appears to be treating Huang with kid gloves in order to limit the risk of retaliation from Beijing.”
It is possible that Huang’s continued presence in New York, at least as of Thursday, was due to a 30-day grace period extended to outgoing diplomats. Either way, Miller’s comment proved wrong, and Foggy Bottom has provided no additional information.
When asked for comment, a State Department official referred National Review to Miller’s remarks from last week, the day before Huang appeared in public. A spokesperson did not respond to a follow-up question asking whether State previously knew that Huang remained in Manhattan as of Thursday evening. Neither Hochul’s office nor the consulate general responded to requests for comment today.
Stephen Akard, a former director of the State Department’s office of foreign missions, which oversees the department’s relations with foreign diplomats posted in America, said that there are numerous questions relating to whether Huang remains accredited. These include whether there has been a notice of termination for his post, whether he’s in the grace period, whether a successor has been appointed, and whether he still enjoys consular immunities.
“Seems to me that State is (deliberately?) a little vague on terms they are using. He wasn’t expelled. He clearly is still here. Is that with U.S. consent or not?” Akard, now a partner at Bose McKinney & Evans, said via email. He also wondered whether Huang now falls outside the acceptable term of his assignment.
The indictment details Sun’s frequent communications with an unnamed “PRC Official-1,” who oversaw her efforts to block Taiwan from engaging with New York State and to prevent Hochul from mentioning China’s abuses of Uyghurs. At one point, the document alleges that PRC Official-1 directed Sun to ask an unnamed politician to thank the Chinese government for facilitating the shipment of ventilators to New York at the start of the Covid pandemic. The indictment refers to an April 4, 2020, tweet that matches the description of a message that then-governor Andrew Cuomo posted that day thanking Huang.
Hochul’s call for Huang’s expulsion was the first high-profile demand for consequences to be imposed on Chinese diplomats for their alleged ties to recent repression and foreign-influence schemes prosecuted by the Justice Department. Federal prosecutors also tied defendants in cases relating to the illegal Chinese police station in NYC and a Massachusetts man’s harassment and surveillance of anti-CCP activists to the consulate, on Manhattan’s Twelfth Avenue.
Sobolik said that Huang’s activities, as detailed in the indictment this month, amount to “textbook malign influence, and it merits retaliation from Washington.” He added: “If we’re hesitant to push back, we can expect to see more cases like this.”