The revelation comes after the DOJ brought charges against a Hochul aide for acting as an unregistered agent of China.

The administration of New York Governor Kathy Hochul assigned a senior state government official to participate in back-channel talks led by a Chinese Communist Party bureau allegedly involved in espionage and co-opting foreign political leaders.

This individual was slated to deliver remarks on a Zoom call on October 19, 2023 with the CCP’s International Department and several Chinese officials linked to the Party’s political influence organs, according to emails and documents obtained by National Review under a public records disclosure law. Hochul’s then-director of Asian Affairs, Elaine Fan, coordinated the official’s participation. The official was only referred to as a “senior representative of New York State” and is not named in the correspondence.

In a statement, Hochul’s press secretary Avi Small suggested that the administration’s involvement in the dialogue was authorized and that the State Department had coordinated its role in the talks: “The Hochul Administration has strong vetting procedures in place to review potential invitations and determine their provenance. It is not uncommon for the United States Department of State to ask state government officials to participate in conversations with foreign counterparts.”

At the time, the Biden administration was seeking a diplomatic rapprochement with Beijing, following the Chinese spy balloon incident in February 2023. The White House was so eager to revive high-level talks with China that top Biden officials at the State Department delayed human-rights sanctions and other tough measures that would have irked Chinese officials, Reuters reported.

Two months after the videoconference to which the Hochul administration sent a New York State official, General Secretary Xi Jinping visited San Francisco. Then, in January 2024, International Department minister Liu Jianchao, the lead Chinese delegate to the virtual talks, met with top Biden administration officials in Washington, D.C.

Meetings involving the International Department are controversial given its role in espionage and malign political influence schemes. Safeguard Defenders — the human-rights watchdog group that was first to reveal the existence of a secret Chinese government police station in New York City — has said that Liu was the architect of a global repression and kidnapping campaign in one of his prior roles. The Justice Department has brought numerous cases in recent years targeting alleged Chinese agents who played a role in those efforts.

Laura Harth, director of Safeguard Defenders’s China program, expressed concern about the Hochul administration’s role in the back-channel dialogue, telling National Review: “The set-up bears all the hallmarks of the CCP’s subnational influence campaigns, and is of particular concern given the growing awareness on the Party’s united front work and objectives.” The CCP’s united front work is its bespoke approach to influencing people outside of the Party to do Beijing’s bidding and destroying its enemies.

“The timing of this particular event is almost comical in that sense, as it closely follows the release of a public notice by German intelligence services on the nature and risks of engagement with the International Department. In July 2023, they explicitly warned that the ID should be considered part of China’s intelligence apparatus, aiming to influence foreign politicians across the political spectrum to adopt stances in line with the CCP’s preferred policy objectives and to use such contacts for intelligence gathering.”

Harth was referring to a public bulletin issued by Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution identifying the International Department as “part of China’s intelligence apparatus.”

“One would or should expect Government officials in the U.S. to be similarly aware of the dangers of such encounters, which very much begs the question why anyone would think this to be a good idea,” Harth continued.

National Review has reported extensively on the Hochul team’s eyebrow-raising engagements with China’s consulate general in New York and pro-Beijing nonprofits, who have hosted events that Fan attended during her time working for the governor.

In September, the Justice Department brought criminal charges against former Hochul staffer Linda Sun, alleging that she acted as an unregistered agent for China’s government and the CCP. Prosecutors said that Sun secretly maneuvered within state government to promote Beijing’s interests by blocking Hochul’s team from engaging Taiwan; she denies the allegations and is set to face trial in the coming months. Hochul had a warm working relationship with Chinese consul general Huang Ping, appearing alongside Ping at numerous business and cultural events around New York. She did, however, call for his expulsion after Sun was arrested.

The information about Fan’s role in coordinating New York’s apparent participation in the dialogue included in a tranche of records that the governor’s office provided National Review as part of the outlet’s ongoing effort under the Freedom of Information Law to investigate state and municipal agencies’ interactions with China’s government and CCP-tied entities.

Fan is the granddaughter of Fan Changjiang, a prominent CCP official who started his career as a journalist sympathetic to Mao’s communist revolutionaries, then later served in various roles across the Chinese Communist Party, including as the chief editor of Xinhua News Agency, a propaganda outlet. Her time working for Hochul’s office ended the month after the dialogue, according to her page on LinkedIn. She is currently chief of staff to the mayoral campaign for former NYC comptroller Scott Stringer. Neither Fan nor the Stringer campaign responded to requests for comment.

In an October 18 email addressed to Fan, Asia Society staffer Jing Qian thanked Fan for her “unwavering support in arranging a senior representative from the New York State to speak at tomorrow’s Track 1.5 Dialogue.” That term is diplomatic speak for back-channel talks involving both government officials and non-government officials.

Qian continued: “As discussed, there is one issue affecting New York State, which Governor Hochul recently emphasized often, as you are well aware, is the impact of fentanyl and the ongoing opioid and overdose crisis.”

“This matter appears frequently on the potential list of U.S.-China collaboration which seems to be at an impasse, and could benefit from a push from you.”

An agenda for the virtual meeting that Qian attached to his email showed that the “Senior Representative of the New York State” was scheduled to speak during a plenary session of the dialogue the morning of October 19 focused on putting the U.S.-China relationship “on a more stable track.”

The documents Qian sent to Fan and U.S. participants in the dialogue were marked confidential and included a list of the speakers with lengthy professional biographies and headshots. An agenda for the meeting said that the International Department and the Asia Society “will independently draft own press release if they choose to.” It continued: “The co-hosting institutions will be acknowledged, and participants in the dialogue might be named, only with their consent.”

While the International Department published a two-sentence summary of the talks five days after the virtual meeting, it only named the Asia Society as the U.S. organizing entity and did not name any of the attendees.

The documents obtained by National Review, which were marked “confidential,” listed American participants, including business executives and think tank scholars who have met frequently with Chinese officials, such as Asia Society fellow and former Obama State Department official Daniel Russel, Johns Hopkins professor Jessica Chen Weiss, MIT president emeritus Rafael Reif, Council on Foreign Relations President Michael Froman, and John Thornton, the executive chairman of Barrick Gold. Australian ambassador to the U.S. Kevin Rudd was a lead member of the Asia Society delegation.

The Asia Society’s back channel with the International Department has continued into the Trump administration. Asia Society president Kyung-wha Kang and Qian met Liu in Beijing last month, according to the think tank’s website. The Asia Society declined to comment for this article.

The Party’s International Department, which was created in 1950s as a tool through which CCP chairman Mao sought to shore up Beijing’s ties to other communist regimes and foment global revolution.

In subsequent decades, it has become an outreach, influence, and cooptation vehicle for the Party’s efforts to conduct outreach at the political party level, often in the developing world.

As Washington has distanced itself from China in recent years, the International Department’s interactions with Americans have generally been limited to Beijing-friendly individuals in the business and nonprofit worlds.

Before Liu was appointed to run the International Department in 2022, he held roles within the CCP’s anti-corruption bureaucracy, including as head of the Central Anti-Corruption Coordination Group’s “International Fugitive Recovery Office” from August 2015 to April 2017.

Safeguard Defenders alleged in a 2023 filing to the U.K. authorities that, in that capacity, Liu “had command responsibility for all international fugitive recovery operations,” the Party’s term for its kidnapping efforts.

Some China watchers believed Liu to be next in line for the post of Chinese foreign minister at the time of his January 2024 visit to the U.S., but he was never appointed to the role. The source of that rumor, which found its way into reports about Liu’s visit and was used as a rationale for meeting him, is not known.

Another participant in the Track 1.5 dialogue was Qiu Yuanping, a former official who launched Beijing’s “Overseas Chinese Service Centers” program, which saw the installation of covert Party-run outposts across the world. Both officials are actively involved in Beijing’s influence efforts targeting foreigners.

Safeguard Defenders found that there are several such overseas centers in U.S. cities. A 2023 report from the group said that while those outposts appear to be distinct from Chinese “police service centers” — such as the one that previously operated in Manhattan — they are also controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, via the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office.

Qiu served as head of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, pioneering the rollout of that strategy in the 2010s, according to the Daily Caller, which cited Chinese government websites. In 2017, that office joined the United Front Work Department, a primary CCP political influence organ, though the OCAO had performed united front work long before that.

Multiple other Chinese participants in the virtual October 2023 talks described themselves as members of the Chinese People’s Political and Consultative Conference, a key coordinating mechanism for united front work.

Hochul’s office obstructed a previous National Review request for records under the Freedom of Information Law, claiming, falsely, that a search for correspondence related to China and Taiwan had yielded no responsive records.