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It sounded like something out of a spy novel rather than a tip about New York politics. Yet credible sources kept telling us that China is pushing its agenda into American democracy by screening candidates, targeting lawmakers and throwing its weight around in New York elections.
We know from the U.S. government and extensive news reports that China and its intermediaries have made some aggressive moves on American soil, from hacking into cellphone networks to setting up an illegal police station — used to harass Chinese dissidents — above a noodle house in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
Still, we stepped into this reporting gingerly. After all, writing about Chinese influence in the United States can be dicey. It’s all too easy to slip into what we call “reds under the bed” reporting: assuming that contact with people associated with the Leninist government of America’s most powerful adversary implies wrongdoing. It usually doesn’t.
We must also be wary of taking the statements of sometimes overzealous prosecutors at face value, a painful lesson learned a quarter-century ago in the case of the nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee.
The deeper we dug, though, the more evidence we found that China’s influence on its huge diaspora in New York City was creating an environment where ethnic Chinese candidates — from City Council hopefuls to candidates for Congress — who didn’t toe Beijing’s line confronted long odds to win or even hold on to their elected office.
Political sins might include support for more civil liberties in Hong Kong; a dream of a future democratic China; or sympathy for Taiwan, which Beijing considers to be a province of the mainland.
These are political stances embraced by both Republicans and Democrats across the United States. But in large swaths of New York City, we were hearing, they were toxic.
Case in point: We uncovered that Iwen Chu, a New York state senator born in Taiwan, was raked over the coals for attending a banquet with the Taiwanese president in 2023. First a high-ranking official in the Chinese Consulate confronted her, and then Ms. Chu found herself being ostracized by community leaders with close ties to the Chinese government. She was the only New York state senator to lose re-election last November.
And we reported on the shocking case of Yan Xiong, a former leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising in China who ran for Congress in New York in 2022. Federal prosecutors said an agent from China’s Ministry of State Security conspired with a private investigator to undermine his candidacy and discussed beating him or hiring a prostitute to seduce him.
We have been investigating China’s covert influence campaigns in America, for almost a year. So far, most of our work has focused on New York, home to the largest ethnic Chinese community outside East Asia.
We had built a strong network of sources while uncovering the improbable rise of John Chan, a former heroin trafficker and human smuggler who became a political power broker in Brooklyn. We also investigated Winnie Greco, a top fund-raiser and former adviser to Mayor Eric Adams, and her ties to people and groups connected to Beijing. Her homes were raided last year by federal investigators looking for evidence of Chinese interference in the 2021 mayor’s race.
That aide and another Adams supporter also caused a stir after reports last week that they had given red envelopes of cash to some journalists at his events this summer.
We learned through dozens of interviews that the Chinese government wields its influence in New York politics through diaspora organizations that are usually organized around people from the same village, city, or province in China. We use the blanket term “hometown associations” to describe these in our investigation. Chinese diplomats at the country’s New York consulate on Manhattan’s West Side were in constant communication with leaders of these groups.
We found a rich vein of material in Chinese government announcements and articles in the local Chinese-language press to build up multiple databases. We created a list of more than 200 New York hometown organizations that had forged ties to the consulate, tracked their political involvement (which we found was often unlawful because of their tax-exempt status), documented their interactions with China’s consulate, and analyzed campaign contributions from the community.
We also built a comprehensive list of diplomats at the consulate, complete with their pictures so that we could readily identify them at events, and analyzed voting behaviors in majority-Chinese neighborhoods.
Perhaps our most important resource for mapping out Beijing’s influence is a tool that, ironically, is banned in China: YouTube. It turns out that hometown associations often hire a videographer to record their many gala events, from Lunar New Year to their elaborate banquets — held once every two years — where new leaders of the groups take an oath of office.
After scraping and watching hundreds of hours of video, we learned that many of these “patriotic” groups have Chinese consular officials administer these oaths, which often parrot official Chinese policy such as “reunification” with Taiwan, a thriving island democracy that fears an invasion from the mainland, and “rejuvenation” of the nation, a buzzword that China’s president, Xi Jinping, often invokes. We found 35 videos where consular officials were administering the oaths from the past 10 years. Here, and in other areas of our work, we relied on the assistance of the Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking freelancers Mable Chan and Yi Liu.
Working with our colleague David Fahrenthold, a reporter who investigates nonprofits, we discovered that these hometown groups and other tax-exempt Chinese American associations have been documenting their political activities in high-res video. We identified more than 50 organizations with ties to Beijing that have mobilized members to fund-raise or endorse political candidates over the past five years. Many were nonprofit charities, which are prohibited by law from electioneering.
We bolstered our reporting with numerous freedom of information requests to city, state and federal agencies, and interviewed dozens of prosecutors, politicians and China experts. We examined hundreds of pages of court documents and public records, attended political fund-raiser and community events, visited dozens of hometown associations and their leaders, covered election rallies, monitored consular events and tallied government appropriations.
And we met with many people who offered us tips.
Some threads remain untangled, and we are eager to follow them. If you have information, share it with us at nytimes.com/tips.