The CCP's subtle method of turning members of China's diaspora into spies

In an article entitled How China turns members of its diaspora into spies, The Economist tells the story of Tang Yuanjun, a well-known bona fide Chinese dissident who 

participated in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and landed in prison as a result. He later defected to Taiwan, swimming to one of its outlying islands from a fishing boat. America granted him asylum and he settled in New York, becoming the leader of Chinese pro-democracy groups.

But in August 2024 Tang Yuanjun was arrested by the FBI.  

He admits to having used his position to collect information for the Chinese government and to report on his fellow activists. He did this so that the government would allow him to return to China to see his ailing parents.

China’s hacking of American computer networks and its efforts to steal Western military and trade secrets have made headlines in recent years. But it has also been pursuing a more subtle campaign, one that involves bribery, blackmail and secret deals, and which uses people such as Mr Tang and other members of the Chinese diaspora to carry out surveillance, information-gathering and influence operations around the world.

 … This year there have been several high-profile cases involving China. By publicising these investigations, the American government is sending a warning to would-be agents, say experts. … But China’s influence operations often occur in a grey area. … the line between voluntary action and work as an agent is fuzzy. Many overseas Chinese are genuine supporters of the Communist Party or, at least, willing to further its interests because it will help their businesses back home or keep their families in China safe. It is only when they receive covert funding, instructions or supervision from Chinese officials that they cross the line into being foreign agents. 

 … American authorities have struggled to combat these efforts without alienating the Chinese diaspora. An anti-espionage programme launched in 2018, called the China Initiative, aimed to stop the country from using “non-traditional collectors”, such as academics and scientists, to steal America’s trade and technology secrets. Nearly 90% of the defendants charged under the initiative were of Chinese heritage, according to a database compiled by the MIT Technology Review. 

 … The risk is that in its efforts to counter the Communist Party, [Donald Trump's] America drives more members of the diaspora into its hands. ■

Disney Blast From the Past: A Portuguese-American Unpacks the H-1B Kerfuffle For You, Adding Immigration Values to the Conversation

Over at her own website, Sarah Hoyt explains the H-1B kerfuffle (for Americans and foreigners alike).

I keep giggling when the media — even some on the right — refers to the lively… discussion last week about the appropriate use of H1B visas and when to import workers as “A MAGA civil war.”

 … This wasn’t a civil war. This was barely a family argument. 

Let me unpack it for you: Of course Musk and Trump had a prejudice pro H1B visas. The first came here with one, and he and the second see only the results after they’ve been normalized, tamped, cleared and made rational by their middle managers.

 … So, of course, Trump and Elon stepped in it, after Vivek really stepped in it by thinking America is how Hollywood portrays it.

But Elon and Trump have walked it back, and I really think they mean it.

 … The point is, as much as I’m sure Vivek didn’t know what he was stepping into, this argument is one that needed to be had. The pros and cons, and the justifiable anger of the people should be on open display.

 … American citizens are tax payers. They are also members of the culture, born and raised in it. If their buy in doesn’t get them at least equal consideration for work and the benefits of an economy they and their parents helped build, it’s on you to explain why not. America should be run for the benefit of Americans (of all colors.) I’m not suggesting we slam the gates shut. I’m suggesting small, a trickle really, and for very specific needs and circumstances …

 … In healthy families, nations and movements, things get discussed in the open without fear it will destroy everything.

And yes, the dems will think it’s a civil war and that we’re “falling apart” but that’s because they don’t tolerate dissent or even questioning, and frankly any questioning would cause them to fall apart, because they have no coherent philosophy.

Ignore them. The adults need to work through this stuff.

Read the whole thing.

The only time that this blog wrote about the H-1B law in its 20 years of existence was during the Obama administration, when a news report in the New York Times in June 2015 made me particularly furious (the fact that it was the Disney Corporation made me angrier still) and particularly willing to write a post dripping with icy sarcasm. 

As you read the following post (plus the NYT article) from 10 years ago, remember this sentence: "If their buy in [and culture] doesn’t get them at least equal consideration for work and the benefits of an economy [that American citizens] and their parents helped build, it’s on you to explain why not."

The Wondrous Benefits of Our Forward-Looking Leaders' Avant-Garde Attempts to Educate Us Bitter Racist Xenophobes to Be Tolerant of Foreigners, and to Generously Accept More of Them in Our Living (and Working) Spaces

From the New York Times, Julia Preston brings us a delightful article on the wondrous benefits of being open to our benevolent, forward-looking leaders (business leaders as well as political) to educate us — the bitter, racist xenophobes that we are — to be tolerant of foreigners, especially to (previously) illegal immigrants, and to generously accept more of them in our living (and working) spaces.

Some [American employees] were performing so well that they thought they had been called in for bonuses.

Instead, about 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost.

“I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly,” said one former worker, an American in his 40s who remains unemployed since his last day at Disney on Jan. 30. “It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it.”

 … the layoffs at Disney and at other companies, including the Southern California Edison power utility, are raising new questions about how businesses and outsourcing companies are using the temporary visas, known as H-1B, to place immigrants in technology jobs in the United States. These visas are at the center of a fierce debate in Congress over whether they complement American workers or displace them.

  … Too often, critics say, the visas are being used to bring in immigrants to do the work of Americans for less money, with laid-off American workers having to train their replacements.

“The program has created a highly lucrative business model of bringing in cheaper H-1B workers to substitute for Americans,” said Ronil Hira, a professor of public policy at Howard University who studies visa programs and has testified before Congress about H-1B visas.

 … H-1B immigrants work for less than American tech workers, Professor Hira said at a hearing in March of the Senate Judiciary Committee, because of weaknesses in wage regulations. The savings have been 25 percent to 49 percent in recent cases, he told lawmakers.

Thank God Barack Obama is proceeding forward in his dream of radically transforming America, in making the USA more like other countries, and its citizens consequently poorer, more in need of help from the government, and more in need of bureaucracy oversight.

Yes, we can.

Yes we can make Americans poorer.

Yes we can make proud citizens more dependent on government help.

Yes we can make America more of a bureaucratic nation.

RIP Jimmy Carter, the American Chamberlain whose naïve foreign policy led Iran to became the world's biggest sponsor of terror

As Jimmy Carter is laid to rest at the age of 100, it is time to remember that, thanks to the Georgia Democrat (and peanut farmer), the United States, along with the rest of the planet, has suffered for the past 45 years from the locofocos' (the Democrats') naïve foreign policy, that is, their traditional "be kind and understanding to our enemies, be tough on our friends" approach to foreign affairs. (After all, in the Far Left's Fairy Tale View of Foreign Policy, the only true enemy of the U.S. and of the rest of the world are America's dastardly Republicans…)

Like government itself, the party of government (at the time, the Carter administration) created a problem, here internationally, where none existed before, to be resolved — by government — in the future.

Like the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution (how much better was JFK in the White House?), the Nicaraguan Revolution (also the result of a Carter policy, see details in the blockquote below), and innumerable other revolutions, the Iranian Revolution made the country a far worse place, both for its own citizens and for the international community at large.

In spite of Carter achievements, such as, arguably, the Camp David peace accords (but surely Britain's Chamberlain also had achievements that the PM could boast of), the world and Iran itself have for 45 years suffered under the helm of the "Death to the Great Satan/Death to the West" Ayatollahs, which today, as Investor's Business Daily puts it, "is the world's biggest sponsor of terror" (see, e.g.,  October 7, 2023).

Other American Chamberlains followed Jimmy Carter: although unlike Barack "smart diplomacy" Obama and Joe "the grown-ups are back in charge" Biden, the British PM of the 1930s never seems to have thought it rational to deliver to the Democracy-hating Nazis pallets with millions and millions of dollars (or of pounds sterling) in cash. However, along with the Clintons, Obama and Biden did manage to hand billions and billions to the Democracy-hating Communists of China.

In his History of the American People, Paul Johnson writes that

Carter actually added to American weakness by well-meaning but ill-thought-through ventures. One of them was his 'human rights' policy, based on the Helsinki Accords

 … A human rights lobby grew up within the administration, taking over a whole section of the State Department, which worked actively to enforce the Accords. Thus, it played a major role in the overthrow of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua. … The 'sharp break' took the form, in 1979, of the overthrow of Somoza, a faithful if distasteful ally of America, and his replacement by a Marxist and pro-Soviet regime, whose attitude to human rights was even more contemptuous and which campaigned openly for the overthrow of America's allies in Guatemala, El Salvador, and elsewhere in Central America

 … The next year the State Department's Bureau of Human Rights played a significant part in undermining the position of another old ally, the Shah of Iran, whose pro-Western regime was overthrown by orchestrated street-mobs in 1979. It was replaced by a Moslem fundamentalist terror regime, which swiftly accumulated an unprecedented record of gross human rights abuses and characterized the US as the 'Great Satan.'

 … During the 1970s the Cold War spread to virtually every part of the globe and was marked by two developments: the contraction of US naval power, and the expansion of Soviet naval power.

 … While the Carter administration was adept at damaging friends and allies, it failed to develop any coherent response to this extension of the Cold War

The very first thing that followed Carter's brilliant foreign policy decision about abandoning America's ally, the Shah, was the humiliating Tehran embassy hostage crisis (which would last 444 days), compounded by Carter's incompetent 1980 rescue attempt (shades of Saigon 1975 and Kabul 2021, all of them incidentally involving helicopters). 

As we reflect on Jimmy Carter, let us take a minute to pause and remember how Frank Gaffney defined the Obama Doctrine, aka smart diplomacy, an ideOlogy typical of all Drama Queens' naïve fairy tale foreign policy:

• Abandoning our allies,

• emboldening our enemies,

• and diminishing our country

Update: Will Tanner reminds us that Carter was instrumental in killing the free, prosperous state of Rhodesia and aiding Mugabe in … transforming it into hellish Zimbabwe, while Yehuda Teitelbaum, in turn, opines that the 39th president "might have done more damage to Israel’s security and international standing than any Western leader in history." For her part, Sarah Hoyt points out that the alleged hero, saint, and peacemaker "was responsible for letting the Soviets and their Cuban guerrilla lackeys put former Portuguese Africa to fire and blood".

Update 2: So far, no coverage that I have seen on
the killer rabbit attack on Jimmy Carter's canoe