The CCP Is Capturing New York City

Jan 6, 2026 - 10:53 Updated: Jan 6, 2026 - 10:48

Commentary

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) excels in conducting overseas influence operations. These are coordinated actions aimed at swaying public opinion and influencing key decision-makers in a given country, often using tactics such as misinformation, social media manipulation, and psychological strategies that exploit emotions and spread propaganda.

As the media and financial capital of the world, New York City has been a primary target for the CCP’s influence operations for many years. New York is the American city with the largest ethnic Chinese population, with more than 700,000 residents, concentrated in areas such as Flushing in Queens, Manhattan’s Chinatown, and Brooklyn.

This makes it perfect for the CCP’s United Front Work Department’s (UFWD’s) new core mission of “overseas Chinese work,” which involves co-opting, mobilizing, and controlling ethnic Chinese communities to promote CCP narratives, suppress dissent, gather intelligence, neutralize critics, and coordinate campaigns against anti-communist/pro-democratic Chinese in the U.S. Northeast.

Let us examine the ramp-up in UFWD operations in New York City during Xi Jinping’s tenure as Chinese leader.

Molding the UFWD Into a Magic Weapon

Xi had big plans for the United Front Work Department, seeking to centralize Party control over political, religious, ethnic, and overseas Chinese affairs. He personally attended the Central United Front Work Conference, held in Beijing in May 2015. This event marked the first time in nine years that a major national-level united front conference was convened, and notably the first to be elevated to “central” status rather than just “national.” Attendees included senior CCP officials, provincial and ministerial authorities, military representatives, and others involved in united front affairs.

In resurrecting Mao Zedong’s description of united front work as an important “magic weapon” for the CCP to realize the “Chinese Dream” of national rejuvenation, Xi discussed new challenges, such as managing overseas Chinese affairs and the urgency of making the united front a whole-Party responsibility.

As a clear indication that Xi meant business, after the conference, the first-ever Party regulation specifically governing united front affairs was published: the “Provisional Regulations of the Communist Party of China on United Front Work.”

The mission of the UFWD was further reformed and expanded through institutional changes made at the Third Plenary Session (Third Plenum) of the 19th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in February 2018. Specifically, the UFWD was given unified leadership over the State Ethnic Affairs Commission while absorbing the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO) and the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) into the UFWD.

The result was achieving Xi’s goal of centralizing CCP leadership over united front work, ethnic and religious affairs, and the Chinese overseas diaspora (the global community of people of Chinese origin living outside China).

Within the 12 bureaus of the UFWD, two bureaus (the Ninth and Tenth) divide the responsibilities of the former OCAO. The Ninth Bureau is officially known as the Overseas Chinese Affairs General Bureau. Its primary function is overall coordination and strategy of influence operations (peddling) throughout the Chinese diaspora by building and maintaining relationships with overseas Chinese communities, promoting loyalty to the CCP among Chinese diaspora, mobilizing these communities to support CCP goals such as opposition to “Taiwan secessionist forces,” overseeing cultural exchanges and people-to-people diplomacy, and coordinating with overseas friendship associations, and other united front-linked groups.

The Ninth Bureau coordinates closely with the 10th Bureau (Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau), which focuses on more specific operational aspects of influence operations, including media, propaganda, cultural/educational programs, youth exchanges, and other targeted activities among the estimated 60-plus million overseas Chinese.

Note: The near-identical names of the two bureaus signal that they are complementary components of the CCP’s intensified, highly coordinated overseas united front effort.

UFWD at Work in NYC

The Big Apple has sustained many Chinese influence operations since the CCP refocused the UFWD’s mission beginning in 2015. Here are just a few of them.

The UFWD routinely tries to influence New York-based media along at least three lines of propaganda: promoting the “one-China principle,” suppressing any accusations of Chinese human rights violations, and supporting all CCP policy statements from Zhongnanhai.

From January 2019 to October 2021, state-run China Daily paid at least $7 million to print and online publications, including The New York Times, to carry its pro-CCP propaganda. These inserts, often labeled as “China Watch,” promoted positive views of the CCP and China–U.S. relations while even occasionally disguising them as news articles.

On the social media front, in November 2021, the Chinese Consulate in New York signed a $300,000 contract with Vippi Media Inc., a New Jersey-based company near New York, to recruit at least eight influencers on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch to produce 24 sponsored content segments promoting the Beijing Winter Olympics and disseminating CCP-friendly narratives through social media influencers without overt disclosure.

UFWD-friendly organizations, such as the Asian American Community Empowerment (formerly Brooklyn Asian Community Empowerment, or BRACE) and the Coalition of Asian-Americans for Civil Rights (CAACR) in Queens, have hosted receptions for UFWD delegations while extending so-called community services to overseas Chinese. United front work is a whole-of-government mission.

The UFWD has co-opted local civic groups to assist in carrying out repressive activities in the United States. One example is the America Changle Association (ACA), which housed a secret CCP police station in New York City that the FBI raided in October 2022. The Ministry of Public Security established the so-called police station through China’s Fuzhou Public Security Bureau as another example of a whole-of-government mission.

The station targeted critics of the CCP, including pro-democracy activists and Falun Gong practitioners. In parallel, ACA President Lu Jianwang later admitted to recruiting individuals to harass dissidents and disrupt Falun Gong protests during Xi Jinping’s 2015 U.S. visit while receiving payments from the Chinese Consulate for recruitment purposes.

The UFWD organized protests against then-Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen after she arrived in New York for a visit in March 2023. According to The Guardian, the demonstrations were organized by local UFWD-friendly organizations, including the Brooklyn Chinese United Overseas Chinese Mission. Protestors were allegedly offered $200 to attend. Large banners were provided to the protesters by the Fu Zhou Lang Qi Association and the Fujian Foundation in USA, two other CCP-friendly organizations.

Linda Sun (C) joins a protest against Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s visit, in Manhattan, New York, on July 12, 2019. Liang Guanjun (2-R), president of the United Chinese Associations of the Eastern United States, holds up the mic. U.S. Attorney’s Office

The ongoing prosecution of Linda Sun, who served as the deputy chief of staff for consecutive New York governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul, could be another example of the UFWD in action. She is accused of being a Chinese agent who used her position to advance Beijing’s interests, particularly by undermining relations with Taiwan and avoiding scrutiny of Beijing’s human rights abuses.

Sun allegedly engaged with key figures regularly, such as Shi Qianping, a standing committee member of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese (a UFWD-controlled organization) and head of the U.S. Federation of Chinese-American Entrepreneurs, as well as regional UFWD branches in her native Jiangsu Province. Lastly, as part of the UFWD strategy of using economic incentives to foster dependence and loyalty, she also allegedly directed lucrative COVID-19 personal protective equipment (PPE) contracts to Chinese companies connected to the CCP during the pandemic.

Concluding Thoughts

The United Front Work Department has been hard at work in New York as it executes its expanded “overseas Chinese work mission”—in this case, to surveil and suppress Chinese dissidents while promoting Beijing’s interests in all matters and commensurately undermining U.S. interests.

The UFWD’s actions involve influencing U.S. media and decision-makers, orchestrating pro-Beijing protests on demand, fostering economic dependencies on CCP-run enterprises among overseas Chinese to gain leverage, facilitating pro-CCP cultural exchanges, suppressing anti-China human rights reports and associated protests, and coordinating actions with other Chinese bureaucracies to execute the CCP’s efforts to “capture” New York City.

Perhaps the UFWD’s biggest coup was indirect assistance in the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, who benefited from CCP-connected donors and CCP-supporting parts of the activist network in New York, such as the nonprofit The People’s Forum. Mamdani received donations from groups aligned with CCP narratives, funded by Neville Roy Singham, an American tech millionaire who relocated to Shanghai. In addition, Singham’s sister, a professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai, also allegedly donated to pro-Mamdani PACs.

Another Mamdani campaign overlap with the CCP was a volunteer video editor on his campaign who later relocated to China and produced content defending the CCP while downplaying Uyghur genocide claims, as reported by the Daily Caller.

While these CCP connections are “indirect,” Mamdani has not disavowed any of that support, and the UFWD operatives are clever enough to keep such support behind the scenes while expecting “future considerations.”

New York City appears to be a main front in the CCP’s ongoing hybrid war with the United States.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.