In latest crackdown on alleged Beijing agents, ex-high ranking New York official arrested

New York, Sep 4 : A former high-ranking state official has been charged with acting as an agent of the Chinese government, capping a series of arrests of people, including former dissidents, who have allegedly worked secretly for Beijing.

Linda Sun, a former Deputy Chief of Staff to New York Governor Kathy Hochul, "actually worked to further the interests of the Chinese government and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party)," Breon Peace, the federal prosecutor for Eastern New York, said on Tuesday announcing the arrests of her and her husband Christopher Hu.

She had also worked for former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as chief diversity officer.

She is accused in court documents of blocking Taiwan representatives from contacting high-level state officers; changing the messaging of the officials regarding China and the CCP; getting official state proclamations for Beijing representatives; attempting to set up a China trip by a senior state politician, and arranging meetings for visiting Beijing delegations with state officials.

In return, her husband is alleged to have received transactions worth millions for his business, and a relative promotion.

The detailed court papers said that one of the illegal benefits was her parents receiving "Nanjing-style salted ducks prepared by a People's Republic of China government official's personal chef".

Sun's arrest was the latest in a crackdown on alleged Chinese agents, who include at least two political dissidents playing a double role in New York.

Last month, Yuanjun Tang, who had been arrested during the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 and received political asylum in the US, was charged with providing information about dissidents to the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) while running a pro-democracy organisation.

Prosecutors said his cooperation with MSS was motivated by a desire to visit relatives in China.

A former scholar at a local university, Shujun Wang was convicted earlier in the month of giving Beijing information about activists for Taiwan and Tibet and Uyghur causes while running a foundation named for two Chinese reformers.

One of them was Hu Yaobang whose death sparked the Tiananmen uprising.

In a brazen operation in the US, last year two men were arrested on charges of setting up a secret Chinese police station in New York City to intimidate Chinese dissidents.

After the arrest of Harry Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping, the then-head of counter-intelligence for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kurt Ronnow, said, "It is simply outrageous that China's Ministry of Public Security thinks it can get away with establishing a secret, illegal police station on US soil to aid its efforts to export repression and subvert our rule of law."

Last year in June, two persons of Chinese descent and a former New York City police sergeant were convicted on charges relating to the harassment of a former Chinese official to force him to return to China.

(Arul Louis can be contacted at arul.l@ians.in and followed at @arulouis)