LA mayor Karen Bass met with Chinese influence group despite Biden admin warnings
Gabe Kaminsky
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Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California state treasurer Fiona Ma met with the head of a Chinese government-funded group just after the Biden administration sounded the alarm on the country expanding its influence operations.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a report on Feb. 6 describing how Beijing is “redoubling its efforts to build influence at the state and local level to shift U.S. policy in China’s favor.”
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Still, Bass and Ma met between Feb. 13 and 15 with Lin Songtian, president of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, an agency under the control of China’s Communist Party, as part of his 10-day tour to the United States, according to Chinese state media.
“It’s a real problem,” Victoria Coates, an ex-deputy national security adviser under former President Donald Trump, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s a blatant attempt to influence policies. Everyone in California should probably start asking what they talked about.
“What kind of cooperation are they proposing?”
The Chinese People’s Association has been dubbed the “public face” of the CCP’s United Front Work Department, an entity that gathers intelligence and aims to sway countries to align with the party’s interests. Songtian is also a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a political advisory organization that is a central CCP component to propose policy changes, according to Chinese state media.
“Anti-China has become the ‘political correctness’ of the United States and the West,” Songtian told China Review News, which posted a picture of the president with the Democratic officials. “But the interests and well-being of the people of China and the world are eternal, and talking about geopolitics will not solve the problem.”
“Only when the people of the world stand up, stand together, and make a rational voice, the democratically elected government will return to the human world, respond to people’s livelihood and well-being, and devote itself to developing production, improving people’s livelihood, and solving problems such as employment, food security, climate change, education, and the environment,” the president added.
The ODNI’s Feb. 6 report on China and other countries, including Russia, Iran, and North Korea, came on the heels of its issuing a July 2022 report noting how China’s government under President Xi Jinping “has increasingly sought to exploit” the U.S. government and business leaders “to advance” its interests.
In October 2020, the Trump administration withdrew from a U.S.-China partnership launched in 2011 to boost cooperation between the two governments due to alleged attempts by the Chinese People’s Association, which participated in it, to “directly and malignly influence” the U.S. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement at the time that the goal of the U.S. was to “shine a light on this organization and make clear that their messages come from Beijing.”
The meeting between Bass and Ma with Songtian, which was first reported on by the Washington Free Beacon, is not the first time the Chinese People’s Association has taken steps to develop a relationship with California’s government.
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Biden State Department official Nina Hachigian met at least twice with the association in 2017 while she was deputy mayor of Los Angeles to discuss “the exchange and cooperation in areas such as sister city, environmental protection, and youth,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. The association also cosponsored trips to China between 2016 and 2019 for Robert Hertzberg, California’s-then senate majority leader, records show.
The California mayor’s office did not reply to a request for comment.