Democratic Delegate Chao Wu was born in Hubei, China, and has been a member of the Maryland House of Delegates since January 2023, where he serves on the Ways and Means Committee. Prior to attaining elected office, he served as president of the University of Maryland’s chapter of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, and an archived version of his LinkedIn page shows that he was once affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party’s Thousand Talents Program.
The CSSA was established to “monitor Chinese students and mobilize them against views that dissent from the CCP,” and its individual chapters are overseen by the CCP’s United Front Work Department, a global network of party loyalists tasked with gathering intelligence and exerting influence, according to the State Department. The Thousand Talents Program, meanwhile, has been flagged by the FBI as a Chinese government-backed industrial espionage operation.
Wu’s tenure as president of the University of Maryland’s CSSA chapter occurred while he was working on an engineering doctorate at the institution in the early 2000s. The length of Wu’s affiliation with the Thousand Talents Program, which is listed on an archived version of his LinkedIn page from 2013 as the “Thousand Talents Plan Overseas Talent Exchange Circle,” is unknown.
What is known, however, is that despite Wu’s links to two established CCP influence groups, he landed jobs within the federal government and at firms dealing in sensitive technologies.
One of Wu’s first jobs after completing his doctorate was as a software development fellow at the Obama administration’s Food and Drug Administration. Shortly after that, he moved on to work as a senior electrical engineer at Maryland Aerospace, a midsize defense contractor working on projects for the Army, Navy, Air Force, and NASA.
The CSSA’s links to the Chinese government were hardly unknown at the time, leaving little excuse for how Wu ended up working both in the federal government and as a defense contractor.
Around the time Wu was heading the University of Maryland’s CSSA chapter, another CSSA chapter was embroiled in a massive industrial espionage scandal. In 2005, an investigation conducted by the French newspaper Le Monde found that a CSSA chapter had served as the hub for a “Belgian-based economic espionage network” that included “hundreds of Chinese spies working at various levels of European industry.”
Wu’s affiliation with the Thousand Talents Program is also potentially problematic in relation to his work as a government official and defense contractor. According to the FBI, the CCP pushes members of its talent programs “to steal foreign technologies needed to advance China’s national, military, and economic goals.” Often, members of the programs are required to share trade secrets with the CCP, subject themselves to Chinese laws, and recruit other individuals, usually their colleagues, into the program.
The risks associated with the Thousand Talents Program aren’t purely hypothetical. Law enforcement has caught members of the initiative stealing American military technology, and the National Institutes of Health had dozens of open investigations into the behavior of individuals associated with the program as of June 2020. The value of intellectual property stolen by those involved in the Thousand Talents Program has, in some cases, approached $1 billion. Some Chinese-born scientists have faced legal consequences for failing to disclose their ties to the program.
During his time at Maryland Aerospace, Wu worked on “the design, simulation, and control of small satellites and UAVs.” Drone technology has since become a point of contention between the United States and China.
“American politicians should strongly oppose the Chinese Communist Party’s broad and malicious political warfare within the U.S. — especially when it targets the Chinese diaspora community,” Michael Lucci, CEO of the national security organization State Armor, told the Washington Examiner. “Yet Delegate Wu led an arm of one of these influence operations as president of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at the University of Maryland. Our State Department has identified CSSAs as an arm of Beijing’s influence operations used to crush campus dissent against the CCP and to steal intellectual property. And Thousand Talents Program schemes, with which Delegate Wu has past affiliations, are direct attempts to steal American intellectual property. Delegate Wu should minimally condemn these past associations that spread malicious CCP influence into American society.”
Wu and the Maryland Democratic Party did not respond to requests for comment.
The Maryland House of Delegates was not Wu’s first foray into American political life. Before heading to Annapolis, Wu worked in local government in Columbia, Maryland, where he played a key role in striking a sister city agreement with Liyang, China. China hawks accuse the CCP of leveraging sister city agreements to advance its foreign policy aims. House Republicans have even introduced legislation that would place greater scrutiny on such relationships.
ALUMNI OF CCP-CONTROLLED GROUP HOLD SENIOR POSITIONS IN SENSITIVE INDUSTRIES
In recent months, Wu has been critical of the Trump administration on social media.
“Actions by those so-called patriots are intentionally or unintentionally damaging the country,” he wrote in April. “How ironic!”
Wu only won his seat by 0.1% of the vote in 2022. He is up for reelection in 2026.