The dangerous rise of ‘Chinese Bezique’

In one of Joseph Conrad’s early stories he mentions an old seaman who delighted in a card game he called “Chinese Bezique.”  Captain Lingard considered the game as “a remarkable product of Chinese genius – a race for which he had an unaccountable liking and admiration.” 

This passage somehow popped into mind as I read the New York Times expose, “How China Influences Elections in America’s Biggest City.” The article has nothing to do with card games – or Borneo, where Conrad’s novel is set-but it exemplifies the same odd combination of admiration and disdain. The four authors of the Times’ article are clearly impressed with the elaborate efforts of the Chinese consulate in New York City to recruit the City’s Chinese social clubs into instruments of Beijing’s foreign policy.  And they are appalled at China’s ability to swing American elections through a combination of bribery and intimidation. 

“Chinese Bezique,” incidentally, is a real card game played with six decks, in which the cards that count as trumps change in every round. In Chinese it is called sheng ji, and its appeal is its complexity. You never know whom to trust. Card playing is very popular in Chinatown, where it is easy to find people playing ban luck (black jack) and guandan, the object of which is to get rid of all your cards.  I’m not sure whether Captain Lingard’s favorite game retains a following, though Winston Churchill was an enthusiast.  

The Times’ article is a beautifully reported account of both local corruption and international intrigue. The authors focus on the role of “hometown associations,” which are groups organized by having shared an ancestral village, which are constantly replenished by new immigrants. These hometown associations do some of what immigrant clubs from every ethnicity do. They maintain ties to the old country; and they provide newcomers a sense of community as well as practical help in negotiating their new home. 

But these Chinese hometown associations do something more. They help the Chinese consulate suppress any Chinese who support Taiwan’s independence or Hong Kong’s freedoms. In at least one case, a hometown association provided cover for a covert Chinese “police station” in New York. They illegally raise money for political candidates, they quash any candidates that refuse to toe the line, and they attempt to project an image of pro-Beijing unity within the Chinese America diaspora.  

I commend the precision and detail of the Times’ reporting.  I’ve spent more than a decade attempting to track Chinese influence in American colleges and universities, and I know how hard it is to get past the blockades, the fearful silence, and the façade of normalcy. Push ever so slightly and Beijing’s defenders will raise accusations of racism and Sinophobia.  

The Times’ venture into this fraught territory took more than the four bylined authors. We’re told nine reporters worked on the story tracking “more than 50 organizations” that do China’s bidding despite their non-profit charters that forbid involvement in electoral politics. The reporters gathered videos of dozens of events in which Chinese New Yorkers pledge allegiance to the Motherland. Michael Goodwin writing in the New York Post was, like me, impressed with the scale of the journalistic effort but impressed as well that the reporters pulled their punches.  They documented a widespread pattern of illegal activity in elections without ever challenging the validity of the votes. 

What makes all this news at the moment is the potato chip bag that Winnie Greco gave to Katie Honan.  

Winnie was an advisor to NYC Mayor Eric Adams-his former Director of Asian Affairs. He had to let her go last year when she was implicated in Chinese government interference during Adams’ 2021 election, but she was still working as a volunteer on the mayor’s current campaign. Then on August 20 came the great potato chip fiasco. Winnie gave Katie, a reporter for The City, a bag of the crunchy delights that also held a red envelope containing $100. 

Some observers concluded that Winnie was attempting to buy favorable press. I’m skeptical.  Favorable press costs a lot more. $100 sounds more like a tip.

This hardly counts as the tip of the iceberg when it comes to NYC Chinese influence operations.  But the potato chip bag – Herb’s Sour Cream – was the kind of detail that caught public interest.  Adams has an unfortunate record of attracting aid from dubious sources.  The lock-step support of a portion of the Chinese community tied to the Chinese consulate doesn’t help him.  

The bigger story is perhaps the fate of honest Chinese politicians in the city that Beijing needed to unseat or remove from contention. The Times’ article gives a compelling account of figures such, a retired U.S. Army chaplain “who helped lead the Tiananmen Square uprising when he was a student,” who tried to run for Congress in a district that includes parts of the city with many Chinese people. China opposed him with a variety of underhanded means, spied on him, threatened his supporters, and smeared him.  He lost the election and left the state. 

I rather doubt that Times’ readers will be exercised by Xiong’s fate and similar stories. It is more or less accepted that China operates by its own rules of influence peddling and the veiled threat of violence.  City authorities ignore this as long as Chinese electoral corruption has more to do with manipulation of American Chinese and immigrants than it does the city as a whole.

This may, however, be a mirage. In Chinese Bezique, the trump suit keeps changing. So keep up.

Beijing’s interference in American self-government extends pretty far.  Hunter Biden’s lucrative deals are but one instance of guanxi, China’s perfected policy of paying off the family members of elected leaders. What, if anything, did Joe Biden do for China? For one thing, he put a stop to the U.S. government’s nosy investigations into how China was corrupting American universities. Those investigations had already yielded some fearful results. Charles Lieber, chairman of Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, was arrested in January 2020 for “tax offenses.”  He had failed to report the very large amounts of money China had been paying him. For what? Something to do with his services to the Wuhan University of Technology, but we will never know exactly what. He was convicted, sentenced to two days in prison, and retired from Harvard.  Perhaps he was handed a bag of Herb’s Sour Cream potato chips on the way out.

How many others like Charles Lieber are there in our universities? Certainly hundreds, and perhaps more than that, recruited through China’s “Thousand Talents Program” and other dodges. American universities have been a Niagara Falls of American intellectual property flowing to China. Much of that intellectual property is the result of U.S. taxpayer funded research contracts with professors, some of whom are cut in Lieber’s cloth.  But the labs run by those professors are often filled with graduate students and post-docs who are Chinese nationals.  This is even the case at academic programs doing highly sensitive military research.  

Can these folks be trusted?  During the Biden years the American government lost most of its curiosity about that. My organization, the National Association of Scholars, succeeded in getting the attention of members of Congress who followed up on tips we provided about Alfred University and Georgia Tech.  We encountered the delightful policy that China’s military calls “picking flowers in foreign lands to make honey in China.”

Let’s change trump suits again.

President Trump may take a more heedful approach, though Trump’s new proposal to welcome 600,000 Chinese students into American universities (up from the current 270,000) suggests a certain lack of caution. Those students may pay a lot of tuition dollars, but they also represent 600,000 new security risks and the loss of a great deal of whatever American technology that hasn’t already been stolen.  

It may be that Trump is playing his own game of Chinese Bezique. His announcement of the 600,000 new visa was met with consternation by MAGA supporters  who correctly drew attention to the devastating effect on national security. Trump responded by feigning innocence, telling The Daily Caller, in effect, that admitting the students is part of his international diplomacy:

“I think that it’s very insulting to a country. I have a very good relationship with President Xi. I think it’s very insulting to a country when you say you’re not going to take your students, and they have probably 300,000 –  [600,000 over] two years – but they have, let’s say 300-350,000 students. It’s also good for our system, when you take them out and you know who’s going to be affected, the lesser colleges, the top colleges aren’t going to be, it’s the lesser colleges that are.”

And perhaps a useful way to fill the empty seats at America’s “lesser colleges” in light of declining enrollments.

Will these dangers be offset by Defense Secretary Hegseth’s “letter of concern” that Microsoft has been using Chinese nationals to service the Pentagon’s cloud computing?  No, not likely.

These matters may seem remote from the concerns of most Americans. But China’s subversion of American education actually has consequences that touch us all. We have tied ourselves in knots to fight “climate change.”  China has played a major role in promoting American climate hysteria primarily through our universities. Tsinghua-China’s top university-founded the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate (GAUC), and Tsinghua takes the lead in promoting fear of climate change through agreements with America’s top universities. It has been particularly successful in California where it has partnered with the University of California Berkeley to create the California-China Climate Institute (CCI), which has worked hand-in-glove with the state’s political leadership. 

California of course stands out for its extreme political aversion to fossil fuels, led by Governor Newsom. He visited China in 2023, leading to an agreement on “Enhanced Subnational Climate Action and Cooperation Between the State of California and the People’s Republic of China.” As it happens, Article I of our Constitution prohibits states from entering into agreements with foreign powers, but what does the Constitution matter in the existential war against the internal combustion engine?

The appeal of Chinese Bezique, as I said before, is its multi-deck complexity.  China plays this game with exquisite finesse.  Corrupting local elections in New York City by suborning “hometown associations” is just one small trick in a relentless and sophisticated program of gaining influence around the world.  Now and then a detail comes tumbling out. We just learned that Beijing managed a years-long espionage campaign called “Salt Typhoon” that monitored government and private communication in 80 countries including the U.S. 

That seems like a big thing. So is China’s stunning advances in its navy and its bold moves towards Taiwan. But China’s game of Bezique also aims at sectors that most Americans don’t often think about, such as those hometown associations.  Here in New York China even maintains little Red Guard-style groups such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation that turn out for street protests on whatever cause China’s agents decide suits their goals. China also buys assets that are mostly out of sight, such as those 380,000 acres in places such as Grand Fork, North Dakota.  China targets our universities because they are engines of American culture, high-tech invention, and policy ideas-and they have operated at least until now as little principalities with no outside oversight. They can be plundered with hardly anyone noticing. 

Like Conrad’s Captain Lingard, I find myself admiring the game, even though my side appears to be losing.  I trust at some point we will switch to something we are better at. Under President Trump, that might be poker.