U.S. Diplomat Endorses China’s ‘Wonderful’ Sister-Cities Malign-Influence Campaign
A former senior official told NR, ‘The consul-general should be hauled back to Washington to explain himself.’
A former senior official told NR, ‘The consul-general should be hauled back to Washington to explain himself.’
S ignaling a retreat from its own previous warnings, the State Department this month sent an American diplomat to a conference run by an organization that it had previously flagged as a vector for the Chinese Communist Party’s malign influence.
That gathering, the fifth China-U.S. Sister Cities Conference, came just ahead of this week’s expected meeting between President Joe Biden and General Secretary Xi Jinping in San Francisco, and it provided Beijing with a prime opportunity to stress propaganda narratives centered on the importance of “people-to-people diplomacy.” Xi sent a message lauding the conference, claiming that China has inked 284 sister-city agreements with American states and localities since 1979, the year of Sino-American normalization.
U.S.-China sister-city agreements might sound innocuous enough. But Washington has previously warned that the Chinese organization that oversees them from the China side is a front for Beijing’s malign-influence campaign. Despite those warnings, State sent Daniel Delk, an official from the U.S. consulate general in Shanghai, to the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC) conference, which took place late last month in the city of Suzhou with the theme “Build Green Cities for the People.” Over 100 U.S. mayors and local dignitaries participated.
On the sidelines of the event, Delk delivered a Pollyannaish message. “I believe people-to-people relations is really the foundation of the U.S.-China relationship,” Delk said in an interview with Chinese state media. “As we all know that U.S.-China relations began with Ping Pong Diplomacy, with cultural exchanges, with music, with youth, and so it’s wonderful that here we are so many years later once again making sure that we’re strengthening those relationships.”
What was left unsaid was that such purported diplomacy between peoples was an aspect of the party’s effort to co-opt foreign leaders: CPAFFC is a direct subsidiary of the party’s United Front Work Department, its powerful political-influence organ and a bureau that Xi and other party officials have called a “magic weapon,” according to the U.S. government.
In 2020, then–secretary of state Mike Pompeo called CPAFFC “a Beijing-based organization tasked with co-opting subnational governments” and withdrew the U.S. from a joint governors’ forum being hosted in tandem with the CPAFFC. Last year, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center echoed those warnings, issuing a bulletin emphasizing that the CPAFFC operates the so-called sister-city partnerships between U.S. and Chinese localities in such a way as to require cities to agree to Beijing’s perspective on sensitive issues such as the status of Taiwan.
A former senior State Department official told National Review that she was alarmed by Foggy Bottom’s new stance toward CPAFFC. “It’s remarkable to see a career foreign-service officer so fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the regime in Beijing,” said Mary Kissel, who served as Pompeo’s senior adviser, referring to Delk’s comment.
“The U.S. national interest isn’t served by appeasing the Communist Party and endorsing its malign-influence campaigns, but by recognizing the reality of the regime and confronting it,” said Kissel, now executive vice president at Stephens Inc. “The consul-general should be hauled back to Washington to explain himself.”
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Given that the U.S. has held other meetings with CPAFFC, Delk’s appearance hints at a potential rollback of Washington’s warnings about the Chinese Communist Party’s malign influence. Since the spy-balloon incident early this year, Washington and Beijing have been moving toward repairing the U.S.–China relationship.
During his trip to China last month, California governor Gavin Newsom held a meeting with CPAFFC president Yang Wanming, who in a social-media post hailed California’s long-standing “close personnel exchanges and fruitful cooperation” with China. The Daily Caller first reported on Newsom’s meeting with Yang. According to the outlet, climate envoy John Kerry took part in a webinar with CPAFFC in 2021.
Newsom said that he had discussed the trip — which was focused on signing several climate-focused agreements with Chinese-government agencies — ahead of time with the State Department. After meeting with Xi, he said that he declined to bring up human-rights issues because the State Department had advised him to instead address the topic in meetings with other officials, including top CCP diplomat Wang Yi. Asked about this, State referred NR to Newsom’s office, which did not respond to an email.
Newsom later led the California delegation in joint talks with Chinese officials in Beijing, dubbed the Great Wall Dialogue. Photos of the event shared by the governor’s office make it evident that CPAFFC co-hosted the talks.
Newsom’s office, which did not respond to NR’s request for comment, also said that Amy Tong, California’s secretary of government operations, would participate in the sister-cities conference “to help further strengthen ties between California and China,” according to the Daily Caller.
Also attending the conference was a delegation sent by the U.S.-China Heartland Association, a nonprofit group representing Midwestern mayors who seek closer ties to China. Members of the group included mayors Jim Brainard of Carmel, Ind.; Barbara Buffaloe of Columbia, Mo.; Lee Harris of Shelby County, Tenn.; Chokwe Antar Lumumba of Jackson, Miss.; Kim Norton of Rochester, Minn.; and Robyn Tannehill of Oxford, Miss.