The State Department endorsed a summit co-hosted by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries.
The State Department endorsed a summit co-hosted by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries.
Tacoma, Wash. — On a sunny afternoon here last month, the Sixth U.S.–China Sister Cities Summit kicked off with a land acknowledgement, a salmon bake, and warm words about friendship between the two countries.
Ricki Garrett, the president of Sister Cities International, the American nonprofit that organized the summit, suggested that Dwight Eisenhower — its founder — would have appreciated the scene “because it was his belief that it was only through citizen diplomacy, people-to-people, community-to-community relationships that true peace could be achieved.”
Yang Wanming, the head of China’s delegation of 140 municipal and provincial officials, responded in kind, speaking through an interpreter: “It is proven that there is no one and nothing to be in the way of our friendly exchanges and cooperation.”
The next day’s summit featured panels on trade, sustainability, and educational exchanges. What went unmentioned is that Yang’s organization, the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), is a Chinese-regime organ flagged by U.S. intelligence.
In an October 2020 statement, Mike Pompeo dubbed it “a Beijing-based organization tasked with co-opting subnational governments” and terminated the State Department’s agreement with the group to host a U.S.–China Governors Forum.
Pompeo’s statement followed a speech he delivered at Wisconsin’s state legislature the previous month to warn that the party aims to use cities and states “to circumvent America’s sovereignty” and that Chinese leader Xi Jinping “thinks local leaders may well be the weak link.”
The intelligence community’s National Security and Counterintelligence Center (NCSC) agreed, echoing the then–secretary of state’s assessment two years later.
But in a letter addressed to the summit held last month, and read out to the audience, U.S. ambassador to China Nicholas Burns described the event as “heartening.”
A State Department spokesperson said Burns’s letter was addressed to Sister Cities International, which it said “has played an important role in linking American citizens with partners around the world, including Chinese citizens.”
The spokesperson added that State is nonetheless “clear-eyed” about China’s “ambitions to influence and co-opt subnational and non-governmental actors, and we have firmly pushed back against any attempts to exploit our open society.”
Yet Burns’s endorsement of the event — co-sponsored by CPAFFC — represents a little-noticed, yet significant, shift in how Foggy Bottom regards the group, as it has ramped up its activities in America.
A ‘People’s Organization’
CPAFFC, Pompeo said in his statement, “has sought to directly and malignly influence state and local leaders” and is part of the CCP’s united front — the party’s vast ecosystem for co-opting non–party members to do Beijing’s bidding.
The intelligence community’s warning about CPAFFC, in a 2022 bulletin about Chinese influence operations, cited its use of sister-city agreements.
While these pacts are in concept focused on trade and cultural activities, the bulletin warned that Beijing uses them to pressure Americans to “sever ties to foreign governments, cities, and people” it regards as enemies, such as Taiwan.
The State Department still views these agreements with China as useful. The spokesperson told National Review: “This type of diplomacy maintains strong connections between the people of the United States and the people of China that can help stabilize the competitive bilateral relationship.”
Unlike Sister Cities International, a nonprofit, CPAFFC oversees all of China’s sister-city agreements. Chinese officials claimed at the July 19 summit that there are 286 such agreements with U.S. municipalities and states; the U.S. federal government does not track them.
CPAFFC claims that it has nothing to hide. In an interview with NR at the summit, CPAFFC secretary general Shen Xin contested Pompeo’s characterization of it as a united-front entity.
“He used a totally wrong word to describe our work,” Shen complained, citing Pompeo’s memoir, which, like the statement, referred to CPAFFC as a united-front entity. Shen claimed that united-front work, as the CCP defines it in publicly accessible documents, “is focused on overseas Chinese — nothing to do with Americans.”
Shen added that the proper label for CPAFFC is a “people’s organization” — a term believed to refer to CCP-controlled groups that execute Beijing’s united-front work.
“We are financed partly by the central government, as many American NGOs are also financed by the American government,” Shen said. He continued: “We are an independent organization.”
He denied that CPAFFC is controlled by China’s central government and the CCP, though he said it reports to the Chinese government’s State Council.
But a former senior China policy adviser to Pompeo stood by the united-front characterization — and alleged that CPAFFC is “also a cover for all sorts of Chinese economic and industrial espionage operations in the United States.”
A report from the House select committee on the CCP about united-front work said its networks “are often viewed as prime operating grounds by the PRC’s intelligence agencies.”
Shen denied that CPAFFC has any involvement in intelligence activities.
Since 2020, federal officials had steered clear of CPAFFC, reflecting the deterioration in bilateral ties and the difficulties of traveling between China and the U.S. during the pandemic.
That freeze persisted among state and local-level officials, too, until the Biden administration pursued a quasi-détente with China in 2023, culminating in a meeting between Biden and Xi in San Francisco.
In a videotaped address that played at the sister-cities summit, Chinese ambassador Xie Feng claimed that more than ten U.S. state and local delegations visited China in the months since the Biden–Xi meeting, while more than 30 such Chinese delegations traveled to America.
Starting last fall, CPAFFC launched a dizzying series of U.S. initiatives reaching everyone from high school students to state lawmakers to Hillary Clinton — whom Yang huddled with in New York. (Shen said they talked about educational exchanges.)
That was one of three trips that Yang, CPAFFC’s president, has taken to the U.S. in 2024, with stops in Iowa, Utah, Oregon, and elsewhere. Other senior CPAFFC staffers have traveled to the U.S. separately.
While major East Coast cities, such as Philadelphia and New York City, have hosted delegations from their Chinese sister cities, CPAFFC’s efforts there pale in comparison to those on the West Coast.
California governor Gavin Newsom first met Yang in Beijing, during a nine-day trip to China in October that concluded in an audience with Xi.
Then, Newsom hosted Yang in June, co-organizing with CPAFFC a conference to encourage exchanges between San Francisco and China’s “Greater Bay Area,” comprising Hong Kong, Guangdong, and Shenzhen.
San Francisco mayor London Breed traveled to China in April. CPAFFC’s Shen accompanied her delegation.
These visits yielded a big outcome: This year, China agreed that it would send pandas to zoos in San Francisco and San Diego. “It represents so much joy,” Breed said when she returned.
Matters of State?
Tacoma has a warm relationship with its sister city, Fuzhou, which is what made the city an appealing location for the summit.
Senior Chinese officials and propaganda outlets tout what they say is Xi’s personal role in initiating the arrangement. When he served as Fuzhou’s party secretary, he visited Tacoma in 1993, then again in 2015 as China’s leader.
This year marked the 30th anniversary of the agreement, with Mayor Victoria Woodards bringing a group of the city’s students to celebrations in China last month.
“For us, it was an opportunity to strengthen an opportunity that already exists, but it was also an opportunity for my students to get to China to understand that truly the only thing that separates us is distance,” Woodards said of her trip, which she said was funded by the city of Tacoma.
At the summit, Woodards signed an agreement with the city of Ningbo to begin conversations about initiating a new friendship-city pact. However, summit participants did not sign new sister-city agreements at the event.
Sister Cities International and CPAFFC did unveil a new initiative: a CPAFFC-funded program to bring 1,000 American students to China in 2025. They distributed applications for summit attendees to get their cities’ schools on a “priority list” for the program, which seeks to implement Xi’s stated goal to bring 50,000 U.S. visitors to China over the next five years.
Beyond the calls for exchanges and cooperation, there were a few signs that Beijing saw the summit as a way to circumvent the Beltway’s hawkish mood.
Xie, the ambassador, complained in his video that “the so-called political correctness of being tough on China has been spreading in the United States, casting a chilling effect on sister-city cooperation and sub-national interactions.”
On a later panel, Xing Huidong, vice president of Zhejiang province’s branch of the CPAFFC, said U.S. sanctions were hampering trade with his province.
Whether the State Department does enough to alert local officials to CPAFFC’s aim to co-opt them is in dispute.
Senator Jim Risch, in a recent report on China’s influence operations, accused the State Department’s sub-national-diplomacy unit of focusing more on climate change than warning about Beijing’s subversion campaigns. A source familiar with Risch’s report said the unit has briefed U.S. state and local leaders who reached out for advice on China matters, though that the effort has overall been haphazard.
The spokesperson for State confirmed that the unit, with expert officials in the department, serves “as a resource for state, local, and regional governments seeking advice or support to help ensure international engagements benefit U.S. communities.”
The State Department spokesperson added that State collaborates with its China-focused office to “regularly conduct briefings with local officials to raise awareness and bolster resilience to PRC influence, and Mission China also briefs subnational leaders traveling to China.”
Asked if Foggy Bottom briefed her ahead of her recent trip to China, Woodards said: “No, not at all.”
Summit organizers indicated that no one at State flagged concerns for them regarding CPAFFC’s intentions.
“I’ve never really had a conversation with the State Department about CPAFFC,” Carol Robertson Lopez , the president emerita of Sister Cities International, told NR. She takes credit for making the summit happen after she traveled to Suzhou, China, for a sister-cities conference organized by CPAFFC last year.
U.S. diplomats had attended the Suzhou conference, with one of them calling the event “wonderful” in an interview with a CCP propaganda outlet.
Two State Department officials, representing the sub-national-diplomacy unit and the bureau of educational and cultural affairs, attended the Tacoma summit, according to Lopez.
“The State Department is supportive of any people-to-people relations, so they’ve been great,” Lopez said.
Shen shared that outlook, citing Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s advocacy for people-to-people exchanges during a meeting with Shanghai’s top party leaders in April and Burns’s letter: “Their attitudes are very clear.”