That a senior member of Hochul’s team was at an event celebrating Taiwan’s history suggests that the governor’s office is now more willing to engage Taiwan.
A top appointee in New York governor Kathy Hochul’s administration hailed the state’s economic and cultural ties with Taiwan, a month after the Justice Department brought charges against a former gubernatorial staffer alleged to have worked covertly on Beijing’s behalf.
New York politicians’ willingness to engage Taiwan is one possible indication of whether they have eyebrow-raising ties to China’s consulate general in Manhattan, as Chinese diplomats work to block American officials from meeting Taiwanese diplomats. The federal government alleged that the staffer had blocked Taiwanese officials from meeting with both Hochul and her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, over the course of several years, while taking direction from the Chinese diplomatic outpost.
During an event last Thursday to celebrate Taiwan’s National Day, marking the 113th anniversary of the Republic of China, Hope Knight, a senior member of Hochul’s team, made an appearance, suggesting that the governor’s office is now more willing to engage Taiwan. That is noteworthy because at Taiwan’s National Day reception in New York in 2023 — the first since the Covid pandemic — no Hochul appointee made an appearance.
“New York and Taiwan share a long and vibrant relationship. New York is proud to have the second-largest Taiwanese American population in the United States,” said Knight, the official who leads Empire State Development, New York’s official economic-development arm.
In her speech, she also talked up the “thriving trade partnership” between New York and Taiwan, and spoke about a trip that she took there in April as part of a trade mission that focused in part on the semiconductor industry. She added that New York “also opened an office in Taiwan to help New York businesses export goods and support Taiwanese businesses that want to come to New York State.”
According to the federal indictment filed by prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, Linda Sun, the former Hochul aide, was fired from her role in New York government in March of that year over concerns about her ties to China’s consulate general in Manhattan. The court filings alleged that Sun had communicated with Chinese consular officials about rebuffing invites from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York — Taiwan’s de facto consulate — for Hochul and others to meet Taiwan’s president and other officials.
New York City mayor Eric Adams, who is close to the Chinese consulate general, as Hochul was before the Sun indictment, did not send any officials to the National Day reception on Thursday. Adams declined to attend a banquet for Taiwan’s then president in 2023, after former Chinese consul general Huang Ping wrote him a letter urging him to skip it, National Review reported.
Adams’s ties to the Chinese consulate come as Beijing has stepped up its work to cultivate relationships with local and state politicians, as the federal government has grown more skeptical of the Chinese Communist Party’s intentions.
Taiwan’s work to win friends in cities and states was also on display Thursday night, as a range of local and state officials from across New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania spoke at the reception.
One of the speeches was by New York City councilwoman Gale Brewer, a Democratic former Manhattan borough president, who hailed Taiwan’s support during the pandemic for residents of nursing homes and public housing projects in her community on Manhattan’s Upper West Side: “I want you to know that during the pandemic that Taiwan was so good to New York City.”
Asked later by National Review if she had any thoughts about Adams’s lack of a presence at the reception, Brewer said: “I saw that the governor’s people were here, but I’m not going to comment.” Asked if she’s concerned that City Hall has distanced itself from Taiwan, Brewer replied: “You know how I feel about Taiwan.”