Top Eric Adams Aide Attended Chinese Communist ‘United Front’ Meetings in NYC and Beijing

A top aide to New York City mayor Eric Adams has attended several gatherings hosted by at least three organizations within the Chinese Communist Party’s united-front political-influence system on both sides of the Pacific.

Winnie Greco, a longtime political ally to Eric Adams, interacted with at least three distinct CCP united-front entities throughout Adams’s time as Brooklyn borough president, a period scrutinized in the indictment that federal prosecutors in Manhattan brought against him last week. While the charges involve Adams’s ties to Turkey, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn reportedly raided two houses that Greco owns in the Bronx in February in a separate investigation.

During Adams’s borough presidency, Greco served as his unpaid, volunteer liaison to the local Asian community, though she effectively acted as his envoy to Chinese officials posted at Beijing’s consulate general in Manhattan and to Chinese municipal governments — a role that she reprised when Adams appointed her to a top job at City Hall.

In 2017, Greco attended functions in New York with at least two entities linked to the CCP’s “united front” ecosystem, which advances the party’s political influence in China and beyond. The House select committee on the CCP recently issued a memo warning Americans about united-front work. “United front work is a unique blend of engagement, influence activities, and intelligence operations that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses to shape its political environment, including to influence other countries’ policy toward the PRC,” it stated.

On March 17, Greco represented Adams at a ceremony in Flushing, N.Y., to welcome a visiting delegation from the southern region of Guangxi’s branch of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office. Through that office, the party coordinates its political outreach to the Chinese diaspora abroad. It was formally moved under the aegis of the United Front Work Department — a party bureau involved in coordinating some united-front activities — in 2018.

Then, on December 12, Greco attended a ceremony for Shanghai’s branch of the Western Returned Scholars Association — a party organ that the Australian Strategic Policy Institute think tank has linked to Beijing’s extensive tech-transfer efforts. At the gathering, the association signed an agreement with a Manhattan nonprofit to “set up a liaison station,” which it described as its first overseas. Other participants in the event included Zhu Lingling, who was described as vice president of the Shanghai-based organization, and officials from China’s consulate general.

Those events bookended two trips that Adams and Greco took together the same year. In October, Greco accompanied Adams to a meeting with the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), a Beijing-based group that the State Department accused of coopting state and local officials across America to advance the CCP’s aims. In a 2022 counterintelligence bulletin, the office of the director of national intelligence echoed State’s concerns and pointed to analysis referring to the group as “part of China’s united front bureaucratic structure.” CPAFFC claims that it is an independent group and not part of the party’s united front.

The CPAFFC meeting occurred as Adams traveled to Beijing — likely on a trip that the federal government catalogued in its indictment of the mayor last week — also meeting officials from the Chinese capital’s Fengtai district. The 2017 meetings were first revealed by the Epoch Times and the New York Post.

Greco returned to CPAFFC’s Beijing office two years later, a meeting that had not yet been reported. In May 2019, she met Li Xiaolin, then CPAFFC’s president, at the association’s headquarters, according to a post on the association’s website. Greco was identified as president of the Sino America New York Brooklyn Archway Association, a nonprofit focused on building an archway over Sunset Park’s Eighth Avenue. According to the CPAFFC, they discussed the construction of the archway, and Li said she “appreciates the positive efforts made by President Winnie Greco to promote the exchanges between Brooklyn Borough and China.” The archway was never built, despite efforts by Adams and Greco over several years.

During that trip, Greco also traveled to Fujian province, where she led a delegation from Brooklyn that included a man who was later charged with operating an illegal Chinese police station in Manhattan. She then attended a conference in the city of Yiwu focused on promoting Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative global infrastructure project.

Neither Greco nor City Hall replied to National Review’s requests for comment earlier today.