Everybody spies, but not like China, where it has been the legal obligation of every citizen and organization to support the state’s intelligence work since 2017. Beijing’s tradecraft has only improved since it dismantled a nationwide CIA spy ring over a decade ago. Now it’s playing the Great Game on American soil.
Christine Fang, who fled the United States amid an FBI investigation in 2015, was proof that sex, money and power remained key tools in espionage. Congressman Eric Swalwell, FBI documents revealed. She failed, but others picked up the mantle.
Orange County realtor Wanying Zhang, or “Heather,” was arrested on Sunday as she prepared to board a flight to Shanghai from Los Angeles International Airport. The FBI accused the 34-year-old of acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government. She is a naturalized U.S. citizen who went to the same school as Fang.
Senior FBI counterintelligence official Roman Rozhavsky said Zhang was activated for “a brazen plot” targeting the family of Taiwan’s president, but Zhang was just another pawn for Beijing and her alleged crime happening on just another Monday. The White House should be worried that the Chinese state’s offers are so enticing, and its appeals for loyalty so effective, that even U.S. citizens are finding it hard to say no. Public records show that Zhang, a native of central China’s Hunan province, was a former dating show contestant back home.
She moved to the U.S. in 2014 and in 2016 received a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Southern California. Her dream was to retire at 40 and travel the world, she wrote on her profile on the Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote. As a realtor in Southern California, she has made 125 sales, according to her Zillow profile, which has two 1-star views.
Zhang’s apparent links to China’s intelligence services come from her time at the University of International Relations in Beijing, also known as the Institute of International Relations, which was founded in the year of the Communist revolution in 1949 by China’s then-premier and spymaster, Zhou Enlai. That the college is a training ground for China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) is the worst-kept secret in town. FBI Special Agent Kevin Holt, who made the criminal complaint leading to Zhang’s arrest, said the Irvine-based realtor had been recruited by a former classmate and given to an MSS handler, who tasked her with missions at discreet meetings in China to avoid counterintelligence exposure in the United States.
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