Chinese hometown associations, which have been in Chinatowns in New York City and nationwide since the 1850s to help immigrants combat discrimination, are increasingly being used by Beijing to influence U.S. politics, according to investigations.

New York City has more than 100 of the associations, and in the past two years, at least 10 indictments from the Department of Justice have implicated organization leaders of illegal activities, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

One of the cases accuses two Fujian association principals of acting as Beijing agents and setting up a covert Chinese police station at their association premises in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

In another case, the former head of a business association for people from Shandong province entered a guilty plea to federal charges of acting as a foreign agent. The charges involved pressuring a U.S. resident to surrender to prosecutors in the province. 

The DOJ said the tactics were part of a Chinese government plan to repatriate Chinese expats being sought in investigations and included threatening his family with “endless misery” if he resisted their efforts. 

The federal investigations have also come to involve politicians, drawing questions from the public concerning New York’s Rep. Grace Meng, a Democrat elected to Congress in 2012. 

Authorities say in April 2019, while Meng was on Capitol Hill, two leaders of the Henan Association of Eastern America, which the congresswoman has been associated with for years, were delivering a letter of appreciation she’d written to the head of an international Chinese Communist Party influence operation. 

The Henan association has been named as being central to allegations that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office had a mole working in it, and Meng has been distancing itself from the group that has described her as its vice chair for years. 

Chinese leader Xi Jinping took power in 2012, the same year Meng was elected, and restored the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department. 

United Front has been cultivating hometown associations to harass Chinese activists in the United States, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Many Chinese hometown associations appear apolitical or oppose Beijing, and some just allow meeting places for Chinese immigrants to meet with each other, but rights groups say other associations have been harassing critics of China. 

Last year, when Chinese President Xi Jinping visited San Francisco, several hometown association members also arrived in the city. The Hong Kong Democracy Council and Students for a Free Tibet documented 34 instances of harassment, intimidation, and assault during the visit, including some that used Chinese flags as weapons. 

Meanwhile last September, a federal indictment charged Linda Sun, a former aide for Hochul and ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, charging her with coordinating official business with Chinese authorities while using the Henan association’s leadership as an intermediary. 

She has denied charges against her. 

Meng and Sun were both mentored by the same immigration rights leader, with Sun working for Meng before Cuomo hired her. 

Sun’s indictment didn’t name Meng or suggest wrongdoing on her part. But it alleged that the two Henan association leaders who carried her letter to China were working with Sun to get Hochul, then the lieutenant governor, to visit Henan province. 

The Henan association has also displayed photos of her and the group’s president on its internet page, describing her as a top officer. 

Her grandmother was a co-founder of the group in the 1970s, and she said she’s known association leaders since she was a child. But she denies she had a title with the association, saying that “sometimes these groups get overexcited and may use names of elected officials or VIPs to make them look more credible or important.”

She also said that “like any American patriot,” she is concerned about the threats China’s Communist government poses to the United States. 

She also defended hometown associations. 

“Just like there are groups in other communities, [Chinese immigrants] tend to find people that maybe are from their hometowns, share similar foods and customs and traditions,” she said.

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