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Jan. 15, 2021 - Epoch Times
32:04
Chinese Communist Party’s Tactics to Infiltrate Our Local Governments
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So what happens is people high up in the Communist Chinese party will own the real estate.
We went to see a big shopping mall.
Again, that's stuff I'm interested in.
It was like a 9, 10-story mall that was there.
And the owner of the shopping center was there, and he was there to meet us, and we were going to have dinner with him.
And so I wanted to ask him real estate-type questions, like, how do you build it, how do you get the financing?
He didn't know anything.
He didn't know anything about real estate.
I'm like, well do you get the leases first?
How do you do it?
He did interesting.
So then we went to his office.
And in his office he had these models of all these fighter jets.
Chinese fighter jets.
And so finally I figured out his job when he worked was to procure electronics from around the world, legally or illegally, for their jets.
And so his gift from the Chinese Communist Party was the land lease on this property that he could go to some developer and they could do all the work and build it.
And he was, you know, the main owner.
And I'm like, how does that work?
So now, is that common for the businesses that are in China to have strong ties to Chinese Communist Party?
Oh, that's just the standard practice.
I mean, it's very rare to say exceptions.
It's all functioning like that.
Think about how the Communist Party works.
It's more precise to compare it with Mafia.
It's like a Mafia structure.
Everything is wrong, like a Mafia.
It sounds dramatic or sane, but it's true.
Welcome to California Insider.
When it comes to the Chinese Communist Party's influence on the U.S. government, most people think it is focused in Washington, D.C. But you'd be surprised to hear that they're building relationships with state-level officials, county-level officials, and even our local city council.
They do this in a calculated and systematic way that most of our government officials won't realize the intentions behind these relationships.
Today, we welcome back former mayor of Costa Mesa, Jim Rickheimer.
Jim will share how the Chinese Communist Party tried to develop a relationship with him while he served as an elected official.
We also have on the show Dr.
Wen Chen.
She's an expert on China and an acting member of Amnesty International.
Together, we will discuss what tactics the Chinese Communist Party uses to influence our local communities and what you can do to recognize and minimize its impact.
Dr.
Wendt, welcome to the show.
Jim, it's great to have you on the show.
Welcome.
Great to be back.
And welcome back.
And today we want to talk about an interesting topic.
There's a phenomenon that's been going on for a while that not a lot of people know about it.
And for a while, we look at China's influence in the U.S. and we think, most of us will think that it's in D.C., Washington, D.C., and it's at the high levels.
They're trying to actually lobby the government here.
But there's a phenomenon that you guys both have seen that's happening at a local level.
That they are trying to build relationships with the local level, government officials here.
Can you tell us more about it?
You saw it first hand, right?
Well, when I was on the city council in Costa Mesa and I first got elected, the first thing I see in my mailbox over there is the China Daily News.
It's this newspaper that I've never seen before in my life.
It looks like the L.A. Times got color pictures.
It's good production value.
And it's all about China.
And they're all positive stories and everything's great.
And then, you know, today it would say Xi Jinping, you know, he's solved the corona problem or whatever.
Whatever it was at the time.
And then there's always happy stories about people that saved someone's life or whatever.
But it's just a nice kind of friendly newspaper.
And then there may be...
It wouldn't be real political.
They would watch the issues that they got into, but it just kind of sets you up for, oh, China.
Oh, these are nice people, and I'm reading nice stories and nice middle-class people doing whatever they're doing there.
So that's the first time that I got it.
It was literally the first day I was in office.
And is this common to see the China Daily based on your experience, Dr.
Wen?
Yeah, China Daily is one of the mouthpiece newspapers run by the Chinese government.
Basically they represent the viewpoint of the Communist Party and it has been paid as advertisements to over 30 mainstream newspapers all over the world including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, And Washington Post, LA Times, it's not, I mean, this kind of inversion is called a China Watch.
Sometimes they change the name, but like basically the same system of the Chinese government, they export this kind of propaganda as advertisement, but they are printed as news.
And now there is a difference between China and the Chinese Communist Party.
Can you explain to our audience the difference between China, Chinese people and Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government?
Yeah, well, we all know that the Chinese people, you know, we are people inheriting like 5,000 years of culture and history from China.
And Chinese Communist Party took over China like about 70 years ago and ruled China.
And we Chinese people, we have been heavily brainwashed when we, I mean, I came from China.
I was born and raised there, and I came here like 20, 26 years ago.
And as a Chinese student in China, we were taught since we were babies that the Communist Party saved your life.
The Communist Party will save people all over the world.
And you have to respect the Communist Party more than you respect your parents.
And we were always told whenever your parents said something against the Communist Party you should report them to the police because the party is closer to you than your parents.
So that's the whole propaganda we learned since we were born.
I never heard about anything different until I came to the U.S. And now let's come back to the topic.
We were taught that the Communist Party saved every Chinese and they're going to save Taiwan.
They're going to save everyone in the world.
And that's why they want to save you, Jim.
Yeah, they do.
And actually, since that time, what you just said, is it becomes an insert in the L.A. Times sometimes.
So I do see it once in a while in the L.A. Times.
But we actually had it delivered to every council person.
They'd send, you know...
They would just send it to your office?
Yeah, I would get my own paper there.
So they're trying to manipulate your...
And it works.
I mean, it just kind of softens you up again.
It gives you a positive thing.
As Americans, we want to think of China as being good and positive.
All the Chinese people that you know in the United States, you get along with them, they're all fine.
But there's a distinction between what she's saying exactly is that the Chinese people and the Chinese party, the CCP, are night and day.
I mean, the people are under the rule of this, and they're being controlled by this government, and you start to see it.
I remember when I went, I went for a trip there, and...
How did that work?
So you were invited to go to...
Well, yeah, so what happens is, is once you get into office, you...
There's different things to go...
And so the water system for Southern California wants you to go out to some dam and see how the dam is done and everything else.
And you'll learn that so you know as an elected official why we have water rates that we do and whatever.
And so these things come up and then all of a sudden you hear, oh, they want you to go to China, you know, and that the trip will be paid for to go to China and all that.
And I was always, you know, when I was in office, I didn't let anybody buy me a cup of coffee.
I mean, I was very alert to it.
I was in a lot of political fights, and I didn't need someone saying, someone's flying you to China.
But at some certain point, I did meet with some people, and we were looking at a sister city relationship with a city in China, Costa Mesa was, and so set up a trip to do it.
And in that, I paid my own way.
I wouldn't let anybody else pay it.
We had a couple city staff go, and the city paid for the staff to go.
So I went over, and then I saw it, and what you started to notice was, How you were being restricted, what you could do.
I remember being up by the bird's nest.
And I'm looking on, first of all, your phone's maps do not work.
They literally have a technology that it's not like off, you know, it changes off.
So you can't see the pictures of where you're at.
But you see, well, I'm going to go from here to here, and you've got to go that way because there's like a fence.
And they have a lot of these retractable fences where they can just roll them out 1,000 feet and then just roll them back, a bunch of wheels on it, and this all compresses and goes back.
But you realize that you cannot walk straight down this road and get to the other side because after, you know, a 500 feet, 1,000 foot walk, there's a fence, and you've got to go back and go back.
And you start to realize you're kind of being corralled in, even though it's not...
Real tight, you start to notice it.
Around Tiananmen Square, same thing, but these big public areas.
And then you start to notice there is some restrictions on what you can do.
When you go to China, the hotel actually is responsible for you.
So you fill out a form, you give them a copy of your passport, and they have to know where you're at.
And the government officials were accompanying you when you guys got there?
So other council people that I talked to that went, that China paid for, or some...
So there's two kinds of trip.
Yeah, so I went more of, because of the sister city thing, I wanted to stay away from any kind of group that was going to pay.
And these other groups will pay, and they may be, you know, U.S. companies China-owned that are paying for the trip.
And at first it doesn't...
It doesn't look fishy, right?
Yeah, it's not.
Other countries do it, too.
Turkey would want you to go to Turkey, because they want to get people that are moving up in the elective office to kind of be positive towards their country.
Just that China does it at a mega level.
They have budgets.
They can do whatever they need to do.
So, yeah, when you go over there, you're going from meeting to meeting.
Seeing different things.
But, you know, they have people there constantly.
I mean, constantly from breakfast to dinner.
I mean, I remember one time when I finally said, I can't go anymore.
I mean, if I eat one more Peking duck, you know, I mean, it was just the table goes around.
And it was great, but you just started to realize what was interesting because when I went, it was more of a private sector type thing.
I paid myself.
It was to look at a sister city relationship there, to look at people that do, American companies do business there.
It was a little bit different in that the everyday Chinese person, and usually these are business people who are wealthy people, they want to meet you.
Because you're an elected official.
And I would look at them like, I'm like, are you kidding me?
I mean, we're in Ordos.
And Ordos is, I don't know, a couple million people.
And they have oil and coal and everything else.
And, you know, we were doing this whole thing about our two different countries and had the big screen up.
And I'm like, yeah, we're Costa Mesa.
We have, you know, Disneyland and South Coast Plaza.
And they got millions of tons of coal and natural gas and doing all these things.
And I would say to the people around me, I'm like, why do they want to be with us?
Why is it?
He says, well, you're an elected official.
And I go, well, they're all elected officials, too.
And he goes, no, Jim, they're not elected.
You're actually somebody who went and got voted in.
I was like, wow, you're kidding.
So it was a big deal, even though I think of it as Costa Mesa's 115,000 people.
It's not a podunk, but it's not Los Angeles.
So it's just different.
So how do they use these relationships, the sister city relationships, to create influence?
Well they want to influence how Americans think.
Like we are talking about a war with China that, about brainwashing Americans.
Like just for example, like Jim, you're an American, right?
If a stranger from China came to tell you how bad the Communist Party is, the human rights, you may say, eh, I don't know you.
I don't trust what you said.
You know, you have credibility issue.
But that makes a huge difference if someone, your neighbor, comes to tell you, I've been to China.
It was great.
You believe that.
And that's why they invited so many Americans, especially elected officials, community leaders, and business owners.
Once they go to China, they feel very good about China, good about the Communist Party.
They will definitely come back to the U.S., tell their neighbors, tell their students, tell their colleagues about China.
And they will influence everyone in America.
And that's just a small part of the big picture.
You said they're doing this at a mega level, definitely.
And another reason is they especially want to influence elected officials because today you are just a mayor.
Maybe tomorrow you will run for Congress.
And maybe two years later you may become a Senate.
Then they can see, once they influence you, once they can kind of brainwash you to think what the Communist Party wants you to think, they can really shape the future policy of the United States.
Interesting you're saying that, because for me, I'm a businessman.
Being on the city council is an advocation, not a vocation.
I could see that they wanted me to meet with the It's like a Chinese Chamber of Commerce group and they wanted to talk about business there and I'm in real estate and they took me out to a property that was, it must have been a 15,000 square foot building that we went into out in the middle of pretty far nowhere.
We're in Inner Mongolia.
You go in there and they have a model of a new city they're going to build.
I mean, big.
I mean, you have to go upstairs to look down on it.
That's how big this model is.
And so they start discussing business and all those kind of things.
And if you're interested in doing business there, they're going to do it.
But then you kind of realize pretty quick, you know, I don't know if that's really what I want to do or be involved in it, but you could see why, you know, it would make a difference there.
But you start to realize, well, then I can't say what I think.
I can't say what I want.
I'll watch what I say.
I went to the stadium where the basketball was at.
And that's being run by a U.S. company, AEG, Anschwitz Entertainment Group, that runs Staples Center and all that.
They own a couple hundred venues around the world.
And you start thinking about that.
I met Young guys there who were running it for AEG, sharp guys that got out of college with their master's degrees, went to work, and three weeks later they said, hey, listen, I need you to go to China, you or Bob, and Bob's got a wedding this week, and I guess you're going.
And seven months later you came home.
Now you're married to a Chinese wife, you've been there for ten years, you're running...
They're business there, but you start to realize you can't say whatever you want to say anymore because you will not get that next deal.
It just won't happen.
The Communist Chinese Party controls all the real estate, and they don't sell it.
It's all leased.
So you have to work with them?
So what happens is people high up in the Communist Chinese party will own the real estate.
We went to see a, it was in Beijing, went to go see a big shopping mall.
Again, that's stuff I'm interested in.
It was like a 9-10 story mall that was there.
And at the top of the mall, the top floor had like a kid's play area, which had like a fire station and a police station and a doctor's office.
It was like a play thing, but all full size, and the fire truck would come out.
I mean, it was just massive.
And the owner of the shopping center was there, and he was there to meet us, and we would have dinner with him.
And so I wanted to ask him like real estate-type questions, like how do you build it?
How do you get the financing?
He didn't know anything.
Yeah.
He didn't know anything about real estate.
I'm like, well do you get the leases first?
How do you do it?
He did interesting.
So then we went to his office and in his office he had these models of all these fighter jets.
Chinese fighter jets.
And so finally I figured out his job when he worked was to procure electronics from around the world legally or illegally for their jets.
And so his gift from the Chinese Communist Party was the land lease on this property that he could go to some developer and they could do all the work and build it, and he was the main owner.
And I'm like, how does that work?
So now, is that common for the businesses that are in China to have strong ties to the Chinese Communist Party?
Oh, that's just the standard practice.
I mean, it's very rare to see exceptions.
It's all functioning like that.
Think about how the Communist Party works.
It's more precise to compare it with mafia.
It's like a mafia structure.
Everything is wrong, like a mafia.
It sounds dramatic you're saying it, but it's true.
You have seen it.
A guy that knows nothing about real estate owns a $300 million building in the middle of Beijing.
You know, or he's one of the owners and the partners, and what did he do?
He did stuff for the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, and this was his payback, was to get ownership in that building.
So remember, everything's leased, right?
There are U.S. companies, U.S. firms, and we all know the big firms, all the big Wall Street banks, that loan money there.
And I look at it and I go, well, how do you loan money on leased land?
Now, you can do it in the United States.
It's not impossible.
But it's very complicated.
There, it's not that big of a deal.
And I said, well, but the lease is up.
So I forget it was, like, think industrial, you've got a 70-year lease, 60-year lease for retail, and a 50-year lease for residential or something like that.
And I said, well, what happens, you know, if you're the lender, how do you make sure you're okay?
And there come from was, oh, these people that own this stuff are all members of the party.
They'll renew the lease.
Hmm.
It's just so they don't worry.
But in the United States, you'd have to think, hey, if that lease is up, it doesn't get renewed.
Can I continue to have a loan on it there?
Oh, the Communist Chinese Party will renew it because they're members of the Communist Chinese Party.
So it's easy to innocently go there and start doing business with them on these type of trips, right?
Because you get offered...
Opportunities, right?
Well, I don't know if you get offered.
I mean, I wouldn't say I ever got offered an opportunity.
I got my beak wet.
You know, they kind of said, look at this, and I'm interested, and, you know, I'm looking at a map of someone building.
I mean, a 35-year-old guy who's a billionaire showed me a map of a new city they're going to build, which is, you know, miles and miles square.
I mean, this is probably, you know, 30, 40-mile square piece of property, and the Communist Chinese Party handed over to them and said, go lay out a city.
And then I went to some of those cities.
When we're in Ordos, there's the new Ordos, which is built for a couple million people, and there's maybe 40,000 living there.
Thirty-story buildings all over the place, vacant.
With beautiful libraries and beautiful central parks and lakes.
We call them Ghost City.
And why are they built?
Why do they build that?
Well, they want to attract foreign investments.
Like, you know, all these loans and go to China.
These also become like projects to show off the Communist Party.
Basically, when you visit China, they will show you all these nice cities.
They see this is how modern China is.
That's the success story of the Communist Party.
Do you see the real China?
Did you see anything that do you think people will see what's going on really in China in these trips?
Well for those cities like of course for these kind of trips either you pay for yourself or if the government of China pay for you they will not allow you to see Outside.
Basically you enter a bubble.
You only see whatever they allow you to see.
I've heard quite a few educators who went to visit China.
They were invited to give lectures in Chinese universities.
They had all these best students asking excellent questions, but every student was chosen ahead of time.
Every question was prepared ahead of time.
Every comment in the classroom was prepared ahead of time.
Basically, all these educators, they may be like high school teachers or college professors or business owners, they would come back and say, hey, all these Chinese students, they highly support the Communist Party.
So I think the Communist Party has good support in China, of course.
But they didn't realize that these are not random sample students.
So the whole thing is fake.
Yeah.
It's kind of set up.
Yeah.
And now, what can the government officials do?
What do you recommend them do when they are getting that China Daily on their desk?
Yeah, I mean, you've just got to have your eyes open that people aren't sending you newspapers just to be friendly.
There's a reason behind it, whether it's them or some other country in the world.
They are trying to get...
People who are going to move up politically to be kind of friendly to them.
And, you know, that's not, like, unusual.
But like I said, they do it in China at a much more mega scale, where I know, you know, a dozen or two council people throughout, you know, California, Nevada, who went on trips with our state legislature, with our state, I think, I don't want to say, but one of the state office holders, you know, like the treasurer or somebody else, went on the trips with them.
And they bring, you know, a lot of people and you're with them.
And so I would say to people that if you're in office, you just got to be really aware of it.
Right now, what's happening with China, if you're not aware of it or, you know, I don't know how you got in office.
Because right now, it's pretty clear.
We've seen what's happened with the coronavirus.
We've seen how this whole...
Disease has really done a lot to us and where China almost went out of their way to make sure we had it.
Kind of like if they're going to be hobbled by it, then we're going to be hobbled by it.
And so we have this problem here.
So I think you've got to have your eyes open to this.
And for the community, in terms of the things that are not reported on the human rights, what are your thoughts on that?
I think there are quite a few Americans quite naive about the human rights situation in China.
They just kind of vaguely know, oh, they have some human rights problem.
But Americans always have serious problems.
Like that's something very common you hear in universities.
So how big is the human rights problem?
Whether the groups that are getting persecuted or they're not free, and how big is the site?
And of course, like we all heard about dissidents, political dissidents, they quoted disappear, right?
Like we're talking about Falun Gong practitioners, like this is meditation practice, like based on traditional Chinese culture.
It's just to meditate, like, you know, based on the principle of truthfulness, compassion, tolerance.
But the Communist Party think it's independent thinking.
They put millions of people to prison because of that.
In the past 21 years, there was always about half a million Falun Gong detained in China.
And the Communist Party has been taking their organs for transplant.
That's a big issue, and I just wish mainstream media had more coverage about that.
Here in the U.S., people typically wait for years.
We're talking about three to seven years, wait for kidney transplant or heart transplant, because you wait until someone dies from a car accident, who have to have the same blood type match.
But then you can go to China.
They can find the donors within 24 hours.
And you may say, where do they find donors so soon?
Like, do they have so many car accidents?
Because they have millions of Falun Gong Christians and Uyghurs in prison.
And once they were detained, they immediately go through blood type tests.
And then they can find the donors immediately from their big database.
And they have several ranks of, quote, good donors.
The top rank is Falun Gong because they meditate.
They don't smoke, no drink.
They have the best organs.
And the second best are the Uyghurs.
How big is the population of Falun Gong and Christians together, these groups that are persecuted?
I think Falun Gong, it was estimated about 70 million Chinese people practiced Falun Gong.
It was about between 5 to 10 percent of the population.
And the Christians probably similar number of people, population.
But I think like, you know, and also Uyghur, we all heard from news about like between one to two million Uyghurs are in concentration camps in Xinjiang.
That's why Mulan got into trouble, right?
And all of these people, like, they are persecuted by the same organization in China called 610 Office.
So that's kind of Gestapo in China.
Like they have a separate organization of police.
To arrest dissidents or religious followers, including Falun Gong, although Falun Gong does not have worship, but is just at home meditating.
But the same system, they can catch anyone at any time without any legal procedure.
They can just make people disappear.
But of course the authority knows where they are, their blood type, and when to take them.
But, like, when Americans are naive about all these human rights abuse in China, when they're naive about the true nature of the Communist Party, they will say, what's wrong with communism?
I'm fine, like, let communism come to the U.S. You know, I think, like, living in communist countries is great, because just look at Jim.
He went to China.
He had a great experience, right?
You know, and that's the contrast.
Like, it's hard to believe.
Like, would you ever believe that they're doing that to the people in China when you were there?
No, no.
You could not believe, right?
It's very difficult.
Yeah.
That's the main purpose for them, to invite you to China.
Yeah, no, it was different.
And you look at the technology, what our country's doing in China, this facial recognition.
I got three daughters, right?
We all know what TikTok is.
And at first it sounds like a joke.
It's not a joke.
They have the facial recognition of all of our kids.
They have every text and email they've ever sent.
They know all this data, and we're allowing the CCP to have it.
So when Trump says, hey, we're going to shut this down.
The American company has to own this because we're not going to allow you to continue to keep all this data on us.
Understand that the technology they have now is that not just your facial recognition, but they can look on a major intersection And they can pick out people, who they are, and have little electronic, you know, captions under them so you know who they are.
And then the computer is using artificial intelligence to figure, well, I'm not sure it's the same guy, but he turned around the corner to that camera, so that's who it is.
And they're following you everywhere you go.
So they don't have to have, you know, find out the kids have to turn them in.
Or somebody else, you know, they know every second where you are.
And then what it is, is with the Facebook and the Googles of the world, we've learned about this massive amount of databases that they can use.
So the whole thing is, it's like there's so much data, it's such a big haystack.
But it's an easy haystack to get through when you have computers.
And so they have all this data of all these people all over the world.
And personal profiles.
Of everybody.
They know the calls that my kids made to who they made.
So 30 or 40 years from now, if they need that information and they want to get to one of my kids, they'll get to one of their friends.
I mean, I know it sounds like a movie, but that's what they're doing.
They're building up those kind of databases that are very scary.
And Silicon Valley has no problem giving it to them.
They're just a customer.
And they'll go ahead and do it however they have to do it.
They'll make sure their Facebook doesn't say anything negative about, you know, Chinese or, you know, I shouldn't say Facebook.
These companies that do those type of things there, shift them and change how they operate for China.
I mean, clearly Google search does.
Now, with all of this information, what do you guys recommend for our audience to do going forward?
I would say there's a lot for Americans to do.
Like, for example, look at your local library, right?
See whether they are carrying China daily.
Okay?
Right.
We're talking about our community library.
Our taxpayers' money has been funded, have been funding all this, like, Chinese propaganda to feed into our own school.
And my two daughters, they are in Pasadena High School.
Like, they are taking AP Chinese.
And I just learned recently that the college board that runs AP Chinese have been collaborating with the Chinese government about the content textbook.
And as a matter of fact, like just last year, my older daughter's AP Chinese daughter, a Chinese teacher, she was from China, right?
She told the students that Tiananmen Massacre was a rumor.
That was last year, okay?
She came from China.
I think she has been in the U.S. for at least six years.
And she told students that the Tiananmen Massacre was a rumor.
And that is what our high school students in public school are receiving in their classroom.
And in colleges, like we all know about Confucius Institute, they have been teaching that Americans started the Korean War because Americans wanted to invade North Korea.
That was what I learned about the Korean War in high school in China.
And nothing about 20 or 30 years later, the next generation, they would be totally confused about the history.
And that's what the Communist Party tried to achieve in America.
And that's something like all of us can do a little bit.
You know, we can always tell school, like, you know, this is not what we want.
You know, it's our children.
We have to be responsible for the education they get.
And I really highly appreciate that Epoch Times for exposing all of the very, very important facts.
And it doesn't matter, like, how one feels about it, but at least that started the conversation.
People, I'm pretty sure, like most of the Americans, they will want to find out more about what's going on.
And then once people know what's going on, they will know what to do.
Thank you.
And Jim, do you have any other last thoughts for our audience?
You know, it's a massive country.
It's, you know, 1.45 or 1.5 billion people.
Our kids are going to have to, you know, live with whatever we do.
And I think in our country, we're a capitalist country.
By the way, they're a capitalist country there.
I didn't see a communist anywhere.
There's more communists in Berkeley than there is in China.
They're all about making money.
And I think that is, you know, young people, as they go into university and go out for jobs and stuff, there's going to be a lot of opportunities to go to China and to do business.
I would recommend against it.
You're going to be rooting for the wrong team on the wrong side.
The Chinese people are the right side.
The Chinese Communist Party's not.
And until that changes, we've got to have our guard up because they're not our friends.
They're not here to help.
Well, thank you so much.
And I have to say, they're not Americans' friends.
They're not Chinese people's friends.
Thank you, Dr.
Wen.
Yeah.
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