Name: FBI: China has ‘hundreds’ of proxies in the US, targeting critics
Uploaded: 2026-03-16T16:31:07.000Z
Duration: 9 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This is a campaign by the Chinese government to silence dissent on US Soil.

I'm the Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence and Espionage Division for the FBI.

How much of a national security threat is this phenomenon?

It's a huge priority for our adversaries, such as China, Russia, and Iran.

And we're seeing more and more of these cases, and we're seeing escalating tactics.

Everything, you know, from assassination, forced kidnapping to harassment, hiring organized crime or private investigators to go after people on US Soil.

Yes, in the last few years, they've definitely intensified, and

the tactics have escalated to, you know, violence and kidnapping and, you know, murder for hire.

Anytime someone criticizes an authoritarian government, usually, or just any foreign government, and

then that government comes after the person on US Soil and tries to silence them through a variety of tactics.

What specifically have you seen the Chinese government doing here in the US So, in some of our cases, we've seen them send officials here to harass individuals.

We've seen them hire private investigators to surveil people.

We've seen them hire private investigators to try to get them to commit violence against individuals.

We've seen them hiring private investigators to destroy things.

Such as, there was a statue of Xi Jinping in California that criticized COVID policies, and

they hired a private investigator who burned it down.

We've seen them threaten the families of these people who are still in China.

We've seen them recruit US Government officials to try to get database access to see when an individual would travel so they could try to arrest him.

There are some loopholes that they take advantage of.

So, for example, if I'm a Chinese intelligence officer and I want to surveil you, I can hire a private investigator to follow you on a public street.

However, if that private investigator does something illegal, then it becomes illegal, and

we can prosecute under the Agent of a Foreign Power Act.

There was a case, a prosecution indictment a couple of years ago, and

the case is ongoing involving allegations of a secret Chinese police station.

We had been investigating this before the report came out, and

it was a police station that was covertly set up in Manhattan.

And we executed a search warrant and arrested and indicted to individuals that were running the police station.

I can't say much about the prosecutions because they're still ongoing, but

I can say that in the indictment, we described how one of those two individuals was tasked by an MPS official in China to find a dissident that was the campaign manager for a former Tiananmen Square protester who was running for Congress in New York.

What is your reaction when you hear about, in your words, establishing a secret police station on U.S.

It is a gross breach of U.S. sovereignty.

And, you know, we were all surprised when we.

And you can imagine the reaction if the FBI tried to set up a covert station in Beijing.

And obviously the US Government does not appreciate what China did with that.

From what I understand, in that particular case, it involves a Chinese kind of home association where you have almost clubs that are people of Chinese origin that still have ties back to home.

How much of a concern are things like this in emigre communities that might cross a line?

There is a lot of concern, and that's, you know, that's kind of the point of transnational repression.

The tactics are often crude, you know, burning down a statue or threatening people.

But the main goal is to create a climate of fear in the community.

So for every brave person that's willing to speak out there, you know, probably a thousand people that choose to stay silent and censor themselves.

And here in the US Here in the US and that's really the point of transnational repression, Right?

They do these very overt things to scare the rest of the community, and

they recruit people to report, you know, within the community.

So they're creating this Orwellian climate of fear where everyone is afraid to speak out, even though they're on US Soil and it's their right to do so.

And so, yes, it is a major concern in the Chinese diaspora, you know, that someone will report them to the Chinese government, and

the Chinese government will retaliate against their family or in some other way.

Do you hear that from citizens of Chinese origin here in the U.S. definitely.

I've heard that many times where victims will say, I don't want to.

I don't want to cooperate with you because I don't want them to come after my family, my elderly parents, or whoever is still back in China, it has become a lot more brazen over the last few years, and

we're trying very hard to, you know, bring these cases to light to tell the entire story of how this is being directed from the highest levels of the Chinese government.

In another example, we had a professor that came over in the early 2000s who started basically a fake pro democracy foundation so he could keep tabs on the real pro democracy activists.

So it's been very aggressive and widespread.

And from what you're describing, it sounds like there are different levels of American society that have actually been compromised at this point.

Can you describe the scale of resources that the FBI employs to combat this?

We have hundreds of people working on this.

Should people here in the US Be paranoid and looking over their shoulders for agents or proxies of foreign adversaries?

If you're a vocal dissident with a large following, I would say yes.

If you're popular and vocal and have a very large following, you'll be seen as a threat by these governments.

If the threat is so real here in the US do you have estimates of how many people might be acting as proxies for or as agents for a government like China here?

I couldn't give you exact numbers because, you know, is it in the hundreds or thousands?

Does the same go for other countries, other governments like Iran and Russia?

Well, their resources are far more limited than China's.

China has vast resources to deploy against this problem, whereas Russianot problem, I'm sorry, to deploy for this purpose.

Russia and Iran are far more limited, so I would not say hundreds for them.

But that brings an interesting kind of comparison.