Local U.S. officials implicated in China‑funded trips and development schemes

23 affiliates."* These and other organizations maintain close ties to China’s diplomatic missions in the United States and are often in contact with training or “cultural exchange” companies that bring delegations of PRC experts and Communist Party members to US cities and states for so-called study tours. US and Chinese groups promoting exchanges and investment have often been a valuable resource for American local leaders—see, for example, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts annual China Fest'* or the Chinese investment program in Greenville, South Carolina'*—but there have been other instances in which American politicians working with Chinese organizations have been drawn into schemes that cost them their jobs. Perhaps the most telling case is that of four officials in Ypsilanti, Michigan, who, in 2017, accepted a trip to China that they had been told was paid for by the Wayne State CSSA. The trip was eventually revealed as a boondoggle funded by a developer, Amy Xue Foster, who hoped to build a $300 million “Chinatown” in the area.’ The four officials, including the mayor, were fired. This is not to suggest that shady Chinese nationals are always plotting to corrupt otherwise innocent American leaders; US politicians have a long history of willingly accepting free trips, gifts, and other favors from the PRC or its fronts. As other sections of this study make clear, however, Beijing-directed activities such as the secret purchase of American Chinese-language newspapers and radio stations, harassment of local Chinese American dissidents, and the operation of CCP cells in local American businesses and universities do require heightened vigilance by US sub-national authorities, regardless of how much investment, how many tuition-paying students, or how many tourists China is able to produce. China Exchanges and Chinese Leverage The over forty years of engagement with China has created for American cities and states, as it has for American corporations and universities, deep interests and traditions with regard to China. However, the local policies that have guided these relationships are sometimes at odds with Washington’s policies, even our larger national interest. Although the United States has pulled out of the Paris Agreement, the seventeen governors who have joined the United States Climate Alliance, for example, continue to work with Beijing, which many would agree is a very salutary thing. But sometimes sub-national solidarity with China can become overexuberant, as it did ona July 2018 trip to Hong Kong by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who declared Section 2 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020482