So New York Governor Hochul’s saying “Please get him out of the country” wasn’t enough?
Governor Hochul reports that on Wednesday, September 4, 2024, she convinced the State Department to expel Huang Ping, China’s consul general in New York, because of his alleged connection to the alleged schemes of the governor’s former aide, Linda Sun. The scheming had all been laid out in detail in a federal indictment.
Contradicting Hochul, the State Department said that no, we didn’t expel Huang. Huang did leave the country, State said, but simply because his current term had ended in August. (It seems that spy terms always end around the time the spy is discovered.)
Still here
But if Huang’s term was supposed to have already more or less ended by the time Hochul asked State to get rid of him, thus obviating the State Department’s need to do so, it is odd that Huang continued to go about his consular duties as usual, which is what the consulate reported.
After not leaving country, Huang showed up “at a swanky function hosted at the Plaza Hotel. The Chinese consulate general and the China Daily CCP propaganda outlet both publicized his appearance there. Just two days after the arrest of Linda Sun, who allegedly acted at the direction of an unnamed ‘high-ranking government official’ at the consulate, Huang delivered a cloying address calling for cooperation between the U.S. and China.”
The cloying address was about the virtues of people-to-people power, a timely theme. Of course, Chinese Communist Party spies and manipulators are eager to meet people and get to know them. They are people persons.
It was State Department spokesman Mark Miller who said: “Our understanding is that the consul general reached the end of a regular, scheduled rotation in August, and so rotated out of the position—but was not expelled…. It was the end of August, is my understanding.”
Was this understanding based on watching Huang board a plane? Based on a hazy atmosphere of almost-but-not-quite-complete grasp of Huang’s location circulating in the ventilation system of the State Department? Or what, exactly? How hard is it to know whether a prominent Chinese official, the one heading up the consulate, is in town or out of town? Put out an all-points bulletin if you have to.
The plot thins
Michael Sobolik with the American Foreign Policy Council says that the State Department “appears to be treating Huang with kid gloves in order to limit the risk of retaliation from Beijing.” In other words, the State Department is lying, as I understand it. (Or it is being “a little vague,” suggests a former State Department official.)
National Review: “When asked for comment, a State Department official referred National Review to Miller’s remarks from last week, the day before Huang appeared in public. A spokesperson did not respond to a follow-up question asking whether State previously knew that Huang remained in Manhattan as of Thursday evening. Neither Hochul’s office nor the consulate general responded to requests for comment today.”
Sobolik: “If we’re hesitant to push back, we can expect to see more cases like this.”
The first step in dealing with any problem is deciding to deal with it.
