In late October, Attorney General Merrick Garland gave a press conference on the topic of Chinese espionage at the Justice Department’s headquarters, flanked by top prosecutors and FBI director Christopher Wray. The department had teased the announcement of a major action in response to a foreign malign-influence effort, and it did not disappoint: Garland described charges against 13 individuals — alleged agents of the Chinese government — involved in three distinct espionage plots.

The first was an effort to infiltrate the Justice Department itself. On behalf of an unnamed Chinese company — almost certainly Huawei — the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) tried to undermine the prosecution of an executive of the firm by seeking to bribe a U.S. law-enforcement officer to provide confidential documents. Court documents outlining the case describe, in clear detail, a link between China’s espionage service and a telecom firm as they collaborate to interfere in the American justice system.

The other two cases involved a scheme to illegally force the repatriation of a man wanted by the Chinese government as part of China’s broader “Operation Fox Hunt” kidnapping campaign, and the use of a fake academic institute in New Jersey to attempt to recruit American security officials to work as assets for Beijing. Each of these plots had been thwarted by federal investigators and double agents working for the U.S. Most of the perpetrators were Chinese nationals, and most remain at large, though two people were arrested.

The announcement fit a pattern. Starting with the Trump administration’s so-called China Initiative — a special program focused on criminal acts by agents of the Chinese regime — and continuing now under President Biden, the Justice Department has made prominent efforts to investigate, expose, and prosecute malign activity by the Chinese government or its agents on U.S. soil.

Clearly there’s a lot of it. Prosecutors have filed charges so far this year against more than two dozen individuals alleged to be working illegally on behalf of the Chinese regime — more than in any previous year. In 2020, Wray began to convey the magnitude of Beijing’s operations on American soil with a statistic that he has repeatedly cited since: The FBI opens a new China-related counterintelligence case every ten hours (or every twelve hours, the figure he’s cited more recently). He has previously said there is an open investigation in each of America’s 50 states.

Main Justice considers these cases different prongs of a single threat. “Each of these cases,” Wray explained at the October press conference, “lays bare the Chinese government’s flagrant violation of international laws as they work to project their authoritarian view around the world, including within our own borders.” Deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco said on the same occasion that “China seeks to be a major power on the world stage and to challenge the United States in multiple arenas.” Beijing’s spy rings on U.S. soil advance that objective through traditional intelligence-gathering, industrial espionage, efforts to neutralize threats among the Chinese diaspora, and other acts.

The cases provide critical details about the Chinese Communist Party’s operations on U.S. soil. The first thing that stands out is their brazenness.

The most egregious plot might be an attempt this year by China’s MSS to discredit and even physically assault a candidate for Congress. Prosecutors revealed in March that an individual affiliated with the MSS, Qiming Lin, had hired a private investigator to uncover or, failing that, create a scandal to sink the candidacy of Xiong Yan in the Democratic primary for New York’s tenth congressional district. Yan is a naturalized U.S. citizen who helped lead the Tiananmen Square protests before leaving China.

The private investigator worked with federal law enforcement to build the case against Lin, furnishing some revealing conversations. At one point, Lin had asked the PI to manufacture a prostitution scandal. The methods escalated chillingly from there: “Violence would be fine too,” Lin said during a conversation monitored by federal law enforcement. “Beat him until he cannot run for election,” he said. “Car accident, will be completely wrecked.” Yan told NR that federal agents contacted him to instruct him on basic security tactics, such as driving safely, before he was aware of all of the details. He says he’s profoundly grateful for their work. A veteran of the U.S. Army, he added, chuckling, “I’m a soldier too. I know how to take care of myself.” But the whole thing rattled him and his family, he said.

Lin had other targets, too, according to his remarks to the PI. He promised that the investigator would get similar jobs in the future, including one potentially involving a New York State legislator whose name was inaudible. As quoted in the criminal complaint (and slightly repunctuated here):

There are, uh, some — some, uh, who speak negatively about China. . . . The people who always speak up, you need to pay attention to them. If possible — possible to get some information, then this side will hold you in very high regards in the future.

Yan told NR that he thinks this particular plot, in addition to other instances of Chinese interference targeting his campaign, “successfully” sank it. Whether or not that is true, attempted MSS intervention in a U.S. election, and Lin’s intent to arrange further such operations, is alarming and astonishing. The fact that the Chinese government schemed to take down a congressional candidate has gotten nothing like the media attention it deserves.

There’s another reason for alarm — the Americans described in these cases haven’t always been the good guys. To judge by the details that the DOJ has made public, Chinese agents have bought off more than a few government officials and law-enforcement professionals.

Two Department of Homeland Security employees, Derrick Taylor and Craig Miller, one recently retired, are charged with having accepted bribes in July to access a government database and retrieve passport and immigration-related data about three dissidents. The plot was led by Jason Sun, an employee of a Hong Kong–based tech company. His team included Matthew Ziburis, a former Florida Department of Corrections employee, and Fan Liu (also known as “Frank Liu”), the Queens-based executive of a Chinese-language media company and a U.N.-registered NGO. The group allegedly carried out operations across New York, Indiana, and California. Its members are accused of conducting illegal surveillance of their targets. Although prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, where the case is being tried, don’t allege outright that the defendants are responsible for last year’s mysterious demolition of a statue, by L.A.-based dissident artist Weiming Chen, that showed Xi Jinping as a Covid molecule, court documents allege that they talked about destroying it.

Some of Beijing’s other top collaborators exposed in DOJ disclosures were deeply embedded in Chinese-diaspora communities. Shujun Wang, the 73-year-old founder of the nonprofit and pro-democracy Memorial Foundation, is a naturalized U.S. citizen and was known widely in dissident circles. But in March federal prosecutors alleged he had worked with the MSS to gather potentially damaging information on Beijing’s critics in the New York area. Quanzhong An — one of the defendants charged and arrested in October, for his efforts to force a New York resident to return to China — is a property developer in New York and the majority owner of a hotel in Flushing, Queens. He was also the head of the Chinese Business Association of New York.

Intriguingly, the An case also gives us a glimpse into the way CCP political calculations might shape certain Operation Fox Hunt repatriation efforts. During a meeting with his target’s son in September, An urgently wanted the father to return to China by the start of the CCP National Congress in October.

Ironically, the announcement of these robust efforts to prosecute alleged Chinese agents followed the Biden administration’s cancellation of the China Initiative in February. Civil-rights activists and the higher-education lobby had called the program racist in intent and deed for its singular focus on China. In a speech the same month, Matthew Olsen, the department’s top national-security prosecutor, announced that the China Initiative would be folded into a new program to combat “nation-state threats.” He elaborated:

I want to emphasize my belief that the department’s actions have been driven by genuine national-security concerns. But by grouping cases under the China Initiative rubric, we helped give rise to a harmful perception that the department applies a lower standard to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct related to that country or that we in some way view people with racial, ethnic, or familial ties to China differently.

It’s strange for U.S. officials, who are clearly invested in the China Initiative’s mission, however named, to concede the assumptions that an investigative focus on Chinese-government espionage encourages racism and that the U.S. government has no legitimate interest in announcing its priorities. The China Initiative, as is evident from the recent indictments, has yielded important results. The cases unsealed this year are likely “the return on investment” from the greater focus on China that began with the initiative, says Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. They are also “the backlog shaking free” now that court proceedings are no longer frozen in a pandemic. The question is whether Justice will keep up the pace now that the China Initiative has been ended.

Nearly every month, media and civil-society groups unveil new examples of Chinese-government activity in America that would seem to merit scrutiny, such as the revelation this year by the Madrid-based nonprofit Safeguard Defenders that Beijing has operated an overseas police station, in Manhattan’s Chinatown, ostensibly to assist Chinese citizens with administrative issues but likely also as a front for espionage and harassment. And what is publicly known is of course only a small part of what is happening. With or without a special name, the DOJ’s work of addressing the threat that Americans — especially immigrants from China and citizens of Asian descent — face at the hands of the MSS, other arms of the Chinese government, and their collaborators must continue.