New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has been caught on camera waving a Chinese flag and marching next to a Chinese Communist Party official.
If this had happened 10 years ago, we could have dismissed it as typical leftist idiocy, like wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt or hanging a picture of Karl Marx in her office.
But this happened on Feb. 12, 2023 — just a week after the U.S. shot down a Chinese spy balloon.
Hochul was joined on stage by Chinese consul general Huang Ping, a CCP hard-liner who has strongly defended the Chinese government’s mass atrocities against Uyghurs and support for China’s claims to sovereignty over Taiwan.
Yet none of this has made Huang a persona non grata in Albany or Manhattan. Huang and Hochul have met repeatedly, stretching back to 2019, during Hochul’s tenure as lieutenant governor of New York. In 2021, Huang called Hochul his “old friend” in a Facebook post.
In addition to her long-standing collaboration with Huang, Hochul has also engaged with the China General Chamber of Commerce, which reportedly has ties to the United Front Work Department, a sprawling party apparatus that engages in political influence and interference work in China and overseas. Among the individuals on the association’s board of directors is an executive with Hikvision — a Chinese surveillance firm sanctioned by the U.S. over its key role in the Xinjiang atrocities and in China’s military buildup.
Also joining Hochul in palling it up with Huang was radical Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, Sen. Chuck Schumer, and Mayor Eric Adams. None of the speakers bothered to mention the uncomfortable reality of the spy balloon being shot down, the genocide of the Uyghurs, or that the Chinese government opened a police station smack in the middle of New York City’s historic Chinatown that the FBI raided and closed in 2022.
But Hochul thinks the U.S. and China are great friends.
In addition to her long-standing collaboration with Huang, Hochul has also engaged with the China General Chamber of Commerce, which reportedly has ties to the United Front Work Department, a sprawling party apparatus that engages in political influence and interference work in China and overseas. Among the individuals on the association’s board of directors is an executive with Hikvision — a Chinese surveillance firm sanctioned by the U.S. over its key role in the Xinjiang atrocities and in China’s military buildup.
Hochul referred to the U.S. and China’s “beautiful relationship” during a speech for the China General Chamber of Commerce in 2022. And while there is certainly some latitude given to politicians catering to an important constituency like New York Chinese, the effusiveness of Hochul and other New York Democrats in their praise and toleration of the Chinese Communist government borders on sycophancy.
They never quite seem to “speak truth to power” to their friends, do they?
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