China’s top diplomat in New York has left the U.S. as a foreign agent scandal intensifies following the arrest of a former aide to Governor Kathy Hochul on spying charges.
Hochul said on Wednesday that Chinese Consul General Huang Ping had been removed from his post. Asked about Hochul’s remark at the U.S. State Department’s press briefing on Wednesday, spokesperson Matthew Miller stressed that this was the reason for the consul general’s departure.
“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,” Miller told reporters. He declined to comment on whether the department has considered grounds for expulsion.
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“That said, foreign interference, including attempts to influence through covert activities that should be registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act and are not registered, are things that we take very seriously,” he added, citing Sun’s arrest on Tuesday.
However, CNN quoted a Chinese Consulate General spokesperson as saying on Wednesday that Huang was “performing his duties as usual,” in apparent contradiction to the State Department’s remarks.
Newsweek reached out to the Chinese embassy in the U.S. and Chinese consulate general in New York with emailed requests for comment outside of office hours.
Linda Sun, a China-born, naturalized U.S. citizen, and her husband, Christopher Hu, were arrested at their multimillion-dollar Long Island home.
In addition to her post as Hochul’s deputy chief of staff, Sun also worked for the New York State Department of Financial Services and served as former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s chief diversity officer.
Prosecutors charged the couple with accepting millions of dollars to interfere in state politics. They are accused of using this money to purchase their house in Long Island, an apartment in Hawaii, a range rover, a Ferrari, and Nanjing-style duck prepared by the personal chef of a Chinese official.
The 64-page indictment cited one example of Sun intervening to prevent then-Lieutenant Gov. Hochul from attending an event at the invite of Taiwan’s de facto embassy.
“They sent the invitation to another colleague trying to bypass me. I am working on it right now to resolve the issue,” Sun allegedly wrote to a Chinese consulate official in 2016. “It’s all been taken care of satisfactorily,” she later wrote to the unnamed official, according to correspondence cited by the indictment.
Sun also allegedly argued with Hochul’s speechwriter over including the “Uyghur situation” in one of the governor’s speeches in 2021. Rights groups, the U.S. and a number of other countries say China has committed severe human rights violations against Uyghurs and other majority-Muslim minorities in the country’s Xinjiang region.
Beijing has denied these accusations, claiming that the camps where it interned hundreds of thousands in the late 2010s were “vocational education and training centers.”
Hochul notably attended the 2016 SelectUSA summit in Washington, D.C., instead, an event hosted by the Chinese embassy and the China General Chamber of Commerce.
Sun and Hu pleaded not guilty, according to the Eastern District of New York. Sun was released on a $1.5 million bond.