The new Manchurian candidates

Chinese and Qatari influence-peddling is weakening Western democracy and undermining our economies.

Joel Kotkin
Columnist

Topics Politics USA World

Openness to outsiders is a liberal democracy’s greatest strength, but it can also prove a curse. Hostile autocratic powers such as China and Qatar have realised that throwing dollars around Washington, Ottawa, London, Sydney or Brussels can get results. How else do you get a proposed US-sponsored Qatari airbase in Idaho, and even a US commitment to defend the terrorist-sponsoring kingdom? China, for its part, often backs Democratic candidates like New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill, who received $65,000 from a businessman with strong links to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

This may not be the programmed treachery portrayed in the 1962 thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, but foreign interests have gained growing influence across the West. At the same time, much of the far left lives off donations from CCP-allied Shanghai-based billionaire Neville Roy Singham. In 2028 we might see Gavin Newsom – California’s China-friendly governor – as a wannabe satrap at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Most foreign influence-peddlers are not partisans, but opportunists. China, often tied to the left, was recently found using an agent to penetrate Germany’s hard-right AfD. Authoritarian states see weakness in Western societies – particularly among an increasingly out-of-touch political class – as an opening to accentuate divisions within polarised publics. Influence-peddlers butter their bread on both sides, not minding that their fingers might get greasy.

There are, of course, differences in the nature of foreign political donations. Some target the grifters of Trump world. Some ally with the green left. Others seek to leverage ethnic ties with migrant communities.

In his classic transactional manner, Trump’s family members and associates are getting rich off deals with Middle Eastern monarchs. Top administration officials like Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and FBI head Kash Patel have strong connections with Doha. Trump, no stranger to impropriety, has even accepted a gift of a jumbo jet from Qatar, which is to be refitted for use as Air Force One.

At the same time, many prominent GOP figures – including former House speaker John Boehner – have signed up to a lobby firm that pushes for China’s interests. Trump allies on Wall Street also lobby on behalf of China, cashing in on investments that strip America’s productive capacity – even amid the Trumpian trade wars that are supposed to rein China in.

Over the past decade, much of the largesse from abroad has gone to universities – bulwarks of ‘progressive’ politics. Qatar alone accounts for more than a third of all foreign donations to US universities. This is the same nation, lest we forget, that funds Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

China’s university gambit includes its so-called Confucius Institutes, which openly push the CCP line on campus. Other funds have been used to promote access to US technological know-how. Harvard alone attracted $560million in gifts from China between 2010 and 2025. Similar patterns can be seen in universities in the UK, Australia and Canada.

This influence extends to culture, too. Hollywood stars now denounce Israel and Trump as genocidal maniacs, but ignore the systematic suppression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. The CCP bans any film that threatens its ideological hold. Despite all the kowtowing in Hollywood, Beijing is rapidly replacing vacuous Hollywood blockbusters with its own vapid films. Qatar, for its part, appears to have financed the movie career of Mira Nair – mother of nepo-baby and likely next New York mayor, the socialist Zohran Mamdani.

Some of this largesse goes directly to Democratic politicians who, like the Trumpistas, are no less lured by foreign lucre. Timmy Davis, Joe Biden’s ambassador to Doha, last month landed a lucrative job at Irth Capital Management, a fund controlled by the ruling al-Thani family. This despite having no experience in finance. But what does that matter among friends?

As befits the world’s other superpower, China’s influence is even more pervasive. The late Dianne Feinstein’s driver was apparently an agent, while congressman Eric Swalwell – a consistent critic of Trump’s alleged Russian ties – was involved with an alleged Chinese femme fatale. Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, had extensive business dealings with Chinese interests, while his brother, James, hired an ex-Secret Service agent to assist a Chinese client.

Many of the Democratic Party’s favoured oligarchs also tend to be pro-Beijing. The very billionaires who see themselves as defenders of democracy had no trouble clinking glasses in San Francisco last year with China’s brutal dictator, Xi Jinping. To them, a real, committed autocrat, it seems, is preferable to a mercurial, term-limited one.

Democratic mega-donor Michael Bloomberg once described China as ‘ecologically friendly, democratically accountable and invulnerable to revolution’. He even claimed that Xi is ‘not a dictator’. Apple’s Tim Cook, whose products are largely made in China, waxes lyrical about a ‘common future in cyberspace’. The relentlessly self-promoting hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio, who made much of his wealth in authoritarian China, attacks Trumpian authoritarianism while envisioning American decline and Chinese ascendancy. One leading Silicon Valley VC firm, Sequoia Capital, even employs the offspring of Politburo members.

Canada, too, has been targeted. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has identified relentless efforts to gain inside information about Canada’s raw materials, defence and AI industries. It has also documented China’s use of agents, including Canadian citizens, to influence MPs and to blunt criticism of the Middle Kingdom.

Similar patterns have emerged in Australia, where Chinese operatives, sometimes working with local ethnic minorities, use political donations from CCP-linked businesspeople to sway the China policy of major parties. One senator was expelled from parliament after being caught pandering to Chinese-language media on South China Sea policy and warning his CCP-linked patron about government surveillance.

Both China and the Gulf monarchies are playing a long game – and for them, the real bonanza could come when the Democrats regain power. They almost got a winning shot when Kamala Harris nominated Minnesota’s Tim Walz, a committed Sinophile, as her vice-presidential pick. Their best hope now may be Gavin Newsom, who has a more than decent shot at being America’s next president.

Newsom is shamelessly pro-China, and the feeling is mutual. After Biden’s dreadful debate performance in June last year, the Asia Times and South China Morning Post both reported that Newsom was seen as the ideal replacement for the doddering Biden. Newsom is a ‘fresh’ but ‘sober-minded politician in the US’, according to Henry Wang, founder of the Centre for China and Globalisation.

Newsom essentially functions as what one climate-policy critic has called a ‘climate propaganda enable[r]’. His green agenda is an enormous economic win for the Middle Kingdom, given China’s domination of electrification and clean-tech supply chains – not to mention its interest in Western deindustrialisation. Newsom’s 2023 trip to China was paid for by a green non-profit. There, he ignored China’s human-rights abuses, while going out of his way to praise Chinese electric vehicles at a BYD factory.

The following year, Newsom was widely criticised for cleaning up San Francisco to ‘coincide with the arrival of “fancy” leaders’, including Xi Jinping. When Xi visited California in 2023, Newsom and the state establishment gave him a standing ovation. They even managed to sweep the homeless off San Francisco’s streets while the emperor was in town. More recently, CalMatters has criticised the California governor for his ‘soft-pedalling approach to China… in stark contrast to his drumbeat of harsh rhetoric – which continued during his travels – directed at Republican politicians in America’.

One particularly troubling pattern has been Beijing’s use of immigrant communities. In November 2023, Newsom dispatched state secretary of government operations Amy Tong, a first-generation Chinese immigrant, to attend a ‘US-China Sister Cities Conference’. In October 2024, Tong also attended a ‘China International Friendship Conference’ in Beijing, sponsored by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC) – long characterised as the public face of the CCP’s United Front Work Department.

Non-profits tied to the Chinese diaspora – around 40 per cent of whom live in California – are quick to call anyone who criticises the CCP ‘racist’. New York governor Kathy Hochul’s aide, Linda Sun, has cultivated strong ties with Hong Kong’s CCP-backed puppet government.

Over time, these influence operations create what looks like a classic colonial relationship – China buys raw materials and foodstuffs while selling back increasingly sophisticated industrial goods. In 2022, for example, California imported nearly 10 times more from China ($147.6 billion) than it exported ($18.15 billion). This turns the tables on the old Western model of exploitation. If the influence-peddlers get their way, the West will slide into dependency. Our elites will enjoy the riches of Chinese investment – in universities, resort towns and leafy suburbs – while ordinary citizens become ever more reliant on Chinese imports for the essentials of daily life.

Soon we may find the West – with only the US capable of resistance – reduced to satrapies within an expanding Chinese empire. In London, the proposed giant Chinese ‘super-embassy’ could play the role once held by British missions in the colonies – offering both diplomatic cover and surveillance on a grand scale.

To be sure, the new Manchurians – whether from the Gulf or China – don’t advertise their Islamic or Communist leanings. Instead, they represent systems that, while deeply repressive, don’t demand ideological devotion, at least not from foreigners. These are flexible regimes that offer riches to those who play along. China’s ideology may seek to undermine Western values, notes historian Sean McMeekin, but it does so in ways that are ‘a little subtler’ and ‘more insidious’ than the Soviet Union’s attempts.

In future, our children might well ask: ‘Who lost the West?’ If it happens, it won’t be down simply to the power of our adversaries, but also to the weakness of our elites and their willingness to be co-opted.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.

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