US lawmaker condemns spying on president’s son

The surveillance of President William Lai’s (賴清德) son on US soil is “a chilling reminder that the CCP’s [Chinese Communist Party’s] destabilizing ambitions for the Taiwan Strait are a global threat,” US Representative John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the US and the Chinese Communist Party, said on Tuesday.

In a statement published on the committee’s Web site, Moolenaar said he condemned the surveillance as “another gross violation of our country’s sovereignty” and the CCP’s “dangerous belligerence against Taiwan.”

“I hope that President Lai and his family know the Select Committee and the American people stand with them,” he said.

FBI agents arrest Wanying Heather Zhang, center front, at Los Angeles International Airport on Sunday.

Photo : AFP

He was commenting on the FBI’s arrest on Sunday of Wanying Heather Zhang (張婉瑩) on suspicion of surveilling Lai’s son, Lai Ting-yu (賴廷與).

In an affidavit dated Saturday and filed in a US federal court in California, FBI Special Agent Kevin Holt said Zhang was also suspected of surveilling a “Taiwanese elected official, with vocal anti-CCP views” about six months before the alleged surveillance of Lai Ting-yu.

Based on a review of her cellphone and travel records, Holt said that he believed Zhang, a California real-estate agent and China-born naturalized US citizen, met with a Chinese official in China on or about Jan. 25 last year and that the official tasked her with obtaining information about the residents of an address in Irvine, California.

US congressman John Moolenaar is pictured in an undated photograph.

Photo: CNA

Based on conversations with other FBI officials, Holt determined that the address “was previously associated with a Taiwanese elected official, with vocal anti-CCP views,” the affidavit said.

Zhang was arrested on Sunday at Los Angeles International Airport before boarding a flight to Shanghai on suspicion of acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, according to a CBS News report.

Former US vice president Mike Pence on Tuesday called China “the greatest economic and strategic threat facing the United States in the twenty-first century” in a post on X that included a link to a Wall Street Journal editorial titled “China Spies on Taiwan on US Soil.”

US President Donald Trump’s administration “wants ‘strategic stability’ with China, and it’s a nice aspiration,” the editorial said. “But the Chinese Communist Party isn’t behaving like a force for peace in the world, and the latest evidence is Beijing’s alleged spying in the US on the son of Taiwan’s president.”

Lai Ting-yu was working in Washington state, where the CCP was collecting information about him for potential blackmail or other actions aimed at harming the president or the Democratic Progressive Party, the editorial said.

Holt’s affidavit said that Zhang and another person in September last year traveled to Seattle, where a surveillance camera captured them near the home of “a close relative of a high-ranking member of Taiwan’s government.”

“The case is a tiny tip of the iceberg of Chinese espionage in America — from attempts to infiltrate the US military for secrets and companies for technology, to surveilling universities and Chinese dissidents in exile or Chinese students studying in the US,” the Journal said.

Regardless of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) statements about US-China stability, China’s actions have undermined US interests, it said.