A heated fight over Elaine Chao’s reported connections to Chinese Communist Party-linked organizations has taken an awkward turn for one of her defenders.
Former CIA China specialist Dennis Wilder entered the dispute this week, objecting to reporting that raised questions about Chao’s ties to Chinese government and Communist Party organizations. But Michael Lucci, founder and CEO of State Armor, responded by pointing attention back at Wilder’s own record involving China.
And suddenly, the conversation became considerably more complicated.
The Daily Caller News Foundation reported that Chinese government and state-media records listed Chao in four government or Communist Party-linked positions beginning in 2008. According to the report, three of the organizations involved had ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, the powerful organization responsible for influence operations targeting audiences outside China.
Chao’s spokesman pushed back forcefully, denying that she ever held a position with a foreign government and describing the reporting as “unfounded and deeply insulting, hurtful and racist.”
That is a serious accusation against the journalists and researchers involved.
But calling uncomfortable reporting “racist” does not make the underlying questions disappear.
It also raises an obvious question: Are the facts being disputed, or is the messenger simply being attacked?
Lucci’s response brought Wilder’s own China-related history into the spotlight.
In 2016, Georgetown University announced a $10 million gift from the Hong Kong-based Spring Breeze Foundation to establish a U.S.-China initiative on global issues. Georgetown said Thailand-based Charoen Pokphand Group, or CP Group, supported the foundation, and its announcement quoted CP Group Vice Chairman Yang Xiaoping welcoming the program.
Four years later, the arrangement attracted congressional scrutiny.
Then-Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin asked the Department of Education to investigate the Georgetown gift in November 2020. An Education Department report had already identified CP Group as having “ties to the Chinese government through multibillion dollar agreements.”
Gallagher argued that the examination did not go far enough into the company leadership’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party’s international influence network.
That history does not, by itself, establish wrongdoing by Wilder. But it makes his decision to enter a politically charged dispute over alleged China influence particularly noteworthy.
There is a larger issue here that Washington’s China establishment has spent years avoiding: foreign influence is not a problem only when it involves people you dislike.
If Chinese Communist Party-linked organizations are attempting to cultivate influence inside American universities, businesses, political circles or elite institutions, the standard should be the same regardless of which political faction is involved.
America has every right to ask who is funding whom, what relationships exist, and whether foreign interests are gaining access or influence that Americans would reasonably want to know about.
China's Communist Party is not a benign foreign interest. It is a strategic competitor that has spent years pursuing influence inside the United States.
So when questions about China connections emerge, the answer should be documentation and transparency — not reflexive accusations of racism.
And that standard needs to apply across the board.
Because if the people demanding scrutiny of China ties are themselves subjected to scrutiny, that is not a scandal. That is accountability.
Americans deserve to know where foreign influence reaches into their institutions and political class. The days when powerful figures could dismiss uncomfortable China questions with a label and move on should be over. When Beijing’s influence is the subject, sunlight is not racism — it is national security.
