(The Epoch Times)—Linda Sun, former deputy chief of staff to the New York governor, was arrested by the FBI for spying for Beijing on Sept. 3. The next day, it was announced the New York Chinese consul general was no longer in his position, coinciding with a request from Gov. Kathy Hochul to the State Department to expel him.
Analysts say the case serves as a warning to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its agents hiding within the U.S. government.
In its indictment, the Department of Justice (DOJ), says Sun violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and is charged with 10 counts, including visa fraud, money laundering, and accepting benefits to engage in activities that benefit China and the CCP. Her businessman husband, Christopher Hu, 40, was also charged with multiple crimes, including money laundering.
Sun acted at the request of CCP officials and “engaged in numerous political activities in the interests of the PRC and the CCP, including blocking representatives of the Taiwanese government from having access to high-level New York State officers,” the DOJ said in a press release.
The charges against Sun also include “changing high-level New York State officers’ messaging regarding issues of importance to the PRC and the CCP; obtaining official New York State proclamations for PRC government representatives without proper authorization,” and “arranging meetings for visiting delegations from the PRC government with New York State government officials” among others.
The DOJ said Sun received “substantial economic and other benefits” from the CCP for these activities. PRC is the acronym for China’s official name: the People’s Republic of China.
Sun, 41, also known as Wen Sun, is a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Nanjing, China, and moved to the United States with her parents at the age of 5.
She worked in the New York state government for about 15 years. In 2009, Sun served as chief of staff to New York State Assembly representative Grace Meng, a Democrat, who is currently a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2012, Sun joined the New York state government of Gov. Andrew Cuomo and later served as deputy chief of staff to Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, now the governor.
Infiltrating US Government
Wang Juntao, chairman of the National Committee of the China Democratic Party, said the case is especially important to people like himself—overseas Chinese activists who publicly protest against the CCP’s tyranny—because “those in the U.S. government who speak for and act on behalf of the CCP are the ones who should be the main focus of U.S. law enforcement’s crackdown.”
Wang said that the United States started the crackdown on CCP agents in the United States through FARA under former President Donald Trump, and then, “President Biden systematized it, since then the Western world has formed a unified containment of the CCP’s overseas spying operations.”
U.S.-based current affairs commentator Tang Jingyuan told The Epoch Times that Sun’s case is somewhat special because, in the past, most of the CCP spies arrested by the FBI were overseas Chinese community leaders or those posing as democracy activists.
“They were mainly engaged in transnational repression or collecting intelligence on Chinese dissidents in the United States, mostly in the field of human rights,” he said.
Sun’s case is different, Tang said, “mainly because she holds a high position in the U.S. government system, which affects many policies in New York State and even involves U.S. diplomatic relations.”
Tony Hu, a former U.S. Department of Defense official, told The Epoch Times that any U.S. civil servant must understand that, whether in the federal, state, or local government, “as long as you are a civil servant, you cannot use the convenience of your job to help foreign government. This will definitely be punished by U.S. law.”
Hu emphasized that civil servants “are supposed to help their country, state, and city—not foreign countries.”
Chinese Consulate Middleman
U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said at a press conference on Sept. 4 that New York Chinese consul general Huang Ping left his post, but “was not expelled.”
“Our understanding is that the consul general reached the end of a regular scheduled rotation in August,” Miller said.
Huang had served as the consul general in New York since November 2018. According to the CCP’s “Regulations on the Tenure, Seniority and Vacations of Permanent Personnel in Embassies and Consulates Abroad,” the general term of a consul general is three years, so Huang’s term should end in November this year.
Taiwanese retired Maj. Gen. Yu Tsung-chi, an adviser to the Formosa Republican Association, said the United States chose to accept the expiration of Huang’s term instead of demanding expulsion “to avoid enraging China to take the same expulsion measures to retaliate.”
“Then it would become a mutual revenge between democratic and totalitarian countries, which will blur the focus of the case. Therefore, the United States obviously wants to downplay such a serious intelligence infiltration incident in a low-key manner,” Yu told The Epoch Times.
Wang said that the CCP has deployed secret agents all over the United States.
Wang said that based on his knowledge and his connections in the CCP’s top political and military circles, for the CCP’s overseas agents “the Chinese consulate’s role is less significant [in the CCP’s espionage activities], and Beijing is directly controlling the overseas agents through the United Front Work Department from behind the scenes. Therefore, despite that the FBI has put a lot of effort, sometimes it is difficult to find evidence.”
The United Front Work Department is the Chinese regime’s spy and propaganda agency that also controls the regime’s transnational repression campaigns against overseas dissidents.
“The center of the CCP’s spy network is in Beijing. They mostly have exclusive contacts and will not let others know. The Chinese consulate itself also knows that they are actually under [the U.S. government’s] surveillance,” Wang said.
“The Chinese consulate also does deals with some American entrepreneurs, but the Chinese consulate is too conspicuous. The consulate will attend some activities of overseas Chinese groups, but they are not the ones who make the real arrangements.”
A CCP overseas agent who defected and fled to Australia, said that he directly took orders from the CCP’s secret police in Beijing.
Luo Ya, Ning Haizhong, and Fei Zhen contributed to this report.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
