China learns crucial info by intercepting Trump's personal calls

By Hollie McKay

While President Donald Trump refuted reports on Thursday that snoops from Russia and China have been listening in on personal calls he continues to make from his personal phone -- despite warnings from intelligence officials -- leading experts in the field agreed such breaches are highly plausible, and potentially far more wide-reaching.
“They do this against everybody who matters. Hypothetically, it is not just the president but others as well,” said Dan Hoffman, a retired CIA senior clandestine officer and current Fox News contributor. “If you have got a cell phone and a senior person in government, they are going to be looking at you, too.”

A New York Times report said intercepted communications between foreign officials have affirmed the president's phone was being tapped, in particular by operatives working for China.
“It is certainly believable they would do it,” Hoffman conjectured. 

“And just because something isn’t classified, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t sensitive, or potentially interesting to the bad guys.”
So what is of value of personal conversations to such foreign eavesdroppers?
“For them, it is not just about the content but essentially about the Rolodex, the people with whom you are contacting. And we don’t always need to know the content,” he pointed out. 

“They want to get the people [who] are closest to the president.”
In terms of content, Hoffman noted, even small tidbits are of use.
“Even if the president doesn’t think he is saying something particularly useful to anybody, the bad guys may find that it is interesting,” he explained. 

“They want to collect information to understand what makes the president tick and understand what his plans are. It is not necessarily about jumping ahead and taking action. They would simply want to understand what he is doing, and try to make policy decisions based on what they have learned.”
Theresa Payton, who served as White House chief information officer under President George W. Bush and is now CEO of security consulting company Fortalice Solutions, agreed that China would look for information about what the president values, how he makes decisions, and who is important to him.

“For China, this would have been an information-gathering mission to try to outmaneuver the president and the United States,” she said. 

“They likely would have been looking for information to exploit in trade and other negotiations – maybe even national security secrets.”
While two of Trump’s phones were said to have been modified by the National Security Agency, the president reportedly prefers to use a third, personal phone -- seemingly to the chagrin of top intelligence brass.
It's believed China is most strongly taking advantage of the security lapse, and thus piecing together a list of Trump-connected confidantes. 

The Russians are running a somewhat less-refined listening protocol, according to the Times report. Two individuals named with close ties to Trump, and now of special interest to China, include Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of the private equity giant Blackstone Group, and Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn.
The calls could be hijacked as they move through the cell towers and cables that connect cellular networks. 

Moreover, electronic espionage is hardly new – or unique.
“It is just what they do, how they operate,” Hoffman said.
While Hoffman observed the skill of a state actor is involved at that level, other experts expressed concern an even more diverse array of hackers potentially could access telecom infrastructure.
“They would then be able to establish patterns of the life of the president and his associates,” said Carlos Perez, research and development practice lead at IT consulting company TrustedSec. “Locations visited, for how long, times where the phones are blocked from the network for security reasons and much more that can be used to piece a wider look at the current situation in the White House.”
Nonetheless, China’s Foreign Ministry has denied seizing the president’s private phone calls. 

The Russian Foreign Ministry and its Washington embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Espionage: China’s Military Sends More "Scholars" Abroad, Often Without Schools’ Knowledge

The People’s Liberation Army has sent thousands of "scientists" overseas in recent years, but the "scholars" obscure their affiliation
By Kate O’Keeffe and Melissa Korn

Carnegie Mellon University says it does background checks of foreign scholars and entrusts vetting to the U.S. government.

Scientists from China’s military are significantly expanding research collaboration with scholars from the U.S. and other technologically advanced countries, often obscuring their affiliation from their hosts, according to a new research report and interviews with academics.
The People’s Liberation Army has sponsored more than 2,500 military scientists and engineers to study abroad over the past decade, according to research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. ASPI is a nonpartisan think tank that was created in 2001 by the Australian government, which is engaged in a sharp debate about Chinese Communist Party interference in its domestic affairs.
The volume of peer-reviewed articles produced by PLA scientists working with academics outside China grew nearly eight times during the same period, from 95 in 2007 to 734 last year, the report says.
In some cases, the Chinese "scientists" masked their ties with the PLA, enabling them to work with professors at leading universities like Carnegie Mellon without the schools’ knowledge of their military affiliation, according to Wall Street Journal interviews.
The revelations come as the U.S. and China vie for technological superiority in a variety of fields that have both commercial and military applications, such as quantum physics, cryptography and autonomous-vehicle technology—some of the same topics studied by the PLA researchers who went abroad.
The report raises questions about how well governments and universities have considered exchanges with academics from the Chinese military.

Standard military exchanges between nations frequently involve sending officers to visit each other’s institutions to improve relationships and communication. 

But the report notes "scientists" sent abroad by the PLA often have “minimal or no interaction” with military personnel in their host countries.

Typically, these PLA "scientists" are civilian Communist Party members with sound “political credentials,” who go through intensive training before leaving, the report says.

It quotes the PLA Daily, a military publication, warning that if students sent overseas “develop issues with their politics and ideology, the consequences would be inconceivable.”
Cai Jinting—who also goes by Gill Cai—engaged in linguistic research while at Ohio University during the 2012-13 academic year, working with a professor who studied how a native language affects the way people learn additional languages. 

Linguistics can have applications in artificial intelligence.
Cai didn’t disclose his affiliation with the PLA until after he had arrived, instead citing the civilian institution where he received his undergraduate degree, according to Scott Jarvis, who worked with Cai when he was an associate professor at Ohio University. 

He said Cai was helpful in recruiting Chinese students to participate in research studies and, once on campus, told him of his actual school affiliation.
“At some point I became aware it was a military university,” said Dr. Jarvis, now chairman of the linguistics department at the University of Utah. 

“In my mind it was like a West Point kind of place. Even today I don’t really know what it is.”
An Ohio University spokeswoman said the school doesn’t independently vet scholars “for academic connections nor their background” and relies on the U.S. State Department for that.
Following debate in Congress, the U.S. is taking steps to stop China from acquiring critical technology made by U.S. companies. 

But it could be even more challenging to address such problems at the university level. 

The American academic system prides itself on its openness, and many Chinese scholars bring both expertise and funding.
The PLA, which is the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party, could be one place to draw the line, the Australian report suggests. 

“Helping a rival military develop its expertise and technology isn’t in the national interest,” it says.
At the same time, failing to address the issue risks “tarring all research ties with China with the same brush,” writes author Alex Joske, who found that the U.S.—followed by the U.K., Canada, Australia and Germany—was the top country involved in PLA academic research collaboration.
“National security is our top priority when adjudicating visa applications,” said a State Department spokesman. 

“We are constantly working to find ways to improve our screening processes and to support legitimate travel and immigration to the United States while protecting U.S. citizens and national interests.” 

The State Department added that any applicant who hides material facts relevant to national security risks removal. 

The Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t respond to requests for comment nor did the PLA "scholars" mentioned here.
ASPI found most researchers sent abroad by the PLA obscured it by listing affiliations such as the Zhengzhou Institute of Surveying and Mapping or the Zhengzhou Information Science and Technology Institute (Zisti).
According to the ASPI report, more than 1,600 peer-reviewed papers have been published by people claiming to be from one of those two institutes, both of which refer to the PLA Information Engineering University (PLAIEU). 

But without fluency in Chinese, it would be difficult to decipher the Zhengzhou schools’ military affiliations.

A student and an instructor at the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Information Engineering University in Zhengzhou, China in 2015. 

Qu Dan, an associate professor at PLAIEU, claimed to be from Zisti while a visiting computer science scholar at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute from 2016-2017, according to her published research papers.
The bio on one of her 2018 papers says her research interests include speech signal processing and machine learning. 

Qu—who is distinct from other CMU scholars of the same name—also published research with Professor Michael T. Johnson while he was                        in Marquette University’s electrical and computer engineering department.
A spokesman for Carnegie Mellon said the university wasn’t aware of Qu’s affiliation with the Chinese military. 

He said the school does background checks and entrusts vetting to the U.S. government, which issued her a visa. 

He added that Qu worked on “openly publishable, fundamental research.”
Dr. Johnson, now chair of the University of Kentucky’s department of electrical and computer engineering, said that, while he knew one of his publications included a co-author from Zisti, he wasn’t familiar with the institution and didn’t know anyone there.
Dr. Johnson didn’t respond to questions seeking additional clarity on four researchers, including Qu, all of whom claimed to be from Zisti and appeared as co-authors on papers with him. 

Marquette didn’t provide comment.
In another case, Qian Haizhong visited Texas State University to work on GPS trajectory data and published a paper in October 2017 with the San Marcos school’s Professor Lu Yongmei. 

The paper lists his affiliation as the Zhengzhou Institute of Surveying and Mapping. 

Lu, now chair of the university’s geography department, said she hadn’t known of Qian’s military connection.
A spokeswoman for the university said Texas State had been unaware of the connection. 

She said the university has a robust vetting process but that ultimately it is up to U.S. officials whether to issue a visa.
“A known direct military relationship would raise the level of scrutiny especially to ensure the research clearly did not have a military-end use,” she said.

Criminal Confession

China Locks Up Ethnic Minorities in Camps. It Says So Itself.
By Rian Thum

An image from undated video footage of Muslims reading from official Chinese language textbooks at a training center in Hotan, in East Turkestan. The Chinese authorities recently acknowledged the existence of a vast network of indoctrination camps.

NOTTINGHAM, England — “Citizens, please remain calm and relax, no one in the re-education camps will starve, be left in the cold, be punished or be forced to work.” 

With these words, an official from China’s Communist Youth League tried to reassure relatives and friends of members of predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities who had been taken to internment centers. 

The detainees were “infected by an ideological illness,” the official said, and the camps would “cleanse the virus from their brain.”
When the speech was delivered in October 2017, the camps were unknown even to some of the people they targeted, the roughly 11 million ethnic Uighurs and one million Kazakhs of East Turkestan, a colony in northwestern China. 

A year later, the network of indoctrination centers is widely known even outside China: first revealed by inmates’ families and then confirmed, perhaps unwittingly, by the government’s public call for bids on procurement contracts to build camp infrastructure — and now by an official justification of sorts.
A couple of weeks ago, the East Turkestan People’s Congress passed legislation that for the first time provides an explicit basis for the “transformation” of people influenced by “extremism” in “education institutions” through “ideological education, psychological counseling, behavioral correction, Chinese language training” and other programs. 

Last week, the chairman of East Turkestan’s government described the camps as air-conditioned boarding schools that offer cultural programs for people suspected of minor offenses to help them realize that “life can be so colorful.”
Yet former participants have described a system of forced detention and abuse, with military-style discipline, solitary confinement, beatings and torture.
In the past, local officials and local media would sometimes boast online of successfully implementing this camp system. 

But more senior officials — presumably partly out of concern with global opinion — have tended to profess ignorance, including as late as August, in response to questions by a United Nations panel on racial discrimination.
So why is China suddenly acknowledging a network of concentration centers whose existence it had so adamantly denied?
Some news reports say that the law “legalizes” the camp system. 

But that characterization is misleading: Authorizing the construction and administration of so-called training centers does not in itself sanction the extrajudicial internment of people in them, which, as scholars have argued, is illegal even under Chinese law.
The recent legislation does, however, recognize and officialize the detention system — and that’s significant.
In China, the law sometimes seems to play catch-up with enterprising officials. 

For example, “abnormal” beards were legally banned in March 2017, years after the East Turkestan authorities had begun arresting or otherwise penalizing men with large beards. 

Likewise, the latest legislation is evidence that the entire camp program has evolved from local, extralegal improvisation to a formal system that is to be woven into the fabric of the Chinese state.
The concentration camps no longer are an ad hoc measure; they are meant to be permanent. 

And their reach is spreading geographically.
Uighurs throughout China have been called back to East Turkestan by their hometown police and then detained. 

Thousands of Uighurs also appear to have been sent out of East Turkestan to prisons elsewhere in China.
The central government in Beijing provides part of the funding for this enormous internment and indoctrination system. 

And only the highest levels of the ruling Politburo could have decided in 2016 to reassign Tibet’s party chief Chen Quanguo to East Turkestan — to which he brought the repressive measures he had used against Tibetans and Buddhist pilgrims.
The intensifying repression against Uighurs and other minorities in East Turkestan reflects a nationwide shift in the government’s approach to ethnic difference. 

Chinazism

Whereas the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) once professed to value diversity, it now increasingly seeks to assimilate minorities: In recent years, it has even encouraged Uighurs to marry members of the ethnic Han majority by offering cash to mixed couples. 

And as the anthropologist Darren Byler has documented, the authorities are enlisting Han civilians in their efforts, sending them out as “big brothers” and “big sisters” to check in on and watch Uighur and Kazakh homes.
The foremost theorist of this Sinicization project, known as “ethnic mingling,” is Hu Lianhe, an official at the Central Political and Legal Affairs Committee. 

He was the Chinese representative who denied the existence of re-education camps in East Turkestan to the United Nations panel this summer. 

Hu is also known for developing a “theory of stability” that links ethnic identity with extremism, and as the political scientist James Leibold recently pointed out, Hu’s growing visibility likely is no coincidence. 

It may portend a far more comprehensive effort by the government in Beijing to control and subjugate non-Han minorities throughout the country within what official propaganda calls the “Chinese race.”
As the C.C.P. has steadily moved away from recognizably communist policies over the last three decades, its leaders have increasingly justified their rule through Han-centered nationalism and by casting the party as the ultimate guarantor of China’s stability and prosperity, notions encapsulated under the slogan “Chinese Dream.” 

Uighur aspirations for basic cultural rights and more autonomy threaten those claims, and the handful of Uighur attacks over the past decade or so call into question the C.C.P.’s ability to protect the country’s ethnic-Han majority.
Han-centric racism and Islamophobia are driving China’s leaders to blame unrest on Uighur culture and religion. 

But behind their efforts to forcibly re-engineer minority cultures also lies a pressing need to boost their legitimacy and account for their hold on power. 

The East Turkestan problem, in their view, isn’t a local issue; it’s a threat to the foundations of the entire system they oversee today.

US won't talk to China on trade until it gets specific plan to halt tech theft

• The U.S. demands a specific plan from China to halt technology theft.
• The impasse threatens a meeting in late-November between President Donald Trump and China's Xi Jinping

By Jeff Cox 

Trade tensions between have taken another negative turn, with the U.S. demanding that China come up with a specific plan to stop stealing technology.
Until Beijing does so, the U.S. will not resume trade negotiations, according to a report Thursday in the Wall Street Journal.
The latest impasse jeopardizes a meeting between President Donald Trump and China's Xi Jinping scheduled for the end of November at the G20 meeting.
There had been some hope that Trump and the Chinese president could make progress on the myriad trade issues between the two sides, a major focus being forced technology transfers.
China has sought to resume talks but the U.S. has refused until Beijing addresses the tech issue.
"If China wants [the G-20 session] to be a meaningful meeting, we need to do the groundwork," a senior White House official told the Journal.
"And if they don't give us any information, it's just hard to see how that becomes fruitful."
The U.S. has slapped tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, charging the country with unfair trade practices that have ballooned the deficit between the two.
President Trump has threatened to put duties on all imported goods from China.
A week ago, Larry Kudlow, the National Economic Council director, said the U.S. has let its demands be known but has not seen a satisfactory response.
"They are unfair traders. They are illegal traders. They have stolen our intellectual property," Kudlow said in Detroit.
"China has not responded positively to any of our asks."
The Journal reports that there are risks for China to tip its hand on its negotiation strategy.
In 1999, the Clinton administration made public an offer from China when it entered the World Trade Organization, sparking a crisis at home that nearly killed China's entrance into the group.

Malaysian Traitor

How Najib Sold Out Malaysia To China

www.sarawakreport.org
Najib Razak Arrested Again Over Corruption Scandal

The latest six charges laid against Najib and his trusty lieutenant, Treasury secretary-general Irwan Serigar Abdullah, confirm again how blatantly the previous prime minister and his government were prepared to lie in the face of evidence leaked by brave insiders to Sarawak Report.
They also lay bare the outrageous extent to which this former prime minister was willing to rob his country, laying it open to China's economic imperialism, which was naturally quite happy to suck Malaysia into a vortex of debt that would have destroyed the nation’s independence.
Way back in 2016 Sarawak Report published the secret agreement that lay behind the sudden inflation of the budget for the East Coast Rail Link to double the original proposed cost of $30 billion. 

 The secret deal with China’s state owned CCCC (China Communications Construction Company) laid out in clear detail (including amounts and dates) how the repayments on the debts owed by 1MDB were to be concealed through those inflated figures.
The Chinese government had effectively sanctioned the corrupt deal, offering Najib a 2% loan and various up-front incentives, after Najib’s fugitive proxy Jho Low negotiated the terms on his behalf in Beijing. 

 And, as the figures showed, Jho Low had taken care to look after himself in the process by apparently using the deal to also purchase shares in companies he had originally bought using 1MDB’s stolen money.
Najib and his ministers, including then Public Works Minister, Sarawak’s Fadillah Yusof, (brother to Bustari Yusof a key collaborator of Najib and major recipient of money diverted from 1MDB) at the time claimed the story was nonsense.
However, within just a few weeks Najib had visited China and signed off on exactly the contract terms that had been leaked to Sarawak Report for the now massively expensive rail project that experts predicted could never be made profitable for Malaysia.
And this week, following the new charges, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) has made clear that the money to fund 1MDB’s loan repayments was being funneled through the project just as had been detailed in Sarawak Report. 

Inflated pipe line projects in East Malaysia were being employed for the same reason.
Further tranches of cash were also purloined using an inflated and unnecessary land purchase by Bank Negara (no wonder the long standing deputy resigned) and, perhaps even more disgracefully, a straight theft of money from BRIM, the payments supposed to alleviate the lives of the poor.

Given Najib had time and again boasted of BRIM to curry votes it is particularly notable that he was prepared to raid it to pay for the massive hole in 1MDB accounts punctured by thefts used, for example, to pay for his step-son’s production of Wolf of Wall Street and Jho Low’s massive payment of a quarter of a billion dollars for one of the world’s largest super-yachts.
And yet today the ex-PM’s lawyer (Shafee Abdullah, himself facing charges for laundering money from 1MDB and failing to declare tax) called the charges laughable. 

Few others in Malaysia are likely to see the joke as the sums officially misappropriated by Najib have leapt by a further staggering RM6.6 BILLION to RM 9 BILLION (and rising).

The list of 1MDB repayments agreed with amounts and dates as part of the secret deal with CCCC to inflate the cost of the ECRL by over 100%

China's crimes against humanity

China Must End Its Campaign of Religious Persecution

By SEN. CHUCK GRASSLEY Concentration Camps Construction is Booming in East Turkestan

The United States was founded on the premise that all individuals are created equal, with certain unalienable rights. 

Throughout our history, Americans have fought and died for these rights. 

They are ingrained in the fabric of our society and regularly debated, whether in coffee shops on Main Street or the halls of Congress.
Those fundamental rights and freedoms are part of our national identity, but that’s not the case in other parts of the world. 

That’s why for more than a century, the United States has been a vocal supporter, not just rhetorically but financially, as well, of global humanitarian efforts.
Over the past two decades, religious persecution in China has become a larger and more pressing issue. 

The Department of State’s annual International Religious Freedom report has included the People’s Republic of China as a particularly concerning offender since 1999.
Disturbing reports have surfaced out of China of late detailing the imprisonment of Christian pastors, Bible burning, and demolishing of Christian churches. 

The Chinese government has rounded up more than one million Uighur and Kazakh Muslims into concentration camps. 

The state has long suppressed the freedom of Tibetan Buddhists, as well as those who practice Falun Gong.
The Chinese government has removed crosses from 1,200 to 1,700 Christian churches as of a 2016 New York Times report, and has instructed police officers to stop citizens from entering their places of worship. 

There have been violent confrontations between government authorities and worshipers, and communist leaders have implemented restrictions prohibiting children 18 years old and younger from participating in religiously-focused education.
A piece published in Forbes earlier this year describes how Chinese authorities have bulldozed homes belonging to Uighur Muslims, collected passports to restrict travel and collected Uighur DNA and fingerprints in order to track its own citizens.
Communist leaders in China try to explain away these abuses by reiterating their commitment to preserving the Chinese culture, a practice known as sinicization. 

Approximately 100 million people in China belong to religious groups that are outside what the Chinese government deems acceptable. 

That’s approximately 100 million people who are subject to persecution by communist leaders in China, and even those that practice an officially sanctioned religion have not been spared harassment. That persecution stems from religious differences and has spread to other areas of daily life, including the restriction of social media.
The United States doesn’t have the singular authority to stop the religious persecution occurring in China, but it can apply significant pressure to Chinese leaders by linking the need for religious freedom to the economic and political aspects of our bilateral relationship that are important to China. As China’s largest trading partner, the United States is in a powerful position to influence Chinese leaders and stand up for human rights. 

Fighting for religious liberty should be a central part of the United States’ relationship with China. Senator David Perdue and I, with a bipartisan group of senators, recently introduced a resolution condemning violence against religious minorities in China and reaffirming America’s commitment to promote religious freedom and tolerance around the world. 

It also calls on China to uphold its Constitution and urges the President and his administration to take actions to promote religious freedom through the International Religious Freedom Act of 1988, the Frank R. Wolf International Religious Freedom Act, and the Global Magnitsky Act.
No matter where they live, everyone should be able to freely express their religious beliefs. 

The United States has been a beacon of freedom since before its founding. 

We must continue that tradition by doing what we can to promote human rights and freedoms both here and around the globe.

The Sinicization of New Zealand

How China is Buying New Zealand with Campaign Contributions
By Charlotte Graham-McLay

Jami Lee Ross, a National lawmaker, accused the party’s leader of trying to disguise a donation of 100,000 New Zealand dollars as smaller anonymous donations.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — The two politicians started their conversation casually, but there was serious business at hand: a "donation" recently deposited into a party account from a Chinese businessman, which totaled 100,000 New Zealand dollars.
The reported size of the donation, about $66,000, was large by New Zealand standards. 

But the cash, the lawmaker says, came with strings attached — a promise to add the names of two Chinese businessmen to a list of candidates for Parliament — and a plan to disguise the identity of the Chinese donor, a man with deep pockets and well-documented connections to the Chinese Communist Party.
The conversation, a recording of which was leaked last week, is the latest in a series of scandals that suggest New Zealand is vulnerable to political interference at a time when China is seeking greater influence throughout the Pacific.
New Zealand is often portrayed as a progressive paradise far removed from the rest of the world, but it plays an important role in the Five Eyes network, an alliance of Western intelligence agencies assigned to listen in on communications worldwide. 

Jian Yang, the most famous Chinese mole in a Western country

Similar concerns were raised last year when it was revealed that Jian Yang, a Chinese lawmaker and member of the National Party, had taught at a Chinese spy academy. 

Yang denied being a spy and remains in Parliament.
Analysts and allies fear that China can buy influence on the cheap and without raising alarms in New Zealand’s political system, which has weak rules about lobbying, by channeling money through small, anonymous donations.
Political donations, said Miguel Martin, a commentator who writes about China under the pseudonym Jichang Lulu, are an expedient way for the Communist Party to acquire “an avenue of influence on that country’s policy.”
Politicians at the local and national levels and from every party are desperate for funding, and therefore potentially easy prey.
“There’s kind of a ‘let the good times roll’ aspect with politicians in New Zealand, where historically money has been hard to come by and parties — by global standards — don’t have much of a budget at all,” said Rodney Jones, a New Zealand economist based in Beijing.
While contributions made directly from foreigners could raise red flags, Mr. Jones said, donations from wealthy, Chinese-born New Zealanders with connections to the Chinese Communist Party are delivered to politicians “on a platter.” 

It is in the politicians’ self-interest not to ask any too many questions about where the money originated.
The conversation leaked last week between the leader of New Zealand’s largest opposition party and a once-trusted lawmaker has prompted a national discussion about whether New Zealand should tighten its campaign finance rules, or introduce a registry of lobbyists like those in the United States and Australia.

Beijing stooge Simon Bridges, leader of the country’s largest opposition party

Jami Lee Ross, a member of the center-right National Party, accused the party’s leader, Simon Bridges, of fraud by trying to disguise a 100,000 New Zealand dollar donation as smaller, anonymous donations.
By law, the identities of contributors who donate less than 15,000 New Zealand dollars are allowed to remain anonymous.
Mr. Ross turned over to the police, and made public online, a phone call he had secretly taped with Bridges in June, in which the pair discussed a "donation" from the businessman, Yikun Zhang. 

Simon Bridges and his Chinese case officer, businessman Yikun Zhang.

The recording did not contain clear evidence that Bridges had asked for the "donation" to be broken up, and Bridges has denied doing so. 

The police are investigating whether the National Party failed to declare a donation from Zhang.
The National Party has said it did nothing illegal, but has yet to explain how the donation discussed in the call was handled.
The mention of Zhang piqued the interest of China analysts, who said the businessman had known ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Zhang served in the People’s Liberation Army and headed a provincial consultative group for the Communist Party before emigrating to New Zealand in 2000. 

His “entire life is in the shadow of the Communist Party,” said Chen Weijian, a member of the pro-democracy group New Zealand Values Alliance.
Zhang is chairman of the influential Chao Shan General Association of New Zealand, an organization started in 2014 for New Zealanders born in the Chinese town of Chaoshan, but which has become an important intermediary between China and New Zealand. 

He plans to host 1,000 Chinese visitors at a business conference next year in Auckland, the country’s largest city.
Zhang’s “positions and relationships” gave the Chinese Communist Party “leverage enabling it to ‘guide’ or simply expect individuals like Zhang to be aligned with the CCP’s policy goals,” said Mr. Martin.
Zhang has appeared in news photographs with both opposition lawmakers and those in the government, including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

Chinese businessman Yikun Zhang with his intimate friend Jacinda Ardern

Ardern this week defended the electoral donation system, and said the country’s politics free from Chinese interference.
Zhang has also attended a fund-raising auction for Phil Goff, the mayor of Auckland, and is currently traveling in China with another New Zealand mayor.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, center, and Mayor Phil Goff of Auckland, right, at a rally in September. Both politicians have links to Yikun Zhang, a wealthy businessman.

It is Zhang’s second trip to China with that Chinese mayor, Gary Tong of Southland.
Representatives for both the Labour and National parties did not respond to questions about whether they intended to investigate the foreign political connections of their donors, and the law does not require them to do so.
While politicians cannot accept large donations from foreigners, analysts said lawmakers should be more savvy about where their money comes from.
Anne-Marie Brady, a Canterbury University professor who published a paper about what she called China’s global blueprint for influencing Western democracies, told Radio New Zealand that the government should consider reforming rules around electoral finance, conflicts of interests, and “whether it’s O.K. to be a member of a New Zealand political party and a foreign political party.”
(The New Zealand police and Interpol are investigating a burglary of Ms. Brady’s home in February, which she believes was carried out by agents linked to Beijing.)
In the leaked recording between the two lawmakers, Mr. Ross reminds Bridges that he had also discussed with Zhang a potential political “candidacy” for two of his New Zealand-Chinese business associates. 

In New Zealand, some lawmakers campaign for seats representing a local constituency, while others are selected for Parliament by their political parties, and do not have to run for office.
“Two MPs, yeah,” Bridges can be heard responding, in a reference to members of Parliament. 

Bridges said last week that he had not been promising candidates for cash.
China is New Zealand’s biggest trading partner and New Zealand is hoping to expand a free-trade agreement signed in 2008.
New Zealand is not the only country wrestling with issues of China’s reach. 

Australia in June approved a sweeping national security law that, among other things, requires foreign lobbyists to register on a public list. 

New Zealand, on the other hand, does not require domestic or foreign lobbyists to register.
Australia’s law was prompted by revelations that two businessmen of Chinese descent had donated millions across the political spectrum.
Mr. Ross, the lawmaker who released the recorded call, both resigned and was expelled from the National party last Tuesday, but maintained on Friday that he would remain in Parliament as New Zealand’s only independent lawmaker.