Heather Zhang and the Party’s Old Profession

A spy arrested at LAX, a love-letter film enlisted by the United Front, and a regime that treats overseas Chinese as cash, cover and cannon fodder

By Fedor Vostin

A Flight to Shanghai, Missed

On Sunday, October 4, FBI agents stopped a 34-year-old real estate agent from Irvine, California, at Los Angeles International Airport, minutes before she was due to board a flight to Shanghai. Wanying “Heather” Zhang, a naturalized American citizen, is charged with acting as an unregistered agent of the People’s Republic of China.

According to the FBI’s affidavit, Zhang received her assignment in June 2025 in a private room in Changsha, from an official of the Chinese government. In September 2025 she travelled to the Seattle area, where she allegedly filmed the home and vehicles of a young engineer and his family, and sent photographs, video and licence plate numbers to her handlers over WeChat. American law enforcement sources identified the target as Lai Ting-yu, son of Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te. Taiwan’s Presidential Office called it a classic case of transnational repression.

The case will go through the courts, and Zhang is presumed innocent until a verdict. But one part of the story was settled within forty-eight hours, and it did not come from Washington.

On October 6, China’s foreign ministry spokesman was asked about the arrest. He said he was not aware of the situation, and that China has always opposed the hyping of so-called “Chinese spies” to smear China.

No hesitation and no curiosity: just a door closing. Whoever Heather Zhang is, the state she is accused of serving had already stopped knowing her name.

The Same Ministry, the Same Year

The same foreign ministry has spent this year on a very different assignment.

On July 6, it invited some 150 diplomats from 74 embassies in Beijing to watch a film. A Love Letter to Grandma (给阿嬷的情书) is a small Teochew-language drama about qiaopi, the letters and remittances that migrants in Southeast Asia once sent to their villages in southern China. In it, a woman in Thailand spends eighteen years writing letters and sending money to a grandmother in China, so that the old woman never learns her husband is gone. Released on April 30, the film has taken more than two billion yuan.

An assistant foreign minister told the assembled diplomats that he hoped the film would help them understand China better. Chinese ambassadors hosted premieres in Kuala Lumpur and Manila. In Manila, the ambassador said the film would show audiences the fine character of “the Chinese nation.”

At home, the machinery was even less subtle. In Anhui, a district United Front Work Department organized screenings for returned overseas Chinese and their relatives. Its stated purpose included uniting overseas Chinese so that they would actively invest in building up their ancestral hometowns. In Hunan, a municipal party school took its entire spring class to the cinema with instructions to view the film from a United Front perspective. Overseas Chinese federations, party branches and state employers across the country bought blocks of tickets.

Whatever its makers intended, the party has turned the film into a United Front instrument. And in a single year, the same foreign ministry did two things: it disowned a woman accused of spying for the state, and it campaigned to persuade the grandchildren of Southeast Asian migrants that their grandparents’ letters were, at bottom, letters to Beijing.

These are not contradictions. They are the two hands of one trade.

The Old Profession

The Chinese Communist Party was never an ordinary political party. It was founded in 1921 with the guidance and money of the Communist International, Moscow’s agency for exporting revolution. Its first job was not to win votes. It was to build clandestine networks loyal to a foreign headquarters.

The method had been proven in Russia. In 1917, Lenin crossed wartime Germany with German help, because Berlin calculated that one Bolshevik in Petrograd was worth more than an army division. The Bolsheviks then built the apparatus that defined Soviet rule: underground cells, political police, foreign intelligence, front organizations, and the habit of treating every human tie as a possible channel of control.

The Chinese party learned this trade before it governed a single province. Infiltration, united-front work and the cultivation of sympathizers abroad were not distortions of its character. They were its character. Heather Zhang’s alleged mission is not a deviation from the party’s history. It is a page from it.

What the Party Did to the Letters

The film treats the qiaopi as a story about love. The party’s own records tell a story about money and fear.

During the land reform of the early 1950s, cadres in the emigrant counties of Guangdong and Fujian treated families with relatives abroad as class enemies. By the party’s own later admission, some work teams arrested these families, tortured them, and forced them to write to relatives overseas begging for money to buy their release. Households with no land were classified as landlords simply because remittances arrived. In Quanzhou, village cadres learned of a remittance before the family did, and appeared at the door to demand “contributions.” Frightened families wrote abroad asking relatives to stop sending money.

In the film, letters carry love across the sea. In those years, some letters were ransom notes written under torture.

The money mattered to Beijing. In 1956, Liao Chengzhi, the official in charge of overseas Chinese affairs, complained that remittances had collapsed and that the state was running out of foreign exchange. Half the country’s hard currency came from non-trade sources such as remittances, he said, and the state needed it to fund aid to North Korea, Vietnam, Burma and Cambodia. The wages of tin miners and shopkeepers in Malaya and Siam were being converted into the budget for exporting revolution back into their own region.

The fix came from Moscow. The officials who designed China’s remittance coupons and special Overseas Chinese stores later said the idea came from a Soviet precedent: Torgsin. Ukrainians remember Torgsin for one thing. During the famine of 1932–33, starving peasants wrote to relatives abroad, the relatives sent hard currency, and the Soviet state kept all of it, handing the hungry only Torgsin credit to spend on its own overpriced flour. People pulled out gold teeth to buy bread.

China ran its own version during its own famine. A CIA assessment from 1961 estimated that remittances reached about $55 million in 1960, and that Beijing was pressing overseas Chinese to send more while it struggled to pay for grain imports. Many emigrants sent food parcels instead. They understood where cash would go.

Then came the Cultural Revolution, and the people who had served as the state’s cash supply became its enemies. More than 30,000 returnees and relatives of overseas Chinese were branded collaborators, spies or counter-revolutionaries because of their overseas ties. Letters from abroad became evidence of treason. Remittances sent to feed elderly parents were denounced as “spy funds.” One slogan called emigrant districts a “United Nations of spies.”

When the party needed money, overseas Chinese were a cash machine. When it needed enemies, they were spies. At no point were they simply people writing to their grandmothers.

Southeast Asia Said No

Southeast Asia is where Beijing’s claims on overseas Chinese were tested hardest, and where they failed.

When Japan’s offensive of 1941–42 drove the British, Dutch and Americans out of the region within months, it destroyed the belief that European rule was permanent. Japanese occupation brought its own brutality. But after 1945, the peoples of Southeast Asia did not wait to be handed back to their former masters. They built states of their own, and those states soon faced a second test: insurgencies backed by Moscow and Beijing.

They passed it.

In Malaya, the Communist Party launched an armed insurgency in 1948. Twelve years later it was broken, and Malaya went on to form Malaysia, sovereign and outside the communist bloc. In Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew’s government outmanoeuvred a communist united front that had penetrated unions, schools and even his own party, and built one of the most successful states in Asia. In Thailand, the Communist Party of Thailand took up arms in 1965, with a Beijing-backed radio station broadcasting its message. Bangkok fought it in the hills, then broke it politically with the amnesty order of 1980. By the mid-1980s, the guerrillas had come down from the mountains and gone home.

In Indonesia, the stakes were highest. By 1965, the Indonesian Communist Party claimed some three million members, the largest communist party outside the communist world, and Sukarno was proclaiming a Jakarta–Peking axis. After the failed putsch of September 30, that axis collapsed. In 1967 Red Guards ransacked the Indonesian embassy in Beijing; Jakarta suspended relations and did not restore them until 1990.

None of these states became Beijing’s satellite. Communist propaganda told every one of them that history was on the revolution’s side. Every one proved otherwise. That is the real story of postwar Southeast Asia: Asian nations, freed from European rule, refusing to trade it for rule by a party whose headquarters had once been in Moscow.

The Hostage Strategy

Indonesia’s victory came with a massacre. At least half a million people were killed in 1965–66. Many had no connection to the Communist Party. Chinese Indonesians were among the victims, killed because their neighbours had been taught to see them as Beijing’s agents.

Who taught them? Beijing did. And the man who sat at the table for Beijing understood the trade better than anyone alive.

Before he was premier, Zhou Enlai ran the Communist Party’s secret service in Shanghai, an organization built on Soviet methods: informant networks, safe houses, couriers and assassination squads. In 1931, after a senior operative named Gu Shunzhang defected, the service Zhou had built killed members of Gu’s family. This was the school Zhou came from. The Comintern, meanwhile, had long used Chinese communities in Southeast Asia as channels. The Malayan Communist Party was founded in 1930 with the Comintern’s envoy, Ho Chi Minh, in attendance. The Comintern’s bureau in Shanghai moved money and couriers across the region until its chief, Hilaire Noulens, was arrested in 1931.

In 1955, at the Bandung conference, this same Zhou Enlai signed a treaty with Indonesia on dual nationality. Its message to Jakarta was soothing: Chinese Indonesians must choose one citizenship, and those who chose Indonesia would no longer be China’s.

Every Leninist party runs on two tracks. The state signs treaties; the party runs networks. Moscow perfected this in the 1920s, when its foreign ministry signed agreements with governments that its Comintern was simultaneously working to subvert. The Bandung treaty did not dismantle Beijing’s network among Chinese Indonesians. It gave the network a passport. Over the next decade, pro-Beijing activists captured Chinese-language schools, newspapers and associations, and the embassy cultivated them. An ethnic Chinese with an Indonesian passport and a pro-Beijing school board was exactly what a united-front department wants: legally local, politically reachable.

Whatever role Beijing did or did not play on the night of September 30, its responsibility for what followed does not depend on it. It had spent ten years making millions of shopkeepers, teachers and children look like its forward detachment. When the killing began, it offered radio broadcasts and a few evacuation ships. Those who reached China were settled on state farms, and within a few years the Cultural Revolution was interrogating them as spies.

Beijing’s “protection” was never protection. It was bait. A party that let tens of millions of its own peasants starve during the Great Leap Forward was never going to treat shopkeepers in Surabaya as anything but expendable. Alive and trusted, overseas Chinese were money and networks. Alive and suspected, they were frightened people with nowhere to turn but Beijing. Dead, they were material for propaganda about anti-Chinese atrocities. Brought home, they were suspects. Every outcome served the party. That is what cannon fodder means.

The party has never paid for any of it. Other people pay. In 1965 they paid with their lives.

Heather Zhang’s case runs on the same logic, in miniature. If the charges are true, the party sent a naturalized American to spy on a Taiwanese family on American soil, and disowned her the moment she was caught. The cost does not fall on Zhongnanhai. It falls on every Chinese American realtor, engineer and student who will now be looked at twice. The party manufactures the suspicion, then offers itself as the only shelter. The shelter has always been a trap.

Born for No One’s Ministry

So let it be said plainly.

No child of Chinese descent, in Bangkok or Penang, Surabaya or Manila, Vancouver or Irvine or anywhere else on this earth, was born to serve China’s Ministry of State Security. Their grandparents did not cross the South China Sea in leaking junks so that a party founded on Moscow’s payroll could one day claim their grandchildren as assets.

The labourers who died in tin mines and on rubber estates, the shopkeepers who sent home every spare coin, owed nothing to a regime that tortured their families for ransom, diverted their remittances into revolutionary adventures, and branded their letters as treason. Their descendants owe it even less.

Ancestry is not a contract. Blood is not a security clearance. A surname is not a recruitment form. Every person of Chinese descent who refuses Beijing’s claim on them is not betraying their heritage. They are reclaiming it from the people who abused it.

A Regime That Sends Diplomats to the Cinema

Why now? Why does a state that calls itself the world’s rising power need its foreign ministry and its United Front Work Department to sell tickets to a family drama?

Because the harder currencies of influence have run out. For three decades Beijing did not need to persuade anyone. Growth did the persuading. Foreign companies came for the market, investors came for the returns, and overseas Chinese entrepreneurs came because there was money to be made.

That era is over. The property bubble has collapsed, local governments are buried in debt, foreign investment has drained away, and the young cannot find work. A regime that can no longer offer prosperity falls back on what it has left: nostalgia, ancestry and guilt. The Anhui United Front department said the quiet part out loud: the point of the screenings was to get overseas Chinese to invest in their hometowns. Seventy years after cadres stood at the door waiting for the remittance slip, the party is standing at the cinema exit waiting for the same money.

A strong state promotes a film by letting audiences find it. A weak state sends ambassadors to stand in cinema lobbies and party schools to march students into the stalls. When the party turns a grandmother’s love letters into a diplomatic and United Front campaign, it is admitting that it has nothing better to sell. The last time a Leninist state worked this hard to turn family feeling across borders into hard currency, it was Moscow in 1932, and the shops were called Torgsin.

The Letters Were Never Addressed to Beijing

The film tells the story of people who crossed the sea, built lives abroad, and kept their families alive through private acts of loyalty. Their sacrifice belonged to them. It does not need the Communist Party to give it meaning, and their descendants do not need Beijing to tell them who they are.

A century ago, the Bolsheviks showed how a political movement could use foreign help, secret networks and borrowed loyalties to seize power. Their Chinese heirs learned the trade, won a state, and have practised the profession ever since: extracting money from the diaspora in good years, branding it as traitors in bad years, recruiting from it when convenient, and disowning its recruits when caught.

That is the real history behind the love letters. A woman from Irvine is facing federal charges. A ministry in Beijing says it has never heard of her. And across Southeast Asia, millions of people whose grandparents wrote those letters are deciding, again, that they owe the party nothing.

They are right. The letters were addressed to grandmothers. They were never addressed to Beijing.