China’s secret weapon seducing the West

China has spent decades training and deploying women to seduce, manipulate, and extract secrets on foreign diplomats, businessmen, and even students. Some targets knew, most had no idea, but once you're in, there's no getting out. It's called a honey trap. Tonight we'll discuss the U.S.-China rivalry isn't just about tariffs, trade, military confrontation. It's also about intelligence, secrets, and sex. As tensions heat up, the U.S. is taking serious steps to shield its people from one of Beijing's dirtiest tricks. So here's what just happened. Right before stepping down, outgoing U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns implemented a sweeping new rule. No more romantic or sexual relationships between U.S. government personnel in China and Chinese nationals. That includes embassy staff, consulate workers, contractors with security clearance, and even their family members. This is not a small matter. We haven't seen a blanket ban like this since the Cold War. Back in 1987, after a U.S. Marine in Moscow got seduced by a Soviet spy, Washington barred American personnel from dating locals in the Soviet bloc and in China. Those rules were relaxed after the U.S.S.R. collapsed in 1991. Now with China getting more aggressive, it looks like history is repeating itself. I want to show you a book written by Ethan Gutman, who had years of experience doing business in Beijing. His book is called Losing the New China. He describes how some American businessmen in Beijing completely lost their moral compass. Where anything goes, they ended up falling into CCP's traps. It tells how Chinese public relations firms would arrange lavish hotel rooms, drinks, charming company, and then everything was recorded. Not for fun, but for leverage, blackmail, influence, and control. In 2002, Xinhua News actually reported a Communist Party branch being set up in Beijing's famous bar district, Sanlitun, which is a hub frequented by foreigners. The party branch included bar owners, bodyguards, and, yes, prostitutes. These women catered almost exclusively to foreigners. Gutman described how American businessmen were lured into this web. These romantic encounters are not accidents. They are setups, and China knows exactly what it's doing. Just a week ago, Chinese author Du Zheng, who used to be in the CCP, in mainland China, published a 4,000-word exposé in Taiwanese outlet Up Media. His article lays out how the CCP has used women as weapons, not just in isolated cases, but as part of a long-running calculated system to achieve strategic goals. Mr. Du said that the CCP has had a mission called Red Women's Army Project for the past four decades. According to Mr. Du, back in the 1980s, right after China opened up to the world, a retired official told him that the CCP had launched a secret operation to train a new generation of female agents, specially groomed to be sent overseas. Their assignment? Get close to foreign targets, marry them if necessary, extract intelligence, influence politics, and build networks. At the time, Mr. Du brushed it off. It sounded too far-fetched. But years later, other insiders confirmed it was all real, and it ran under the umbrella of China's MSS, or Ministry of State Security. So where did they find these women? Top foreign language universities in Beijing became recruitment hubs. Candidates were carefully vetted. Only those with quote-unquote clean political backgrounds were considered. Many were the daughters of party officials. The thinking was simple. Loyalty runs in the family. These agents aren't just politically loyal. They are well-educated, articulate, and well-trained to blend in seamlessly with foreign societies. Some were sent abroad right away. Others stayed in China to build a fake civilian career. Journalists, scholars, PR reps, until the right time, came to deploy them overseas. Many ended up marrying foreign nationals, especially men who had access to sensitive industries, defense, or politics. Beijing referred to them as strategic assets. One of the key players in all of this was a princeling heavyweight named Ye Xuanying. He was the son of CCP elder Ye Jianying. He wore many hats. The vice president of China Association for International Friendly Contact, the head of PLA's General Political Liaison Department, and he ran espionage operations under the guise of a company called Kaili Industrial Company. His mission? To fund intelligence work and lead espionage campaigns against foreign countries, particularly Taiwan. Under his leadership, it was said that 3,000 Chinese sleeper agents were deployed overseas. Some say the real number is close to 30,000. After Xi Jinping came to power, Mr. Ye handed over his massive overseas covert network directly to Xi. One source told Mr. Du that MSS recruiters were regularly visiting universities. Students would get short-term training, but once you are in, you are in for life. There's no quitting, no walking away. And it's not just the MSS. The militaries, intelligence divisions, the foreign ministry, and most notably, the United Front Work Department, all are part of the same playbook. And yes, they were all recruiting women, lots of them. So together, they form a silent army, not of soldiers, but of charmers, lovers, wives, girlfriends, strategically placed all over the world. Their playbook, their strategy, or their formula for success, and it's very simple. It's called the blue, gold, yellow approach. So here's how it works. Blue means they study the targets, control the flow of information of the targets. That means cyber surveillance, hacking, censorship, and online mind games with the targets. Gold simply means throw money at the person in the form of business contracts, deals you can't resist, such as generous monthly retainers, gifts, bribes, free trips, whatever it takes to catch you to go to Beijing. And yellow, so yellow means exploit your desire through seduction, romance, sex, emotional entanglements. They'll let you run into a woman of your dream and start an affair. You thought you met your dream girl, but only to find out later that there are other hidden agenda. So if you're a foreign businessman, a visiting official, a researcher, a scholar, a professor, or even just a student, you are fair game. Many of those who accepted all-expense-paid trips to China particularly fell into this trap. Even exchange students weren't spared. Some were quietly assigned study companions who just happened to be romantic partners. The CCP's formula is simple. Find your weakness, fulfill your desire, and then they own you. China's use of honey traps is a global operation. Absolutely, it's everywhere. Let's go through some examples. The first case is someone you're very familiar with, Christine Fan, or Fan Fan. She posed as a student in California, managed to charm her way into the inner circles of US politics. She formed close relationships with several American politicians, most notably Congressman Eric Swalwell from California, who later sat on the House Intelligence Committee. I think he was kicked out of the committee recently. Was he? Yeah. And when the FBI started digging into Fan Fan's activities, she fled back to China. Another notable figure is former foreign minister Qin Gang's mistress, Fu Xiaotian, TV anchor Fu Xiaotian. It's another famous one. Well, she attended, I think, one of the foreign language institutes in China, has a master's degree from Cambridge University, and her job is to interview dignitaries around the world. So she certainly seduced China's former minister and somehow caused his downfall. Some say she's a double agent working for both China and the West. The next I want to mention is the highest ranking American diplomat who is rumored to have an affair with a Chinese spy is Gary Locke. He suddenly resigned after two years into the ambassadorship due to personal reasons and later divorced his wife, even though his wife denied extramarital affair. It's widely rumored that Gary Locke had an affair with a famous Chinese TV anchor who was also educated in the West. She was educated in the United States. Many believe this Chinese woman is also a top CCP spy, targeting foreign VIPs or VVIPs. So CCP has also gone after top military figures. Here's a Taiwanese general. His name is Luo Xianzhe, a former Taiwanese army major general who was stationed in Thailand as a military attache. Chinese operatives obtained access to his phone and discovered a personal weakness of General Luo. Women. That's when Li Peiqi, the young officer from China's Ministry of State Security, was sent in. The young woman posed as a businesswoman in international trade. So she seduced General Luo, compromised him, and recruited him. Another one down. It also happened in Canada. There's a Canadian parliament member, his name is Bob Dechart. He's a Canadian member of parliament. He's also a parliamentary secretary in the foreign ministry. He publicly apologized for his relationship with a Chinese woman, Shi Rong, who was a journalist from China's Xinhua News Agency. After the story broke, the Chinese woman was quietly recalled back to China. Damage done. It also happened in Japan in February 2024, and this was recent. Two Chinese women were arrested in Japan on fraud charges. Both were believed to be part of China's overseas police network. One of them, He Lihong, held a Japanese senate pass and served as both foreign affairs secretary and advisor to Senator Shinsuke Matsushita, a rising political star in Japan. Japanese reporters captured the senator and his Chinese mistress visiting a Chinese political donor, walking out with gifts, then the two making out in a car. The fallout, the senator's marriage collapsed, and his political reputation ruined. In Germany, that's in 2020, police raided the home and office of former EU ambassador to South Korea. His name is Sabatier, who was suspected of leaking intelligence to Beijing. His problem at the time, he had a living girlfriend, who is a young Chinese woman he met during her internship at the EU headquarters. Prosecutors couldn't find enough hard evidence to prosecute him, but the cloud of suspicion never lifted. Some honey traps are short term. One night stand, a compromising video, a whispered confession, but others are part of something much deeper and more dangerous, long-term embedding. Relationships, marriages, children. The most famous case is reportedly Rupert Murdoch's wife, Wendy Dunn. So in early 2017, US counterintelligence officials reportedly warned Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law, that Wendy Dunn Murdoch might be using her close friendship with him and his wife, Ivanka Trump, to further China's interests. In 2017, a Japanese magazine reviewed that at least 50,000 Chinese spies were active in Japan. Their primary targets were members of the Japanese Defense Forces, or SDF. So from Tokyo to Osaka to Nagasaki, they used students, waitresses, karaoke hostesses, and even massage parlor workers, training them to approach Japanese military men. The tactics were very simple. Friendly conversation, a shared umbrella in the rain, and before long, an invitation to visit, a friendship, and then relationship, sometimes a marriage. An investigative report later found that around 800 Japanese Self-Defense Forces members had married foreign women, and 70% of these foreign wives were Chinese nationals. Many worked near military bases. Others were linked to karaoke bars with ties to China's Ministry of Public Security. Their mission? You can guess. Get close and stay close. As Chinese society's moral compass eroded, the CCP's honey trap operations only got bolder and murkier. Culver's spy programs have become more open and pervasive throughout Chinese society. Today, it's not just trained agents running seduction operations. Many of the women deployed in these missions come straight from private sectors. They're disguised as PR agents. It's even more difficult for foreigners to tell. The Chinese word lust has a knife right on top of it, and that's not just a coincidence. There's a saying that goes, on top of the word lust sits a knife. In Chinese, we say, so in the world of politics, diplomacy, and espionage, what feels like love might just be the sharpest weapon of all.