Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) waved the flag of communist China over the weekend in New York City after the organizers of the city’s Chinese Lunar New Year Parade played China’s national anthem.
National Review reported that the incident happened on Sunday and that Schumer appeared on stage with “Huang Ping, a hard-line Chinese ambassador who publicly denies Beijing’s human-rights abuses, and Wu Xiaoming, a senior consular official linked to China’s secret police station in New York.”
While the Chinese national anthem was playing, Schumer briefly held his hand over his heart. He later picked up the Chinese flag with one hand and the American flag with the other and waved both flags.
WATCH:
New: Senator Chuck Schumer waved the People's Republic of China flag onstage at a Lunar New Year event on Sunday.
He and other top New York politicians appeared onstage at a rally, preceding an annual parade in Manhattan’s Chinatown, alongside Huang Ping, a hard-line Chinese… pic.twitter.com/seqf0RhOl0
— Jimmy Quinn (@james_t_quinn) February 26, 2024
Schumer’s actions come as China steals billions of dollars worth of intellectual property from American businesses, causing serious economic damage every year.
“They already have built economic espionage and theft of personal and corporate data as a kind of a bedrock of their economic strategy and are eagerly pursuing AI advancements to try to accelerate that process,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray.
China is also engaging in malicious cyber attacks at an unprecedented scale to disrupt U.S. infrastructure, Wray said during testimony last month in front of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
“There has been far too little public focus on the fact that PRC [People’s Republic of China] hackers are targeting our critical infrastructure—our water treatment plants, our electrical grid, our oil and natural gas pipelines, our transportation systems—and the risk that poses to every American requires our attention now,” Wray said. “China’s hackers are positioning on American infrastructure in preparation to wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities, if and when China decides the time has come to strike.”
Wray said that China “has a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined,” adding: “In fact, if each one of the FBI’s cyber agents and intelligence analysts focused exclusively on the China threat, China’s hackers would still outnumber FBI cyber personnel by at least 50 to 1.”
Wray specifically called out the Chinese Communist Party, saying their “multi-pronged assault on our national and economic security” included “low blows against civilians.”
“The PRC’s cyber onslaught goes way beyond pre-positioning for future conflict. Today, and literally every day, they’re actively attacking our economic security—engaging in wholesale theft of our innovation and our personal and corporate data,” he said. “The PRC cyber threat is made vastly more dangerous by the way they knit cyber into a whole-of-government campaign against us. They recruit human sources to target our businesses, using insiders to steal the same kinds of innovation and data their hackers are targeting while also engaging in corporate deception—hiding Beijing’s hand in transactions, joint ventures, and investments—to do the same.”