New Yorkers may have been surprised last week when a former aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo — Linda Sun — was arrested and charged with being a spy for the Chinese government. But experts argue we shouldn’t be so shocked, as Chinese espionage is becoming common across the United States.

“Maybe it was that communist Chinese spy Linda Sun who worked in your administration,” Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis said during a GOP-led congressional subcommittee questioning of Cuomo’s pandemic-era nursing home policies on Tuesday.

Cuomo described Sun as a low level aide.

“She was a junior member in my team. I would not recognize her if she was in this room today,” Cuomo said. “But I think it is a serious matter.”

A 64-page federal indictment charges that while working for Cuomo, Sun organized meetings between then-Lt. Gov. Hochul and Chinese nationals and forged Hochul’s signatures. She’s now charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, money laundering and helping people commit visa fraud to enter the U.S.

Sun’s release conditions block her from traveling to or talking with officials tied to the Chinese consulate. She pleaded not guilty to all charges.

“There is an effort by Beijing, by the Chinese Communist Party to target many, if not most, if not all, state governments in the United States,” said Peter Mattis, president of the Washington-based think tank, the Jamestown Foundation. The group tracks the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to infiltrate U.S. public and private life.

Mattis said the CCP’s goal is to assert China’s dominance worldwide.

“To achieve the party’s dream of national rejuvenation, sort of a comprehensive modernization of making China the most powerful and influential country in the world,” he said. “They need access to technology. They want access to legitimacy to keep up these connections that allow them to exploit universities, companies.”

The U.S. Department of Justice said 80% of economic espionage cases “allege conduct that would benefit the Chinese state,” in a 2021 report.

“It’s fair to say that the White House, and probably over the last two administrations, that dealing with these kinds of issues has been a priority because we’ve seen a steady stream of indictments and changes,” Mattis said.

Last year, the DOJ charged two men for operating an illegal police station in Lower Manhattan for China. There’s also an effort to infiltrate and even intimidate Chinese expats and Americans of Chinese descent.

“But they also very often use, say family members, back in China, to use collective punishment against those people if someone is considered not to be behaving,” said Laura Harth, the campaign director for Safeguard Democracies, a self-described human rights NGO.

The Washington Post investigated allegations traced back to Beijing, aimed at intimidating Chinese populations in San Francisco.

“They may use measures such as passport control or Visa policies, so that people are either forced to travel back to China to get their documents, or maybe cannot travel back to China to say, meet with their family unless they comply with certain guidelines,” Harth said.

In New York, Korean-American State Assemblyman Ron Kim represents a district that is majority Chinese.

He recalled receiving personal threats by Linda Sun, at the behest of ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2021.

“The last interaction I’ve had with her, when she was working with the former governor, was when she tried to facilitate a number of times to get me back on the phone with Governor Cuomo at the time so I can retract the statement to the New York Post regarding a story about him covering up nursing home deaths,” Kim told NY1.

Kim fell out of favor with Cuomo over the state’s refusal to release a full accounting of nursing home-related deaths due to COVID-19.

“It’s like David versus Goliath. Here’s, at that time in 2020, the most powerful Democrat, arguably one of the most powerful Democrats in the entire nation,” Kim said.

Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Cuomo, pushed back on Kim’s account, arguing “no one told her to do that and it’s probably not true.”

“On Linda Sun, as the governor said yesterday she was a junior aide in his administration but the lesson here is that no matter how rigorous the background checks are, state and local governments don’t have the resources to know if someone is on the radar of the intelligence community. The feds do and they should be sharing their resources to help prevent these situations,” Azzopardi said.