A former Chinese government official who defected to the United States is providing firsthand accounts of how Beijing’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) monitors its citizens domestically and conducts influence operations on American soil, LiveMint reported.
Ma Ruilin spent 24 years rising through China’s Communist Party system in Gansu province, eventually becoming a deputy secretary within the provincial UFWD, according to CNN. He arrived in the US with his family in February 2024 and now operates a noodle restaurant in New York.
In interviews with CNN, Ma described building surveillance databases and developing wristband tracking technology that authorities later deployed against religious minorities, including fellow Hui Muslims.
“The system has always been evil,” Ma told CNN. “If you don’t leave, you’ll keep doing evil there.”
A former mid-ranking Chinese official has emerged as a rare whistleblower in New York, exposing Beijing’s extensive domestic surveillance programs and overseas espionage operations.
Ma Ruilin, a 50-year-old Hui Muslim who formerly served as a deputy secretary in the United Front…
— Spotlight on China (@spotlightoncn) February 28, 2026
Ma said UFWD personnel levels have “basically doubled” since 2019. He added that department operations are “definitely” active within the United States. CNN verified Ma’s identity as a former mid-ranking official through documentation and photographs but stated it could not independently confirm all of his specific claims.
FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Roman Rozhavsky told reporters that “hundreds” of Chinese operatives are currently working inside the United States, describing their presence as a “gross breach of US sovereignty.” He said the operatives are “creating this Orwellian climate of fear” among diaspora communities.
A Jamestown Foundation report released February 11 documented more than 2,000 organizations linked to the UFWD operating across the US, Canada, the UK, and Germany. Nearly half of those groups, 967, are based in the United States.
According to LiveMint, Beijing has denied the allegations. “America on the one hand repeatedly disseminates false information about so-called Chinese spies,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said in January 2024.
