With backing from a Chinese State-owned bank, a real estate tycoon buys Eastridge Center in San Jose and evicts Tribe’s land stewardship program
A Chinese born real estate tycoon, whom activists suspect has covert ties to Communist Party spies operating in diaspora communities in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area, is taking criticism from indigenous groups for evicting a Tribal land care and stewardship program from a property he financed with backing from China’s largest State-owned bank.
Chris Jiashu Xu secured a $98 million loan from the Bank of China, the largest of the Communist Party’s four state-owned banks. He purchased the Eastridge Center in San Jose, CA in January of 2024. This month, he evicted the Green Education Foundation – an environmental charity founded by the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe to do textile recycling work on its aboriginal homeland as a strategy to prevent illegal dumping in it’s creeks and waterways.
The situation is calling attention to what critics fear is a microcosm of a wider nationwide takeover of the United States by Chinese financial interests, while it’s treatment of the aboriginal people of North America is quickly resembling the horrific human rights abuses that the CCP is actively committing against Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, and Falun Gong practitioners, along with Taiwanese citizens.
“This is a manifestation of China’s colonial ambitions, and it should strike fear in the hearts of every American. This behavior is a clear and present threat to American sovereignty and the well being of the American people,” explains Matthew Ricchiazzi, an American Indian activist tells The Inquirer.
The Improbable Meteoric Ascent of a Queens Developer
Chris Jiashu Xu was born in 1967 in Yangzhou, China, and immigrated to the U.S. with his family at 18. He started in manual labor — performing housing-related work with friends — before he and his brother George ran United Plumbing, Heating & Appliance Corp. in Flushing. By 24, he owned the distributorship outright.
Real estate followed almost by accident: after buying the building his plumbing business occupied, Xu formally entered real estate in 1996, later bringing George into the business and co-developing over 1 million square feet through C&G Empire Realty before the brothers split to pursue separate ventures.
United Construction & Development Group grew from there. The firm has developed, operated, and managed over 3 million square feet in Queens across commercial, residential, and industrial projects. Its signature deal came in 2015: a $143 million acquisition of the 3 Court Square site in Long Island City from Citigroup, financed by a $100 million Bank of China land loan. The site became Skyline Tower, briefly the tallest building in Queens and the second-tallest in New York State outside Manhattan. A 2023 penthouse sale there set a local price record at $2,300 per square foot.
The Bank of China is a state-owned bank. It is one of China’s “Big Four” major commercial banks (alongside Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, and Agricultural Bank of China). The Chinese government, through Central Huijin Investment Ltd. (a wholly state-owned subsidiary of China Investment Corporation, the country’s sovereign wealth fund), holds the controlling majority stake. Bank of China is publicly listed on the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges but remains under significant state ownership and influence, operating as a systemically important financial institution aligned with national policy objectives.
It functions as a commercial bank with international branches, including in the U.S., while serving Beijing’s broader economic and strategic goals.
Bank of China recurs throughout Xu’s financing history — an $88 million refinancing and a $100 million construction loan for other Queens projects. Bank of China’s U.S. branches routinely lend to Chinese-American developers. They do not finance political deviants or dissenters.
Growth continued through the pandemic downturn. United Construction bought a $103 million Flushing site in 2022 and a $71 million Rego Park site from Vornado in 2023, bringing his career total to roughly $656 million across 22 deals.
The Eastridge Center opened in 1971 as the largest enclosed mall in the western U.S., anchoring East San Jose, a working-class, majority-Latino and Asian-American district. By the 2020s it was struggling: prior owner Pacific Retail Capital Partners had paid $225 million for it in 2016, then defaulted on a $150 million loan, selling to Xu’s affiliate in January 2024 for $135 million — roughly a 21 percent loss. The purchase was made possible with $98 million from Bank of China’s, ostensibly originating from its Los Angeles branch.
Roots in Resilience: The Muwekma Ohlone and the Green Education Foundation
The organization now at the center of the landlord dispute at Eastridge Center traces its origins to the lived experience and entrepreneurial vision of Charlene Nijmeh, the Chairwoman of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe.
Nijmeh founded the Green Education Foundation as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2012, describing it as “a green initiative of the local Ohlone Tribe.” Raised in a Native American household as the daughter of the tribe’s then-Chairwoman, Rosemary Cambra, she was taught early on about “the responsibility bestowed on the people of this Planet to protect Mother Earth.” That upbringing shaped a career that bridges business acumen with cultural stewardship. Nijmeh also leads an international textile recycling enterprise that diverts roughly 60 million pounds of waste annually, providing both operational expertise and industry connections that GEF has leveraged to scale its mission.
At its core, GEF operates a donation-and-recycling network centered on Neighborhood Donation Recycling Stations (NDRS). These drop-off points, placed in accessible community locations, function much like those run by established charities: residents donate clothing, shoes, and household goods, which are sorted, processed, and either resold or recycled. Proceeds support youth environmental education, creating a self-sustaining loop that turns waste into opportunity.
The logistics are thoughtful and global in reach. Donations move to regional pre-sorting facilities before shipping to Guatemala for further handling. Usable items are repaired and sold in resale markets; the rest becomes fiber or, in the case of worn sneakers, reclaimed rubber. Through partnerships with reprocessors and retailers, GEF created a closed-loop system — reclaiming 100% of donated fibers. By 2020, the foundation was diverting more than 50 million pounds of textiles from landfills each year.
For the Tribe, recycling is a means to a deeper end: shaping the next generation of environmental stewards. GEF’s programs counter mixed messages about consumption by offering hands-on workshops, school outreach, and curricula that connect ecology with cultural responsibility.
Nijmeh’s leadership extends far beyond GEF. As chairwoman since 2018 — succeeding her mother, who served for a 43-year tenure and who championed the tribe’s recognition for decades — she has prioritized land stewardship on the Muwekma Ohlone’s aboriginal homelands in the South Bay. The tribe has collaborated with wide-ranging partners including environmental and Indigenous groups to safeguard open spaces from overdevelopment and wildfire risks. Nijmeh often speaks about traditional responsibilities of the Tribe to care for the land.
In the Eastridge dispute, what appears on the surface as a commercial lease matter lands within a much larger story: a tribe reclaiming voice, land access, and cultural continuity amid modern development pressures. For Nijmeh, GEF, and the Muwekma Ohlone, environmental stewardship is inseparable from Indigenous survival and justice — a quiet but determined stand for the land and the generations to come.
The New York Chinese Business Association
Long before Chris Jiashu Xu became one of Queens’s most prolific developers, he was building a parallel career in New York’s Chinese-American civic world — one centered on an organization known today as the Chinese Business Association of New York, or 纽约华人总商会.
The association was founded in 1990 in Manhattan, according to its current president, Dr. Xu Zhou, organized around the mission of “uniting Chinese merchants, mutual assistance, economic development, and safeguarding shared rights.” Over 35 years it grew into what its leadership now calls one of the most influential business networks for Chinese entrepreneurs and professionals in the city, with members spanning construction, real estate, finance, insurance, manufacturing, import-export trade, media, and food service.
Chris Jiashu Xu‘s involvement traces back to the association’s earlier years. His firm’s own biography credits him with serving as NYCBA president for multiple terms during the 2000s, a period during which membership grew to over 800 individuals. That account is corroborated independently: press coverage of the group’s 34th anniversary gala in 2024 lists “honorary president of the Chinese Business Association of New York, Xu Jiashu” — Xu’s Chinese name — seated among the organization’s elders alongside two other honorary presidents, Wu Zhidong and Xu Jiapeng. The honorary-president title is conferred on past presidents. Xu’s leadership tenure predates the current president’s, through the 2000s.
The association’s activities have run in two primary tracks: domestic civic engagement and charity (often sending money back to China to support ostensibly charitable programs), and cross-border outreach to China. The association has also positioned itself as a political force within New York’s Chinese-American community. Its president has said the group has “actively supported multiple candidates for public office over the past year and repeatedly organized fundraisers for them,” describing its role as an increasingly important vehicle for expanding Chinese-American political influence and advocating for minority representation.
Engagement with Chinese officials
The association’s relationship with China’s consulate in New York is profuse, public, recurring, and attested on the record by the Chinese government itself. The consulate’s own website has repeatedly reported on senior diplomats attending and speaking at the group’s milestone events:
- In September 2012, Consul General Sun Guoxiang attended the association’s 22nd anniversary celebration in Manhattan’s Chinatown and delivered remarks.
- At the 34th anniversary gala in 2024, Deputy Consul General Wu Xiaoming spoke, praising the group’s three-plus decades of “doing good deeds and practical work” and crediting it with “actively promoting economic and trade relations between China and the U.S.” and “supporting the development of the ancestral country.”
- At the 35th anniversary in September 2025, Deputy Consul General You Yize again attended, calling the association “an important grassroots force for China-U.S. friendly exchange” and “the pride of the overseas Chinese community.”
As current honorary president Xu Jiapeng appeared at a China-consulate-organized business event promoting investment from Yangzhou — Chris Jiashu Xu‘s own birth city — where Consul General Huang Ping presided over a “Yangzhou Industry Promotion Conference” in New York in August 2023, attended by Yangzhou’s mayor and deputy mayor alongside representatives of New York State and City government offices.
The United Front: The Espionage and Foreign Influence Playbook
The United Front Work Department traces its roots to 1938, when the CCP Central Committee ordered the establishment of united front work departments under party committees at the district level and above, with a Central United Front Department formally established in January 1939. Its purpose then was tactical: the CCP used united front policies to cooperate with “disaffected warlords, religious believers, ethnic minorities, overseas Chinese, and minor parties and groups,” casting itself as democratic while portraying its Nationalist rivals as illegitimate. That logic — building coalitions of the persuadable while isolating the unpersuadable — has defined the department for nearly a century.
Under Xi Jinping, the department’s scope has expanded considerably.
The UFWD now comprises twelve professional bureaus, with three of them and two of its eight vice-ministers dedicated specifically to overseas work — reflecting, per outside analysts, both the Party’s growing aspirations to influence Chinese diaspora communities and dissatisfaction with the state agencies that previously handled that portfolio. A March 2018 reorganization effectively subordinated the Ministry of Foreign Affairs‘ overseas Chinese policy work to the UFWD. Xi has personally elevated the department’s importance: in 2017 he repeated Mao’s description of united front work as a “magic weapon” for the Party’s success.
According to a 2018 congressional commission report, the UFWD directs “overseas Chinese work,” which seeks to co-opt ethnic Chinese individuals and communities living outside China, while a constellation of affiliated organizations — some with clear United Front links, others more ambiguous — conduct parallel influence operations targeting foreign actors and states. Academic researchers describe the goal in blunter terms: the United Front “cultivates pro-Beijing perspectives in the Chinese diaspora and the wider world by rewarding those it deems friendly with accolades and lucrative opportunities, while orchestrating social and economic pressure against critics.”
A recent open-source mapping effort illustrates the scale: a 2026 study identified more than 2,000 organizations across the United States, Canada, the U.K., and Germany showing direct or indirect connections to the CCP’s united front apparatus, using criteria like personnel overlap, institutional ties, event coordination, or documented engagement with the UFWD or the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
That same research found business associations in particular tend to function as facilitators of “economic exchange and political access,” often coordinating investment forums and official visits — a pattern researchers note is common, not necessarily sinister in every individual case, but one intelligence services have shown willingness to exploit.
Analysts studying the UFWD are careful to draw a distinction that matters for fair reporting: all governments practice influence — public diplomacy by another name. Interference, by contrast, is covert, coercive, and corrupting. The United Front’s basic strategic logic is to identify the “main enemy” in international affairs — the United States — and move those sympathetic to it toward neutrality, and those already neutral toward alignment with the PRC.
Crucially, the UFWD is not an intelligence service in the way MI6, the CIA, or China’s own Ministry of State Security (MSS) are; it does not run agents collecting classified information. But it does cultivate a network of “agents of influence,” and it can provide cover for MSS intelligence officers, handing off assets it develops to the MSS, military intelligence, or other state bodies when useful.
Documented Operations Against Diaspora Communities
Congressional and law-enforcement findings describe concrete tactics beyond routine diplomacy. United front work damages U.S. interests through legal and illegal technology transfer, surveillance of Chinese diaspora communities, promotion of favorable narratives about the PRC through ostensibly independent voices, and the neutralization or harassment of critics of the CCP. On U.S. college campuses, the CCP facilitated the creation of Chinese Students and Scholars Association chapters beginning in the late 1970s specifically to monitor Chinese students abroad and keep their views aligned with Party positions, with PRC diplomatic posts often funding and directing CSSA chapters today.
Repression tactics reach further still. United front-linked pressure and harassment — including threats against family members still in China — have been documented against diaspora Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, and Falun Gong practitioners, along with Taiwanese citizens pressured to support unification and Hong Kong exiles targeted after the territory’s national security law.
Perhaps the most concrete recent finding involves clandestine “service centers” operated by Chinese domestic security agencies on foreign soil. Safeguard Defenders documented a network of “overseas police service centers” globally, first established in early 2022 by China’s Public Security Bureau in partnership with overseas hometown associations — themselves a key United Front target. In the U.S. specifically, researchers identified stations or contact points, including a Fuzhou PSB station in New York City. That site became a federal case: the FBI raided the illegal CCP police station in New York City in October 2022.
Federal law enforcement has brought a growing number of cases tied to this apparatus. In October 2022, the United States Justice Department charged individuals — including members of the PRC’s security and intelligence apparatus and their agents — with unlawfully exerting influence in the United States on Beijing’s behalf. More recently, cases like that of Linda Sun, a Deputy Chief of Staff to New York Governor Kathy Hochul, involved charges of acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government. Investigations have also examined demonstrations and pressure campaigns organized with diplomatic and diaspora involvement.
The Long Reach of Beijing in America’s Chinese Diaspora
New York City’s Chinatown became one of the most literal illustrations of the United Front’s overseas ambitions: an actual clandestine police station operating on American soil. In April 2023, the Justice Department announced that a local branch of China’s Ministry of Public Security had run the outpost inside an office building in Manhattan’s Chinatown. It shut down amid an FBI investigation the previous fall. Officials described it as “a blatant violation of our national sovereignty” and said its functions went well beyond its public cover, including efforts to help Chinese authorities locate a pro-democracy activist living in California.
The station operated inside a familiar kind of institution: a hometown association. The building housed the America Changle Association, established in 1998 to serve Chinese immigrants from Changle, in Fujian province. Prosecutors said its president, Lu Jianwang — known as “Harry Lu” — was using the space to run what China calls an “Overseas Police Service Station,” part of a global surveillance network designed to project Communist Party influence abroad. His defense insisted it was simply a place to renew Chinese driver’s licenses remotely and socialize. The case moved slowly through the courts. Lu’s co-defendant, Chen Jinping, pleaded guilty in late 2024 to acting as an unauthorized agent of the Chinese government. Lu himself was convicted by a federal jury in May 2026 on charges of acting as an unauthorized foreign agent and obstruction of justice, after deleting text messages with his handler once he learned the FBI was investigating.
Community reaction split along predictable lines.
A longtime Chinese-American reporter who had covered Chinatown for decades said he did not believe the association was involved in intelligence collection, though he acknowledged not knowing for certain. A street vendor in the neighborhood took a different view: he would not want to live under the influence of Chinese law enforcement as a U.S. resident and noted that he had seen members of Fujianese community organizations turn out at events welcoming Xi Jinping’s U.S. visits and counter-protesting dissidents. That divide — between organizations that appear to be exactly what they say they are and those suspected of doing more — is precisely the ambiguity U.S. counterintelligence officials say the United Front is built to exploit.
The Chinatown station arrests came bundled with a broader set of cases. The same day, roughly three dozen officers of China’s national police force were charged with using social media to harass U.S.-based dissidents. Eight Chinese officials believed to be in China were charged with directing a China-based Zoom executive to disrupt virtual commemorations of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
New York’s most consequential recent case, however, reached into the state’s own government. In September 2024, Linda Sun — the former deputy chief of staff to Governor Hochul and previously an aide under Governor Andrew Cuomo — was arrested alongside her husband, Chris Hu, on charges of acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government.
Prosecutors alleged that, in exchange for gifts, tickets to Carnegie Hall and the ballet, and millions of dollars in kickbacks, Sun blocked Taiwanese representatives from meeting with state officials, shaped Lunar New Year messaging to omit references to Uyghur detention camps, and worked to advance the interests of the PRC and CCP from inside the governor’s office. One indictment allegation described a Chinese consular official shipping over a dozen Nanjing-style salted ducks, prepared by his personal chef, to Sun’s parents.
The couple allegedly used the proceeds to buy a Long Island home, a Honolulu condo, and a 2024 Ferrari. A Chinese embassy spokesman dismissed the case, telling reporters the U.S. government and media have “frequently hyped up the so-called ‘Chinese agents’ narratives, many of which have later been proven untrue.” Sun’s case went to trial in late 2025 and ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked; prosecutors are seeking a retrial.
Other recent Queens-based cases underscore how routinely this apparatus reaches into the same neighborhoods where many Chinese-American entrepreneurs have built careers and enterprises. In August 2024, Yuanjun Tang, a naturalized citizen living in Flushing, Queens, was charged with acting as an unregistered PRC agent. He was accused of regularly reporting to an MSS intelligence officer on prominent U.S.-based Chinese dissidents and helping infiltrate an encrypted group chat used by pro-democracy activists.
In a separate case that stretched back to 2022, Shujun Wang — a Queens academic who had helped found a pro-democracy organization — was indicted alongside four MSS officers for an espionage and transnational-repression scheme. Wang kept “diaries” of his conversations with dissidents for MSS handlers, and at least one Hong Kong activist he reported on was later arrested by Chinese authorities. A federal jury convicted Wang on all counts in 2024; prosecutors called him “a perfect stooge for the PRC” who “betrayed those who respected and trusted him.”
The San Francisco Bay Area: A Center of Gravity
If New York is a major node, U.S. intelligence officials describe the Bay Area as something closer to the center of gravity. San Francisco, given its proximity to Silicon Valley, its political weight within the Democratic Party, and its large Chinese immigrant population, is described by U.S. officials as the centerpiece of MSS operations in California — reportedly coordinated by the MSS’s 18th Bureau, established around 2010 to manage U.S. operations broadly. One official quoted by Politico put it starkly: “if California is elevated among Chinese interests, San Francisco is like nirvana to the MSS, because of the potential to target community leaders and local politicians who may later become mayors, governors or congressmen.”
That long-game strategy has a name in the historical record: Fang Fang.
Christine Fang, a suspected Chinese intelligence operative, spent years beginning around 2012 cultivating relationships with rising California politicians, participating in fundraising for then-Representative Eric Swalwell’s 2014 campaign, meeting him at events, and helping place an intern in his office. Separately, four former U.S. intelligence officials have said that in the 2000s, a Chinese-community-outreach staffer in Senator Dianne Feinstein’s San Francisco office was passing political intelligence to the MSS, handled by officials working out of China’s San Francisco consulate.
The Bay Area has also seen coordinated, on-the-ground operations timed to political events. Ahead of the 2008 Olympic torch relay through San Francisco, Chinese officials reportedly bused in thousands of Chinese students on J-visas and directed counter-protesters to intimidate demonstrators along the parade route, while suspected intelligence officers filmed Tibetan Buddhist monks marching across the Golden Gate Bridge and surveilled Falun Gong, Uyghur, and pro-Tibet rallies.
The San Francisco consulate itself became the subject of an extraordinary standoff in 2020. Tang Juan, a visiting researcher accused of concealing her status as a PLA-affiliated military scientist on her visa application, evaded arrest by taking refuge inside China’s San Francisco consulate for several weeks — prompting U.S. prosecutors to say the consulate had become “a potential safe harbor” for a fugitive, and to allege the case was part of a broader PLA program sending military scientists to the U.S. under false academic pretenses. The case was ultimately dismissed by a court in 2021.
More recent Bay Area cases have centered on trade-secret theft rather than political influence.
In February 2024, Chenguang Gong, a San Jose engineer, was arrested for allegedly stealing trade-secret technology developed for detecting nuclear missile launches and tracking hypersonic missiles. The following month, a federal grand jury indicted Linwei Ding, a Newark, California resident, on charges of stealing proprietary Google AI technology while secretly working with PRC-based AI companies. Espionage prosecutions have also reached beyond Silicon Valley into the military: in a case announced by the FBI’s San Francisco field office in mid-2025, two Chinese nationals were charged with acting as unregistered PRC agents after allegedly attempting to recruit U.S. military service members, using tradecraft like dead drops to pay their sources, in what officials called a “significant disruption of a covert operation directed by the PRC’s Ministry of State Security.”
These cases illustrate the breadth of documented Chinese state activity in American diaspora communities — from overt influence and consular coordination to covert repression and espionage. They also highlight the challenges of distinguishing legitimate civic and business engagement from operations that cross into interference.
The line remains a central tension in U.S. counterintelligence and public discourse.
This eviction of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe’s Green Education Foundation from the Eastridge Center is more than a routine commercial dispute—it is a stark collision of Indigenous land stewardship with the advancing footprint of Chinese state-linked capital on American soil.
For the Muwekma Ohlone and the Green Education Foundation, the fight is rooted in ancestral responsibility to protect waterways, prevent illegal dumping, and build generational environmental leadership on their aboriginal homelands. Yet it unfolds against a backdrop of documented United Front influence patterns, state-bank financing, and diaspora networks that U.S. authorities have repeatedly linked to broader interference operations.
As American Indian advocates warn, such episodes demand urgent scrutiny: not only for the immediate harm to Tribal self-determination and cultural continuity, but as a microcosm of how foreign authoritarian interests can erode sovereignty, displace vulnerable indigenous populations, and test the resilience of the United States’ own commitments to its First Peoples, and more broadly to all of the American People whose sovereignty becomes threatened.
“The Chinese Communist Party is trying to colonize North America and co-opt our governments — a clear and present threat to American sovereignty, to the American People, and to the Indigenous Peoples of North America,” Ricchiazzi explains. “They are doing it New York, California, and Canada alike. This covert effort to should be resisted, struggled against, and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
“True reconciliation and national security both require rejecting colonial patterns—whether domestic or imported—and prioritizing the rights of Indigenous nations to care for the lands that have sustained creation for millennia,” he adds.
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