Introduction
Ninety years of influence, and of looking away
For most of a century, Americans have tended to see the Chinese Communist Party as they hoped it would be rather than as it was: agrarian reformers, anti-imperialist allies, a future trading partner, a regime about to liberalize. This guide takes a different view.
Our argument is that the CCP's influence in America has worked on two tracks. The first is ideological. Mao's revolution supplied the imagery, slogans, and organizing model for a generation of American radicals, from the Panthers selling the Little Red Book at Berkeley to the Maoist factions that broke apart SDS. Many of them later carried out what they themselves called a long march through the institutions. The second track is operational: agents, money, talent programs, Confucius Institutes, united front networks, hackers, and covert “police stations,” all exploiting an open society that was, in our view, often slow to defend itself.
Opinion and fact are kept separate. Every entry gives the documented record with linked sources and a status label. Our interpretation appears only in clearly marked Our Take boxes. Being critical of the CCP also means being honest about overreach: several famous “China spy” cases ended in acquittals or dropped charges, and those outcomes are reported plainly. The CCP and the Chinese American community are not the same thing, and Chinese Americans are often the party's first targets.
Central Theme
The Long March Through the Institutions
Named after Mao's Long March by Rudi Dutschke (c. 1967), endorsed by Herbert Marcuse (1972), and often compared to Antonio Gramsci's idea of cultural hegemony.
The Timeline
Choose an era
Themes
Threads that run through the eras
Pick a theme to see every related entry, from the 1930s to now, in the search section below. The Long March theme comes first because it ties the ideological and institutional stories together.
Search
Search & filter all entries
Sources & Method
How this guide was built
Entries were researched in October 2026 from government documents (Justice Department, Treasury, CISA, GAO, the State Department's Office of the Historian), court-related reporting, major news organizations (AP, Reuters, BBC, Los Angeles Times, Axios, Politico, San Francisco Chronicle), scholarly and think-tank work (Hoover Institution, NBER, USCC), and Wikipedia overview articles that cite them. Each entry lists one to three sources whose links were checked to load at the time of writing. A few news sites block automated checks, so those links were confirmed through search results instead.
Quotations appear only where the wording was found in a primary or cited source. Elsewhere the guide paraphrases.
Point of view. This guide has an editorial position: it is critical of the CCP and gives weight to the long-march interpretation of American institutional change. That position appears only in boxes labeled Our Take and in the Long March essay. The sections labeled The Record contain only sourced statements of fact, and readers can draw their own conclusions from them.
Fairness. An indictment is an accusation, not a finding of guilt. Entries say when cases ended in acquittal, dismissal, a hung jury, or lesser pleas, and when people named in reporting were never charged. The guide also covers the documented history of suspicion falling on Chinese Americans because of their ethnicity, from the McCarthy era to the China Initiative.
Limits. This is an overview, not a complete record. Some stories are still developing, such as the Linda Sun retrial and the Eileen Wang sentencing. Readers should check the linked sources for the latest developments.
Status labels
Key overview sources
Image Credits
Pictures & licenses
All images come from Wikimedia Commons and are public domain or under the licenses shown. They were downloaded and resized for this guide. When no photo of the person or event itself was available, the entry uses an image of a related place, document, or institution, and the caption says so.