Accusations of Chinese Communist Party Ties Roil County Clerk Race in Texas
How deep do this candidate's ties to the CCP go?
A suburban county clerk race in a red state generally doesn't generate a lot of drama. It certainly doesn't raise alarm bells over Chinese Communist Party influence over domestic politics. But in 2026, years of lackadaisical attention to our global adversaries has resulted in poor oversight of their activities in our homeland. Which brings us to the race for clerk in Fort Bend County, Texas, where one candidate has faced increasing scrutiny.
Zhang Jingjing, better known by the anglicized name JJ Clemence, checks all the right boxes to get involved in Texas politics: She was born in Anhui Province, China, where she earned her bachelor's degree in accounting and finance. She then naturalized as a U.S. citizen and earned her master's degree from a small Christian university in Kansas.
Clemence has long volunteered for various local and county Republican committees, including a stint on the finance committee of the Fort Bend GOP, just outside Houston. She has worked for multiple Republican congressmen and the local school district. Clemence also has extensive experience in local political offices, conducting fiscal audits of various local agencies. She publicly supports American values whenever she gets a chance, presenting herself as a champion of individual liberty. Prominent establishment figures in the Texas GOP have endorsed her.
So why have conservative activists begun sounding the alarm?
Whither JJ Clemence?
The warning bells about Clemence began in 2025 with Houston's Chinese community.
Chinese ex-pats who emigrated to the United States to avoid persecution by the CCP have reported extensive efforts by various government groups to conduct surveillance on Chinese people living here, infiltrate political parties and offices, and influence public policy with pro-CCP sympathies.
A Substack account called Vermillion China published an article about the wider activities of the CCP in the greater Houston area in February 2025. The authors, who've remained anonymous to avoid repercussions for family members still living in China, state their goals up front:
This article focuses on activities conducted by the United Front Work Department (UFWD), a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organization that General Secretary Xi Jinping refers to as a "magic weapon" for achieving victory. To gain greater insight into the UFWD, please read this article by Alex Joske from the Australian Strategic Policy Initiative (ASPI). It is the most comprehensive English-language overview of the UFWD.
In this article we often mention "overseas Chinese" (CN) communities (华侨华人). This is a term used by the CCP to describe overseas Chinese populations that are coerced to advocate for pro-CCP narratives in their host countries. Some individuals also act as informal intelligence assets, collecting information, countering narratives critical of Beijing, and influencing unwitting decision-makers.
The article describes in significant detail how the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) coordinate with Chinese Service Centers to "guide overseas Chinese activities, integrate into existing Chinese society, and expand influence by creating a network of government, civil society, and other overseas Chinese organizations." Nearly four dozen of these centers have been set up around the world—including seven in the United States.
JJ Clemence comes up due to her involvement with the Anhui Association of Texas (also known as the Texas Anhui Hometown Association, or TAHA), the Texas Association for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification of China (which opposes Taiwan independence), and the Bengbu City Returned Overseas Chinese Federation. Until very recently, Clemence was listed as a member of the board of directors of TAHA. Her bio has now been scrubbed.
All three of these organizations are known to have direct ties to the UFWD.
Activists have voiced concerns that, if elected as county clerk, Clemence would have direct access to sensitive taxpayer records. They've asked that her potential ties to the CCP be examined.
The United Front Work Department
According to Philip Lenczycki of the Daily Caller:
A Chinese intelligence agency quietly operates "service centers" in seven American cities, all of which have had contact with Beijing's national police authority, according to state media reports and government records reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) United Front Work Department (UFWD) — which at least one U.S. government commission has characterized as a "Chinese intelligence service" — operates so-called "Overseas Chinese Service Centers" (OCSCs) that are housed within various U.S.-based nonprofits. OCSCs were ostensibly set up to promote Chinese culture and assist Chinese citizens living abroad, according to Chinese government records.
Restoration News has previously reported on a social media influencer and former Democratic bundler for the Kamala Harris campaign, Lindy Li, who suddenly and inexplicably switched to a MAGA Trump supporter something like five minutes after he won the 2024 election. Li continues to appear on conservative news broadcasts as a commentator. Her deep connections to China's United Front go back at least a generation, as her parents have been involved for decades in various Philadelphia-area Chinese civic organizations.
The danger of the CCP's United Front was explained at the time by Solomon Yue, who escaped Maoist China in 1980:
In a February 2025 post on X, Solomon Yue detailed her duplicitous statements. He noted that Li went to China to attend an event conducted by the CCP's state media, the Sino-US Leadership Training Camp for young American. Yue goes into great detail explaining Li's extensive connections to figures from China's United Front, which organizes intel-gathering operations by Chinese nationals living abroad, including throughout the United States.
Involvement in the United Front, and various civic organizations related to it, amounts to far more than mere cultural pride and love of the motherland. The UFWD functions as a two-way information superhighway, and a conduit for the CCP to influence the Chinese diaspora, and those they involve themselves with in their adopted home countries.
Through her years of involvement in Chinese civic organizations, JJ Clemence has earned the right to be photographed with and work with high-ranking Chinese officials several times—an honor not generally bestowed on less important Chinese people living in the U.S.
Why was @JingClemence seated at CCP Consul General Li's head table? JJ's father is a loyal party man who praises CCP's greatness & says "the motherland is the eternal mother in my heart" while he was living in America. Apple doesn't fall far from the tree.https://t.co/mep74vmaEy https://t.co/rxuP2wIkwB pic.twitter.com/116MvbpfVT
— Solomon Yue (@SolomonYue) February 9, 2026
The Chinese Consulate in Houston that Trump Shut Down
In 2020, the State Department shut down the Chinese consulate in Houston, calling it a "hub of spying and intellectual property theft" and a "center of malign activity." In its announcement, the State Department said:
Though the People’s Republic of China has engaged in extensive illegal activities and influence operations throughout the United States, the consulate in Houston was a particularly aggressive source of malign activity, according to a briefing by senior U.S. government officials.
CCP agents working out of the consulate helped People’s Liberation Army officers “evade and obstruct” law enforcement to illegally conceal their military affiliations while operating in the United States, according to the officials.
According to the briefing, the consulate was directly involved in fraud and stealing U.S. intellectual property from research institutions and companies in Texas.
The State Department went on to say the CCP "uses its consulates to intimidate and harass U.S. and Chinese nationals living in the United States."
Through their so-called Fox Hunt teams, Beijing targets political rivals of General Secretary Xi Jinping, critics of the Communist Party, or refugees, such as Uyghurs and other oppressed minorities. The goal is to force these people to return to China, a Justice Department official explained.
The CCP didn't take the hint. Instead of dialing back their consular operations in the U.S., they simply shifted them to the Chinese Service Centers. The Vermillion China article explains:
While all designated “Chinese Service Centers” are agencies working on behalf of the CCP (and should be required to register as such), the Houston Chinese Civic Center (CCC, 中国人活动中心) has a more pronounced role in this network. Since the closure of the Houston Chinese Consulate in 2020, the CCC has functioned as the de facto consulate. In this status, the CCC provides consular services (CN), facilitates trips for CCP officials (CN), and guides all associated overseas Chinese organizations in the greater Houston area as well as Texas.
The Texas Anhui Hometown Association (TAHA) has direct ties to the Houston CCC. In turn, members of the CCC sit on the board of directors for TAHA. This includes Zhao Meiping, who once served as TAHA's vice president. It was in this capacity that, according to the People's Daily News—the official news site of the CCP in China—Meiping visited with CCP officials in China in 2014 to discuss "attract[ing] high-level overseas talents to innovate and start businesses in Anhui."
The CCC has a history of organizing protests against Taiwan and Taiwanese officials, supporting candidates who back pro-China policies, and arranging meetings between Chinese and American political officials.
Also on that board (at least until her bio was scrubbed from the website): JJ Clemence.
Why JJ's Involvement in TAHA Matters
While JJ Clemence sat in leadership positions with TAHA, she also worked for now-retired Rep. Pete Olson and in an appointed role for Gov. Greg Abbott. She now works for Rep. Troy Nehls, a Republican from Houston. While working for Olson, she secured funding from the Anhui (Bengbu City) Overseas Chinese Office and coordinated trips to China. According to Vermillion China, she also served as a member of the Overseas Chinese Federation—a Chinese governmental organization.
Other leaders in the TAHA organization work directly with the CCP and have taken Chinese government-funded trips to China. These trips often serve as opportunities to meet with CCP officials, who debrief the returning Chinese nationals on what they've learned in the U.S.
As an example, in 2016 the South China Daily News reported on TAHA's activites: "We participated in the Anhui Provincial Congress of Returned Overseas Chinese, the Overseas Chinese Hometown Visit Delegation, and the 60th Anniversary Conference of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese."
The All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese (ACFROC), also known as China Qiaolian (中国侨联), is directly linked to the CCP. It functions as a "people's organization" (or civic organization) established and operating under CCP leadership, primarily as part of the party's United Front system.
ACFROC serves as a key instrument in the CCP's United Front Work Department (UFWD) efforts to engage, influence, and mobilize returned overseas Chinese and the broader diaspora in support of party objectives, such as promoting Chinese culture, safeguarding overseas Chinese interests, and advancing national unity.
TAHA has clear and frequent links with CCP organizations.
Clemence's involvement in these organizations appear to have gone largely unexamined by America's intelligence community—or her political friends.
The Clemence Campaign—Using Chinese Technology
Much has been made over the past several years regarding Chinese-owned social media, ecommerce, and communications apps like TikTok, WeChat, and Alibaba. It's been known for a long time that the CCP has installed surveillance routines into these programs, which gather massive amounts of data and send it back to the Chinese government for analysis.
WeChat, in particular, is used by almost everyone in China. It serves as the all-in-one social media, communications, payment, and social credit app that allows users to fully function in a digital society. This includes the infamous "social credit score" that enhances or limits one's ability to pay for things, send messages, attend school, go to work, or order transportation—depending on political approval by the CCP.
So why does JJ Clemence use it to organize the Chinese supporters in Fort Bend County for her campaign?
WeChat actively censors China-based accounts that share information disfavored by the CCP. It also uses non-China based accounts to train its censors on things they think they should ban:
On a structural level, WeChat’s policies for account creation limit which foreign and diaspora media organizations, civil society groups, and journalists can share news on the platform. Its “official” or “public account” feature allows users to broadcast articles to a large audience (as opposed to circulating content in closed groups of contents). But this is only available beyond four posts per month to entities registered in China or for those with a Chinese national willing to provide an ID number (a risky prospect if an account aims to share news and views critical of the CCP). This structural curb preemptively bars news organizations, civil society groups, or journalists based outside of China and which are focused on human rights or other content critical of the Chinese government from even creating such accounts.
The CCP's direct involvement in WeChat doesn't stop at banning information it doesn't like. They've also used the platform to directly influence elections:
A November 2021 investigation by the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab found evidence that China-linked WeChat accounts had spread disinformation ahead of elections in Canada, specifically amplifying narratives critical of the Conservative Party and its candidates. Subsequent Canadian government inquiries have similarly voiced concerns of seemingly coordinated campaigns on WeChat spreading falsehoods about Chinese Canadian MPs and election candidates like Kenny Chiu, with some suspecting these could have cost him the election.
In the U.S. context, scholar Seth Kaplan mentioned above argued in a June 2023 piece for the National Interest that voting patterns among Chinese Americans in recent elections appeared to track amplification or suppression of certain accounts and narratives on WeChat, first favoring Donald Trump in 2016 (with some pro-Hillary Clinton material demoted and websites like the Asian American Democratic Club for Hillary banned from the platform). Partway through the Trump administration, Kaplan argues that WeChat public and influential personal accounts—including some belonging to Chinese state-owned outlets like Global Times—“changed from pro-Trump to pro-Biden,” while the platform enabled Democratic groups in 2020 to use the app in ways they had been unable to in 2016; all the while, pro-Trump voices were “bullied” and “ostracized.”
So far, the activists who have raised the alarms have met with severe resistance. Instead of taking their concerns seriously, local and state republicans who endorsed Clemence have lashed back, labeling any questions as "xenophobia." In a state like Texas, in which Islamic and Chinese influence continues to grow despite its conservative reputation, one wonders what it would take to get leaders to take the threat of foreign influence seriously.
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