Translations of dozens of Chinese government records and state-media reports indicate that Elaine Chao, a former U.S. Cabinet official, has maintained an ongoing connection to a Shanghai kindergarten, with those documents recording her attendance at events there alongside officials affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party and the United Front Work Department.
Records show the kindergarten bears the name of Chao's paternal grandfather and appears in documentation as a location where a United Front affiliate worked to build and sustain connections with the Chao family across multiple years. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission has identified the UFWD as a tool through which China pursues foreign-policy objectives and seeks to obtain advanced technology developed abroad.
Since 2008, Chao — whose Chinese name is Zhao Xiaolan — has taken on no fewer than four positions tied to the Chinese government, among them an advisory post attached to the Wuhan municipal authority, along with roles inside the China Overseas Friendship Association and the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, both of which function as operational arms of the United Front Work Department. Three positions Chao held within the UFWD apparatus ran concurrently, at least in part, with two separate Cabinet assignments — one as Labor secretary under George W. Bush and another as Transportation secretary during Donald Trump's initial administration.
O'Connor, who serves as Chao's spokesperson, told a television network that she had not held any position with a foreign government and that the office was unaware of any meetings between her and representatives connected to UFWD-linked organisations. He maintained that position even after photographs placing Chao alongside CCP and UFWD officials were put before him, then described the line of questioning as one that overlooked nearly five decades of public service to the United States, calling the characterisation groundless and painful, and noting that education had long been a central focus of the family's philanthropic activities.
A spokesperson, responding to questions about Chao's attendance at a Shanghai kindergarten bearing her father's name, noted that the secretary travels to schools domestically and internationally, and that Dr. Chao's father has backed the institution across nearly four decades.
The Chao family's ties to the Shanghai school stretch back to its founding, when Chao's father — James S.C. Chao, who established the shipping company Foremost Group — contributed $100,000 toward the Malu Central Kindergarten in 1995. The kindergarten was later renamed Malu Yiren in tribute to Zhao Yiren — Chao's paternal grandfather and a Jiading primary school principal who held that education could serve as a path to national renewal — and Chinese government records and state media accounts document that Chao has held meetings there with party and United Front Work Department officials on multiple occasions across the past thirty years.
Among the activities organised at the kindergarten over recent years, several have centred on combat drills and related military exercises, with a portion of those sessions delivered by personnel from the People's Liberation Army. A September 2025 programme for children aged zero to three incorporated activity stations built around a military framework, with participants handling toy rifles and grenades across sessions labelled "Dodging Bombs," "Advancing Tanks," "Gunfight Game," "Breaking Through The Blockade," and "Carrying Stretchers" under the banner of "red games." The kindergarten had also been incorporating military-themed songs into its curriculum as far back as 2019.
At the school's June graduation event that year, children from the kindergarten class wore camouflage outfits and performed a song titled "Little Navy Sailor," with opening lyrics in which the singer describes steering a small gunboat as a young naval recruit. The ceremony's school anthem, "Yiren One Family," had been written by the Jiading branch of the Zhigong Party — a United Front-affiliated organisation that served as a co-sponsor of the 2019 graduation event and maintained a formal partnership with the school — while the programme also included other songs from that year's event, among them "Song of the Red Star," alongside a lyric from the ceremony in which an unnamed voice declared that any invading force would be driven into the sea.
A "co-construction" arrangement between the kindergarten and Jiading's Zhigong branch was formalised during November 2014. A representative of the local United Front Work Department presided over the signing, conveying a stated hope that the arrangement would deliver benefits across three parties — Zhigong, the kindergarten, and the department's own broader programme.
On 13 November 2014 — a week into the newly signed accord — Chao walked through the kindergarten accompanied by CCP and Zhigong party representatives while pupils performed the recently adopted anthem. Attending the same gathering was the head of Jiading's United Front Work Department, an official who simultaneously led the local China Overseas Friendship Association branch — an organisation in which Chao was reported at the time to hold an advisory position — and directed the district's China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification chapter, a body that had placed Chao in both an advisory and committee member role.
Ina Mitchell, identified as a specialist in Chinese intelligence matters, told a prominent broadcast outlet that those working in counterintelligence have long held that the United Front Work Department pursues relationships with politically connected families and routes influence through personal ties rather than formal government pathways, adding that even where a sitting senator's spouse holds no official title, a close partnership — particularly one involving a partner with notable sway over policy areas touching China — raises questions about access, intent, disclosure, and the degree to which such contacts might shape or be perceived as shaping U.S. policy.
Roughly a year after the kindergarten and Zhigong entered into a cooperative arrangement, Chao traveled back in October 2015 alongside her father and her sister Angela, with local Communist Party and Jiading United Front Work Department officials present, to participate in the unveiling of a statue honoring her grandfather. Marking the kindergarten's two-decade milestone, the Chao family donated $161,290 to the school. In remarks to Chinese state media during the visit, Chao noted that despite having grown up in the United States, she and her sisters were regularly reminded by their parents of their Chinese heritage.
A January 2016 notice from the Jiading United Front Work Department — described in the document itself as notably direct in its language — laid out how that district's Committee of Foreign Affairs branch had carried out outreach activities abroad in connection with Chao and other individuals, drawing on their ancestral and family ties to do so. The notice further specified that the branch had placed particular weight on deploying feelings of kinship, shared hometown origins, and personal friendship as connective threads through which to pursue its international liaison activities across a range of channels, levels, and formats.
According to the document, Chao was among those invited to Jiading for meetings with relatives about "joint development," and a return trip in October 2016 — attended once more by CCP, UFWD, and Zhigong members — saw students refer to Chao and her father as "Momma Xiaolan" and "Grandpa Xicheng" as the group moved through a kindergarten memorial dedicated to the Chao family and a garden honoring Chao's late mother.
The Jiading Zhigong branch received a formal commendation in July 2019, with its overseas liaison activities rated as meeting the standard for "advanced" performance. A companion UFWD document listed the branch's foremost achievement as building enduring connections with Zhao Xiaolan's family alongside a joint-development arrangement with the kindergarten, framed under a strategy the organisation termed "Small Pairing, Big Politics."
An intelligence professional with a background in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and expertise in Chinese intelligence operations told a news outlet that spouses of legislators and Cabinet members ought to have no ties to the UFWD or its affiliated bodies, adding that the broader United Front model functions by drawing people who hold status, access, resources, expertise, or influence into an organised network of relationships — a category that encompasses business figures, academics, community representatives, former officeholders, and political actors. That professional noted that awareness of those objectives may be present in some participants, while others frame their involvement in cultural, commercial, or ceremonial terms.
Weichert, a commentator on geopolitical matters, told a broadcast outlet that Beijing had employed influence operations as a tool for advancing its standing internationally through means short of military force, and that roughly four decades of such activity — among them efforts to embed within American academic institutions — had enabled certain narratives originating in China to gain traction across the United States in ways that the federal government had not moved to adequately address.
