President Biden’s new State Department special representative for subnational diplomacy, who has urged Americans to “embrace China,” has worked with two prominent Chinese Communist Party front groups regarded as influence organs to promote relations with Beijing.

Nina Hachigian, as deputy mayor of Los Angeles, met with the president of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a major Communist Party influence group, to discuss “exchanges and cooperation,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.

And at the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, she was part of a delegation with officials from the CCP-backed China-U.S. Exchange Foundation.

The group proposed “exchanges of military personnel” between the U.S. military and the People’s Liberation Army.

Further, she collaborated at the Center for American Progress with an official from a government think tank overseen by China’s main intelligence agency, the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

Hachigian is only the latest State Department appointee who either has worked closely with CCP groups or espoused sympathetic views toward China.

BlackRock executive Tom Donilon advises the State Department on “strategic competition” with China. BlackRock has invested heavily in the communist nation.

Dominic Ng, who advises the State Department on trade in Asia, has criticized U.S. tariffs on China and has downplayed the regime’s threat to the West while urging American leaders to take a soft approach.

Hachigian, who at times has criticized China’s abuse of human rights and aggression toward Taiwan and Tibet, has repeatedly urged American leaders to take a soft approach to China.

In a 2007 opinion piece, she urged Americans to “embrace China,” and one year later, she opposed a Western boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympics over China’s human rights record.

That year, she called China “a security partner” and “not a threat” with regard to terrorism, pandemics, and relations with North Korea and Iran.

Hachigian was part of a Center for American Progress delegation that met in 2013 with the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation, a group that CIA director William Burns said during a hearing last year was engaged in covert influence activities.

A State Department spokesman, the Free Beacon reported, said the agency has “full confidence” in Hachigian.

Hachigian’s background, the spokesman said, “will be integral in engaging local partners and fostering collaboration on many of the Department’s key priorities CIA director William Burns expressed alarm over the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation’s covert influence activities during a hearing last year – including the priorities surrounding our competition with the PRC.”