Lee Runs for San Francisco Mayor With Pak Behind

San Francisco powerbroker Rose Pak has always taken care of the CCP’s interests; now her hand-picked mayoral candidate Ed Lee faces the voters.
Lee Runs for San Francisco Mayor With Pak Behind
Chinese Consul General Gao Zhansheng, not a frequent visitor to City Hall, made an appearance for the swearing in Ed Lee, who is the hand-picked mayor of his friend, Rose Pak. (Luke Thomas/Fog City Journal)
Matthew Robertson
11/7/2011
Updated:
9/26/2016

SAN FRANCISCO—Throughout a career in which Rose Pak’s influence has steadily increased, two themes stand out: she has lobbied behind the scenes for the concerns that the Chinese Communist Party considers most important and she has patiently helped advance the career of Ed Lee. As Lee faces the voters on Tuesday, in the background is the question of what role Pak would play in a Lee administration.

While Pak has always been linked to Lee, she has been the midwife of his run for mayor.

Pak helped orchestrate Ed Lee’s rise to interim mayor, created the Astroturf movement that helped him announce he would run, and arranged the soft money that poured into the independent expenditure campaigns backing him.

Pak’s relationship with Ed Lee goes back to the mid 1970s, when he was in his first job as lawyer for the Asian Law Caucus, defending tenants facing eviction. At that time Pak was becoming a community organizer and finding her place at the Chinese Chamber of Commerce.

Pak and Lee together raised two million dollars over less than two months for the Chinese Hospital, after a 1974 earthquake that damaged it severely.

Lee’s first job in the bureaucracy was as human rights commissioner, awarded by Art Agnos, for whom Pak had marshaled donations for his election bid. When Willie Brown became mayor, Lee was made Director of Purchasing, and then Director of the Department of Public Works.

While head of Public Works in 2001, Lee went to bat for a Pak friend and client. He persuaded the city architect not to fire contractor Robert Chiang, whose incompetence and waste on the Martin Luther King pool project, according to SF Weekly, cost the city over a million dollars.

Chiang is a good friend of Rose Pak. In 1999 he paid $10,000 to her for unspecified consultancy services, according to her tax return from that year, and he has gone on trips to China with her. Chiang has received tens of millions of dollars in city contracts over the years, despite a record of waste, mistakes, and delays, according to published reports.

When Lee was City Administrator, Pak was a frequent visitor to his office. City workers could often see her half-seated on his desk, whiling away the time in conversation. She also installed several of her own people, young Chinese-American women, to his office.

One of those women was Sally Leung, for whom Pak had previously assisted in finding work (for example, in the now-defunct Chinatown Economic Development Group), who serves as Lee’s personal assistant. Sally Leung is the wife of Joseph Leung, chief editor of Sing Tao, a newspaper whose coverage of Mayor Lee has been adulatory to a fault.

Willie Brown is given a page in Sing Tao after he gets back from China in November, 2001. He and Rose Pak had met with then-leader of the Chinese Communist Party at the time, who was "especially pleased" with Rose Pak's work to oppose a Falun Gong resolution in the Board of Supervisors. (Epoch Times)
Willie Brown is given a page in Sing Tao after he gets back from China in November, 2001. He and Rose Pak had met with then-leader of the Chinese Communist Party at the time, who was "especially pleased" with Rose Pak's work to oppose a Falun Gong resolution in the Board of Supervisors. (Epoch Times)

Slashing a Resolution

Apart from making sure her friends and allies get city contracts, another of Rose Pak’s preoccupations is to ensure that the political line of the Chinese Communist Party is followed in San Francisco.

Rose Pak’s ties with Party officials in China are extensive, and her relationship with the Chinese consulate is also close. A search of her name on Chinese government websites yields hundreds of hits. An incomplete database of her activities compiled by The Epoch Times shows frequent jaunts with Chinese officials in both San Francisco and China: flag-raising ceremonies, trips around town, banquets.

Pak is a member of the overseas council of the Guangdong Province Foreign Affairs Office. She is described as a “high-level San Francisco mayoral advisor” on official Chinese websites.

Former president of the Board of Supervisors Aaron Peskin has commented on Pak’s ties to the Chinese regime.

“It is abundantly clear that Ms. Pak’s affiliations with the PRC are very close,” Peskin said. “That is not a secret. You can see it every day in any number of ways in the [Chinatown] associations that she has helped to influence to move their allegiances from ROC [Taiwan] to the PRC—these are just facts.”

Pak was instrumental in arranging for the voting down of the October 2001 Board of Supervisors resolution that condemned the persecution of Falun Gong in China. Such documents are symbolically important both for Falun Gong practitioners and the Chinese Communist Party.

“They want to isolate Falun Gong and not let practitioners get any support outside China,” says Sherry Zhang, a local adherent of the discipline. “Any support outside China that shows the persecution is wrong presents challenges for them.”

As such, Pak did her best to defeat the resolution. “She was the one leading the opposition to it the first time around. She was actually setting up meetings for the [P.R.C.] General Consul with the Supervisors,” says Chris Daly, who sponsored the resolution.

Pak rounded up community members and allies with the Chinese Chamber of Commerce to testify against Falun Gong, met with supervisors, and crossed the railing several times during the official meetings, to whisper in their ears.

“Rose was clearly running point for the PRC on that,” Daly said.

In 2006 Daly proposed a similar resolution; Pak succeeded in having 90 percent of it cut. All references to China were deleted; instead, it said simply that Falun Gong should not be persecuted, and that the Board of Supervisors does not endorse the practice of Falun Gong.

The way the Falun Gong resolutions were dealt with is in contrast to other human rights issues the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has taken a stance on. There have been lengthy resolutions on human rights in BurmaDarfurIranTibet and elsewhere.

“I didn’t think it would be that controversial,” Daly says.

When the Chinese Olympic Torch came to San Francisco in 2008, Pak was part of the welcoming team. She said it made her “giggle like a teenager.”

But she became more serious when Chris Daly organized another resolution on human rights in China around that time.

Through her Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Rose Pak set up a table collecting signatures to oppose Falun Gong's entry to the Chinese New Year parade. Those who signed it would be added to the running for a raffle prize. (Kerry Huang/The Epoch Times)
Through her Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Rose Pak set up a table collecting signatures to oppose Falun Gong's entry to the Chinese New Year parade. Those who signed it would be added to the running for a raffle prize. (Kerry Huang/The Epoch Times)

The heads of the Chinatown Community Development Center, ostensibly a non-profit tenancy network, called him for a “coffee and a chat.” Present were Daly, Gordon Chin, Norman Fong, and David Ho.

“You’ve got to give it up on the Falun Gong thing,” they said, according to Daly. They repeated Party propaganda against Falun Gong, Daly said, and the meeting ended with both parties agreeing to disagree.

Rose Pak “had everything to do with it,” Daly said “I didn’t even ask if it had anything to do with Rose, because of course it did.”

Pak has also for over a decade successfully kept Falun Gong practitioners from participating in the Chinese New Year’s parade, which is organized annually by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce where she is “general consultant” (or boss).

She says that the ban is because Falun Gong is political, an allusion to the fact that its practitioners are persecuted in China.

“If we got into the parade it would be like we’re part of the community,” says Zhang, the local practitioner. “But in the persecution they want to isolate us and try to show that we’re different from any other groups. That’s why she is excluding us.”

Pak even organized a raffle for people who signed a petition opposing the group’s entry into the parade.

Testimony of defected consular officials explains the significance of these activities to the Chinese Communist Party. Chen Yonglin, told the U.S. House Committee on International Relations on July 21, 2005, that “The war against Falun Gong is one of the main tasks of the Chinese missions overseas.”

Special task forces are set up to “struggle against” overseas Falun Gong groups, Chen said. “The Falun Gong issue is the priority of the Consulate’s job, and it is a daily, long term job.”

Willie Brown explained the importance of Pak’s activities after his third trip to China as mayor, in an interview with Sing Tao Daily on Nov. 23, 2001. Larry Lee, the paper’s deputy editor, asked Brown about the recent eight votes to three veto of a Falun Gong resolution in the Board of Supervisors.

“President Jiang was very happy. He was extremely happy that we as a city made an effort on this matter,” Brown said. “President Jiang is especially pleased with the work done by Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Rose Pak in their effort to strongly oppose passing the [Falun Gong] resolution.”

Rose Pak sits with political allies David Ho and Norman Fong, the latter two from the Chinatown Community Development Center, at the Board of Supervisors on Jan. 8. (Luke Thomas/Fog City Journal)
Rose Pak sits with political allies David Ho and Norman Fong, the latter two from the Chinatown Community Development Center, at the Board of Supervisors on Jan. 8. (Luke Thomas/Fog City Journal)

Soft Money

Much of the money that poured into the “Run Ed Run” campaign, an Astroturf movement meant to convince Lee to renege on his promise not to run for mayor, came from friends of Pak.

Major contributors included, for example, people like Robert Chiang, the construction contractor with a troubled record, Florence Kong, another builder who is a Pak ally, and Victor Makras, a real-estate developer with close ties to Willie Brown.

Some of the large contributions to the independent expenditure committees set up to support Lee’s run for mayor also come from people with close ties to Pak. Osbourne Erickson, for example, a developer who built the condominiums that Rose Pak now lives in, paid $10,000 to the SF Neighborhood alliance in a $5,000 payment from himself and a $5,000 payment from his company, Emerald Fund. Erickson described himself as a “good friend” of Pak in a recent telephone interview. 

Chinese Consul General Gao Zhansheng, not a frequent visitor to City Hall, made an appearance for the swearing in Ed Lee, who is the hand-picked mayor of his friend, Rose Pak. (Luke Thomas/Fog City Journal)
Chinese Consul General Gao Zhansheng, not a frequent visitor to City Hall, made an appearance for the swearing in Ed Lee, who is the hand-picked mayor of his friend, Rose Pak. (Luke Thomas/Fog City Journal)

An Unexpected Guest

Installing longtime loyalist Lee may be Pak’s biggest coup in city government, and the way it was orchestrated sent a clear message to Chinatown about who was in charge.

On Jan. 7, 2011, at the Board of Supervisors meeting where Lee was officially appointed interim mayor, Pak had come with a group of monolingual Chinese to observe the event. Before the meeting officially began, she got up and stood with her back to the gate and, addressing the audience, gave a loud introduction in Chinese.

Chris Daly recalls the event: “Basically it was like, now this is where we install the Chinese mayor, Ed Lee.”

When Lee officially accepted the job to be mayor, he was still overseas. He issued an acceptance statement through the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, a non-profit that Pak leads. The ceremony announcing it was held by Gordon Chin, then head of the Chinatown Community Development Center, and Pak, at the Four Seasons hotel, according to a Sing Tao front page story from the time.

Chin read the announcement that Lee would accept the responsibility of being the interim mayor. A seasoned political observer described it this way: “The message to the Chinese community was clear: you need to come through us. You need to kiss our ring to get access to the Mayor’s office.”

At the Jan. 11 ceremony swearing in Ed Lee at City Hall, an unexpected guest arrived to observe the proceedings: Chinese Consul General Gao Zhansheng. He’s not often seen at City Hall. Rose Pak had invited him.

Matthew Robertson is the former China news editor for The Epoch Times. He was previously a reporter for the newspaper in Washington, D.C. In 2013 he was awarded the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi award for coverage of the Chinese regime's forced organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience.
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