Two charged in New York with running secret ‘police station’ for China

Two US citizens were arrested in New York on Monday for allegedly running an illegal “police station” in Manhattan at Beijing’s behest, as part of a widespread crackdown on what US prosecutors described as the Chinese government’s “transnational repression” schemes.

“Harry” Lu Jianwang, 61, and Chen Jinping, 59, who allegedly opened and ran the office in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown until late last year, were charged with conspiring to act as agents of China’s government and erasing evidence.

Lu was involved in arranging counterprotests during President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington in 2015, prosecutors alleged, as well as efforts to return a fugitive to China. He also agreed to help locate a pro-democracy activist of Chinese descent living in California, prosecutors said.

“The defendants were directed to do the [People’s Republic of China’s] bidding, including helping locate a Chinese dissident living in the United States,” Breon Peace, the US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.

“Just imagine the [New York City Police Department] opening an undeclared secret police station in Beijing,” he added. “It would be unthinkable.”

FBI assistant director Michael Driscoll said: “Upon learning of the FBI’s investigation . . . the defendants erased their communications to conceal their activities.”

The “police station” was established on orders of Chinese national police officials, prosecutors claimed, adding that members of the Chinese consulate in New York had visited the premises after its opening.

“Today’s action sends a strong message that we will not allow Chinese Communist party officials to violate US law or harass, intimidate, or conduct surveillance on anyone in the United States,” said Mike Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi, the Republican chair and top Democrat, respectively, on the US House China committee.

The Chinese embassy in Washington said China’s police “do not engage in ‘transnational repression and coercion’.”

Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu said the facility was formed by overseas Chinese to help other Chinese citizens and had no government connection. “By initiating prosecution against Chinese citizens under the pretext of ‘transnational repression’, the US side is exercising long-arm jurisdiction based on fabricated charges,” Liu said.

Separately on Monday, prosecutors charged 10 individuals, including eight Chinese government officials, for allegedly directing a former executive of a US telecommunications company, believed to be Zoom, to silence dissenters.

US prosecutors had previously charged Julien Jin, a China-based executive at Zoom, in 2020 for disrupting video meetings at which the Tiananmen Square massacre was being discussed. Zoom did not respond to a request for comment.

The US attorney’s office in Brooklyn also unsealed charges against 34 Chinese law enforcement officials for allegedly harassing Chinese dissidents in New York and elsewhere in the US via fake personas created by a troll farm.

The defendants created social media accounts on Twitter and other platforms that lauded the Chinese Communist party and derided its critics, prosecutors said. They posted about divisive topics including the murder of George Floyd and the Covid-19 pandemic, prosecutors said.

The FBI has previously raised concerns about the existence of “police stations” in the US linked to Beijing. Christopher Wray, FBI director, in November told a congressional hearing that the practice “violates sovereignty and circumvents standard judicial law enforcement co-operation process”.

“We have seen a clear pattern of the Chinese government . . . exporting [its] repression right here into the US,” he said, adding that authorities had issued several indictments linked to China’s “uncoordinated ‘law enforcement’” in the US, which included “harassing, stalking, surveilling, blackmailing people who they just don’t like or disagree with the Xi regime”.

The US Department of Justice last year charged five individuals for spying, harassing and stalking dissident members of the Chinese diaspora on behalf of Beijing’s secret police, including what Washington said was its first case for electoral interference involving China.