Of the 40 defendants in the expanding indictments, only the two New York-based MPS officers, Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping, have been arrested. The two men are accused of running a front for the MPS in an unassuming building in downtown New York City. “This nondescript building in the heart of bustling Chinatown in lower Manhattan holds a dark secret: Until several months ago, an entire floor of this building housed an undeclared police station of the Chinese National Police,” US Attorney Breon said. Peace at the press conference. .
Prosecutors describe how Lu allegedly participated in pro-China protests, harassed a Chinese national living in the US, and assisted the Chinese government’s investigation of a Chinese pro-democracy activist living in California. “In other words, the Chinese national police appear to have been using this station to track an American resident on American soil,” Peace said. She added that Lu and Chen are also accused of obstructing justice: they allegedly destroyed evidence of their communications with the Chinese government when they learned of an FBI investigation directed against them.
As surprising as it may be to learn that the Chinese government ran a secret police station in America’s largest city, it is far from the only such operation, says Laura Harth, an activist with rights-focused group Safeguard Defenders. humans. Last year, the group published a report In more than 100 of these underground Chinese police posts in more than 50 countries, many used to persecute Chinese dissidents and critics of the Xi regime abroad.
Harth says today’s charges against Chinese police in the US are the first of their kind. “Other countries still pretend this isn’t a problem,” she says. “We are very happy to see this happen, both for people in the US but [also] for the signal it sends to other authorities around the world.”
As for the two other criminal cases announced today that target Chinese trolling, disinformation and censorship, Harth says Safeguard Defenders has seen no evidence that such troll farms are operated from secret MPS facilities abroad. , but you are not surprised to learn that they are linked to the MPS. She says that her organization’s public communications are frequently inundated with criticism of shady accounts that she has long suspected were organized by the Chinese state. “It’s very revealing the troll or bot type of work,” she says.
Prosecutors say the troll farm of 34 MPS officers, based inside China although prosecutors did not disclose where, is part of a group known as the 912 Special Project Task Force, which they say engages in harassment. and misinformation online. According to the US Department of Justice, the 912 group published pro-China disinformation and bombarded critics of China with intimidating messages on Twitter and other platforms. The topics of his misinformation and provocations included everything from the origins of Covid-19 to the death of George Floyd to criticism of US support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. In other cases, they flooded video conferences held by China critics with threatening and intimidating messages. And in one case, they even “drowned out the meeting with loud music and vulgar yelling and threats,” according to the Justice Department.