Two US citizens were arrested in New York on Monday for allegedly running an illegal “police station” in Manhattan at Beijing’s behest, part of a widespread crackdown on what US prosecutors have described as plans to ” transnational repression” of the Chinese government.
‘Harry’ Lu Jianwang, 61, and Chen Jinping, 59, who allegedly opened and ran the office in Manhattan’s Chinatown until late last year, have been charged with conspiracy to act as agents of Chinaof the government and the erasure of evidence.
Lu was involved in organizing counter-protests during President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington in 2015, prosecutors say, as well as efforts to return a fugitive to China. He also agreed to help locate a Chinese-born pro-democracy activist living in California, prosecutors said.
“The defendants were ordered to do the [People’s Republic of China’s] auction, including helping to locate a Chinese dissident living in the United States,” Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.
“Just imagine the [New York City Police Department] open an undeclared secret police station in Beijing,” he added. “That would be unthinkable.”
FBI Deputy Director Michael Driscoll said: ‘After learning of the FBI investigation. . . the defendants erased their communications to conceal their activities.
The “police station” was established by order of Chinese national police officials, prosecutors said, adding that members of the Chinese consulate in New York visited the location after it opened.
“Today’s action sends a strong message that we will not allow Chinese Communist Party officials to violate U.S. law or harass, intimidate, or surveil anyone in the United States,” said Mike Gallagher. and Raja Krishnamoorthi, Republican Chairman and Senior Democrat, respectively, on the US House China Committee.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington said Chinese police “do not engage in ‘transnational suppression and coercion'”.
Embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu said the facility was set up by overseas Chinese to help other Chinese citizens and had no connection with the government. “By suing Chinese citizens under the guise of ‘transnational repression,’ the US side is exercising long-arm jurisdiction on the basis of fabricated charges,” Liu said.
Separately on Monday, prosecutors charged 10 people, including eight Chinese government officials, with allegedly ordering a former executive of a US telecommunications company, believed to be Zoom, to silence dissenters.
US prosecutors previously charged Julien Jin, a China-based Zoom executive, in 2020 with disrupt video conferences where we talked about the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Zoom did not respond to a request for comment.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn also unveiled charges against 34 Chinese law enforcement officials for allegedly harassing Chinese dissidents in New York and elsewhere in the United States via fake personas created by a troll farm.
The defendants created social media accounts on Twitter and other platforms that praised the Chinese Communist Party and mocked its critics, prosecutors said. They published articles on controversial 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 United States linked to Beijing. FBI Director Christopher Wray told a November congressional hearing that the practice “violates sovereignty and circumvents the standard process for judicial cooperation in law enforcement.”
“We saw a clear pattern from the Chinese government. . . export [its] repression right here in the United States,” he said, adding that authorities had issued several indictments related to China’s “uncoordinated law enforcement” in the United States, which included “ harassment, stalking, surveillance, blackmail of people they simply don’t like or disagree with the Xi regime”.
The US Department of Justice last year accused five people for spying on, harassing and harassing dissident members of the Chinese diaspora on behalf of Beijing’s secret police, including what Washington said was its first instance of election interference involving China.