US charges two over NYC ‘secret Chinese police station’
Luc Cohen |
US law enforcement officials have charged two New York residents for allegedly operating a Chinese “secret police station” in Manhattan’s Chinatown, part of a crackdown on Beijing’s alleged targeting of US-based dissidents.
Lu Jianwang, 61, and Chen Jinping, 59, face charges of conspiring to act as agents of China’s government without informing US authorities and obstruction of justice.
They were released on bail on Monday following an initial appearance in Brooklyn federal court.
The Department of Justice has been ramping up probes into what it calls “transnational repression” by US adversaries such as China and Iran to intimidate political opponents living in the US.
“We cannot and will not tolerate the Chinese government’s persecution of pro-democracy activists who have sought refuge in this country,” Breon Peace, the top federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, told reporters.
Prosecutors on Monday unveiled charges against 34 Chinese officials for allegedly operating a “troll farm” and harassing dissidents online, including by disrupting their meetings on US technology platforms.
They also added eight Chinese government officials as defendants in a case announced in 2020 charging a former China-based executive of Zoom Video Communications Inc with disrupting video meetings commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
The officials charged are all at large.
“By initiating prosecution against Chinese citizens under the pretext of ‘transnational repression’, the US side is exercising long-arm jurisdiction based on fabricated charges,” said Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in the US.
“This is sheer political manipulation, and the purpose is to smear China’s image.”
Lu and Chen are both US citizens who lead a nonprofit organisation that lists its mission as providing a social gathering place for people from China’s Fujian province, prosecutors said.
Lu in 2018 sought to persuade an individual considered a fugitive by China to return home, prosecutors said.
In 2022, he helped open the so-called police station and was asked by China’s government to locate an individual living in California who was considered a pro-democracy activist, they said.
Prosecutors said Lu and Chen admitted to the FBI that they deleted their communications with a Chinese government official.
The police station closed in autumn last year, according to prosecutors.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told a US Senate committee in November he was “very concerned” about the presence of such stations in US cities.
Prosecutors previously charged more than a dozen Chinese nationals and others with waging surveillance and harassment campaigns against dissidents living in the US, including by trying to forcibly repatriate people whom China considered fugitives.
Reuters
