The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has arrested two suspects for allegedly setting up and operating an illegal Chinese police station in the middle of New York City, in a bid to influence and intimidate dissidents critical of the Chinese government in the US, the Justice Department announced on Monday.
The suspects, “Harry” Lu Jianwang, 61, of the Bronx, and Chen Jinping, 59, of Manhattan are charged with conspiring to act as agents of the Chinese government and obstruction of justice.
In a 30-page affidavit accompanying a criminal complaint, an FBI agent alleged that the defendants established a secret police station under the direction of China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS) in a Manhattan office building.
The Justice Department said the two men helped open the outpost in 2022, and deleted their communications with an MPS official once they became aware of the FBI’s investigation.
“It is simply outrageous that China’s Ministry of Public Security thinks it can get away with establishing a secret, illegal police station on U.S. soil to aid its efforts to export repression and subvert our rule of law,” said Kurt Ronnow, the acting assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division.
“This case serves as a powerful reminder that the People’s Republic of China will stop at nothing to bend people to their will and silence messages they don’t want anyone to hear.”
China disputed the US assertions about the police stations on Tuesday, according to the Reuters news agency, which quotes Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin as saying they don’t exist, and that China has a policy of non-interference in other nations’ internal affairs.
In a separate complaint, nearly three dozen MPS officers were charged with using fake social media accounts to intimidate Chinese dissents in the US and disseminate “official PRC government propaganda and narratives to counter the pro-democracy speech of the Chinese dissidents,” the Justice Department said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
The 34 defendants, all believed to reside in China, allegedly worked as part of an elite task force known as the “912 Special Project Working Group” to locate and harass Chinese dissidents around the world in an effort to silence criticism of the Chinese government.
Others are accused of disrupting online meetings where topics critical of the Chinese government were discussed, according to charging documents unsealed Monday.
Monday’s charges, the first targeting secret Chinese police outposts anywhere in the world, are the latest in the Justice Department’s efforts to combat transnational repression of foreign dissidents living in the US.
Last year, federal prosecutors charged more than a dozen defendants, most of them Chinese officials, with allegedly participating in schemes to repatriate critics of the Chinese government, obtain secret information about a US investigation into a Chinese telecom firm and recruit spies to act as agents of the Chinese regime in the US.
