L’Fbi arrested two people on charges of running in the heart of New York a Chinese secret police station with the task, among others, of supervising and putting pressure on dissidents. The charges brought against Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping are that they have conspired to act like agents of China and of obstruction of justice for destroying evidence of their ties to Beijing once it learned that the FBI had launched an investigation. If they are found guilty they risk up to 25 years in prison.
This is a “flagrant violation of our national sovereigntysaid Breon Peace, the attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “We do not want and do not need a Chinese police station. Imagine if the New York Police Department opened a secret station in Beijing. Would be unimaginable“, added the prosecutor, pointing out that the station also provided some government services, for example “helping Chinese citizens renew their licenses. To do this, the law requires that you identify as agents of a foreign government. But that didn’t happen.” On several other occasions, however, the police station also had other tasks, such as the location of a pro-democracy activist of Chinese descent who lives in California. In other words, Chinese police were using the station to track down an American resident on American soil.”
The station, which closed in the fall of 2022, is believed to be one of more than 100 that China operates in 53 countries. In the past, Chinese embassies in the United States and Canada had described them as overseas posts open during the war pandemic to assist Chinese citizens with some services. Human rights groups accused China of using them to threaten and monitor its citizens abroad. Former FBI director Christopher Wray had described them as a “real problem.”
In addition to the two arrests in New York, US authorities have accused 34 members of China’s national police of using fake social media accounts to track and control Chinese dissidents in the United States and to spread the Beijing government’s propaganda. The 34 accused, according to the American authorities, are part of an elite task force called ‘912 Special Project Working Group’ whose job it is to target “Chinese dissidents around the world, including those in the United States.”