The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), along with law enforcement officials from other federal agencies and the state of New York, announced the arrest of two individuals accused of establishing and operating an illegal Chinese regime police station in New York City.
Dozens of others, mostly Chinese nationals currently believed to be in China, are also facing charges of engaging in “transnational repression” against anti-communist dissidents based in the United States, stemming from accusations that the charged established an online army of fake social media accounts to harass and threaten the dissidents.
The arrests are the first in America since the revelation in September by the NGO Safeguard Defenders that China has established dozens of illegal police stations around the world in America, Canada, Japan, Brazil, and Spain, among other locations. The police stations were reportedly used to intimidate and silence dissidents or threaten Chinese nationals considered to dissent from Communist Party orthodoxy to return to China and face the brutal repressive apparatus there.
China is a totalitarian communist state currently engaging in genocide against the ethnic Turkic people of East Turkistan. Beijing has also been extensively documented to be engaging in ethnic cleansing activities against Tibetans and Mongolians. In addition to persecuting individuals who do not conform to the dominant Han ethnic group, people of faith face extreme violence and oppression in the country. The Communist Party regularly bulldozes churches, disappears imams, and kills Falun Gong practitioners to sell their organs.
The DOJ charges unveiled add to the growing body of evidence that China is attempting to export its human rights violations around the world. U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace accused China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS), which runs the Communist Party’s law enforcement operations, of “repeatedly and flagrantly violat[ing] our nation’s sovereignty by opening and operating a police station in the middle of New York City” during a press conference on Monday.
The authorities addressing the public on Monday identified the two men in custody as “Harry” Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping of the Bronx and Manhattan, respectively. The men are facing charges of allegedly having established the illegal police station and used it in an attempt to terrorize critics of the Communist Party in America. The official charges against them are conspiring to act as agents of the Chinese government, a charge that carries a maximum of five years in prison, and obstruction of justice for allegedly deleting mobile phone conversations with an unnamed Chinese government official. The latter charge could result in up to 20 years in prison.
The police station that Lu and Chen reportedly opened was part of the Fuzhou branch of the Chinese MPS, the branch exposed as running these clandestine foreign operations in the Safeguard Defenders report. In a press release, the DOJ clarified that, despite being an alleged illegal “police station,” the operation the men were running did not appear to target any genuine criminals, only anti-communist dissidents.
“The PRC [People’s Republic of China], through its repressive security apparatus, established a secret physical presence in New York City to monitor and intimidate dissidents and those critical of its government,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division said. “The PRC’s actions go far beyond the bounds of acceptable nation-state conduct. We will resolutely defend the freedoms of all those living in our country from the threat of authoritarian repression.”
A six story glass facade building, center, is believed to be the site of a foreign police outpost for China in New York’s Chinatown, Monday, April 17, 2023. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
Lu, in particular, is accused of attempting to coerce a Chinese national to return to China, despite a reasonable fear of repression, through “threats of violence” to the person and their family. Lu also reportedly helped locate “an individual living in California who is a pro-democracy activist.”
“This prosecution reveals the Chinese government’s flagrant violation of our nation’s sovereignty by establishing a secret police station in the middle of New York City,” Peace, the U.S. attorney, said in the press release. “As alleged, the defendants and their co-conspirators were tasked with doing the PRC’s bidding, including helping locate a Chinese dissident living in the United States, and obstructed our investigation by deleting their communications. Such a police station has no place here in New York City – or any American community.”
In a separate series of law enforcement actions, the DOJ announced charges against 40 people identified as Chinese national police officers for engaging in social media campaigns to “harass PRC dissidents” and intimidate an unnamed American “telecommunications company” into barring dissidents from holding meetings to discuss human rights topics online.
“The complaint alleges how members of the Group created thousands of fake online personas on social media sites, including Twitter, to target Chinese dissidents through online harassment and threats,” the DOJ detailed.
“As alleged, the PRC government deploys its national police… as a troll farm that attacks persons in our country for exercising free speech in a manner that the PRC government finds disagreeable, and also spreads propaganda whose sole purpose is to sow divisions within the United States,” Peace explained.
In addition to the use of “troll farms,” the alleged Chinese officers attacked an attempted videoconference to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre by flooding the chat function on the site with violent threats. In another attempt to host a group virtual discussion on human rights abuses by the Chinese government, the accused allegedly “flooded the videoconference and drowned out the meeting with loud music and vulgar screams and threats directed at the pro-democracy participants.”
One of the individuals charged, identified as Julien Jin, allegedly served as a “primary liaison” between the unnamed American telecommunications company and the Chinese Communist Party. “In that capacity, he regularly responded to requests from the PRC government to terminate meetings and block users on Company-1’s video communications platform,” the DOJ claimed.
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While keeping the company’s identity a secret, the DOJ did note that the “troll farms” cultivated online appeared on, among other sites, Twitter, a social media network that China bans its citizens from using. The report did not indicate that those operations involved any infiltration into Twitter as a company, only the mass creation of fraudulent “puppet” accounts.
New York appears to have been targeted for the creation of an illegal “police station” and other illicit activities due to both the presence of a Chinese consulate there and a large population of dissidents. New York is home to a significant Cantonese-speaking population from Hong Kong, home to a massive protest movement the Communist Party crushed during the coronavirus pandemic, and to sizable communities of Tibetans. In recent years, the Chinese government has infiltrated local government to host propaganda shows denying the ethnic cleansing of occupied Tibet, much to the outrage of local Tibetans, and is suspected of having created fake Tibetan organizations to promote Chinese government causes.
Following the publication of the Safeguard Defenders report in September, the Chinese government admitted to growing police activity abroad but blamed the coronavirus pandemic for their existence – and claimed the government activity in question was bureaucratic.
“Due to [coronavirus], a large number of overseas Chinese nationals have been unable to return to China in time for services such as renewing their driving license. As a solution to these difficulties, relevant sub-national authorities have opened up an online licensing platform,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin claimed in October.