Washington — The FBI has arrested two defendants accused of setting up and operating an illegal Chinese police station in downtown New York City to influence and intimidate dissidents critical of the Chinese government in the US, the Department of Justice.
“Harry” Lu Jianwang, 61, of the Bronx, and Chen Jinping, 59, of Manhattan, are charged with conspiracy to act as agents of the Chinese government and obstruction of justice. In a Affidavit of 30 pages accompanying criminal complaint, an FBI agent alleged that the defendants set up 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 learned of the FBI investigation. Both are scheduled to appear in federal court in Brooklyn later Monday.
“It is simply outrageous that China’s Ministry of Public Security thinks it can get away with establishing an illegal, secret police station on American soil to aid its efforts to export repression and subvert our rule of law,” said Acting Assistant Director Kurt Ronnow. 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 its will and silence messages it does not want anyone to hear.”
China on Tuesday disputed US claims about the police stations, according to Reuters news agency, which quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin as saying they do not exist and that China has a policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations.
Agence France-Presse reports that Wenbin said “political manipulation” was behind the arrests.
“China firmly opposes slander, defamation, political manipulation and malicious crafting of the so-called narrative of transnational repression,” AFP said.
In a separate complaintnearly three dozen MPS officials were accused of using fake social media accounts to intimidate Chinese dissidents in the US and spread “official PRC government propaganda and narratives to counter Chinese dissidents’ pro-democracy speech,” the Justice Department said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
The 34 defendants, believed to reside in China, worked as part of an elite task force known as the “Special Project Task Force 912” to track down 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.
The group allegedly operated a troll farm of thousands of fake social media profiles on sites like Twitter to spread Chinese government propaganda and recruit agents in the US to do the same. In one case, members of the 912 Group allegedly targeted a virtual anti-communism conference called by a Chinese dissident with loud music, threats and profanity.
Ten other people, including six MPS officers, are accused of trying to censor the political and religious speech of people in the United States who were critical of the Chinese government.
“As alleged, the PRC government deploys its national police and Special Project 912 Task Force not as an instrument to enforce the law and protect public safety, but as a troll farm that attacks people in our country to exercise free speech in a way that the PRC government finds distasteful and also spreads propaganda whose sole purpose is to sow division in the United States,” said Breon Peace, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, in a statement.
Monday’s charges, the first targeting secret Chinese police sites around the world, are the latest in the Justice Department’s efforts to combat a transnational crackdown on foreign dissidents living in the U.S. Last year, federal prosecutors accused more than a dozen defendantsmost of them Chinese officials, with alleged involvement in plans to repatriate critics of the Chinese government, obtain secret information about a US investigation into a Chinese telecommunications company, and recruit spies to act as agents of the Chinese regime in the US.
And in January, the Justice Department charged three men with conspiring to kill an Iranian journalist living in the US for her outspoken criticism of Iran’s regime. The men, from the US, Iran and the Czech Republic, were loaded with murder-for-hire in an indictment open in New York federal court.
