One of two men arrested in April 2023 for running an illegal Chinese police station to persecute anti-communists in New York City pleaded guilty to one of two charges in the case, the Justice Department confirmed in Wednesday.
Chen Jinping and “Harry” Lu Jiangwang were arrested on charges of conspiring to act as agents of the Chinese government and obstruction of justice, a charge related to them allegedly deleting evidence of communications with Chinese Communist Party officials. Chen pled guilty to the conspiracy charge, which carries a maximum of five years in prison (the obstruction of justice charges would carry a total of 20 years in prison). Lu, the Justice Department noted on Wednesday, has pled not guilty to all the charges.
The scandal of China erecting illegal, secret police stations around the world to persecute dissidents erupted following the publication of a report by the human rights group Safeguard Defenders in September 2022. The report detailed how China used the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to open what it referred to as “service centers,” ostensibly intended to help Chinese citizens abroad renew their passports, licenses, and other legal documents. In reality, the “service centers” were hunting down prominent political dissidents, in some cases harassing their families or forcing them to repatriate into China’s draconian justice system. No evidence indicates that China informed the countries targeted – a long list including France, Spain, Brazil, Nigeria, and Canada, among others – of its law enforcement operations on their soil.
United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace reiterated in comments on Wednesday following the guilty plea from Chen that the illegal police station was a “transnational repression” mechanism to silence critics of the genocidal Chinese regime.
“Today, a participant in a transnational repression scheme who worked to establish a secret police station in the middle of New York City on behalf of the national police force of the People’s Republic of China has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an illegal agent,” Peace said in a statement. “We will continue our efforts to protect the rights of vulnerable persons who come to this country to escape the repressive activities of authoritarian regimes.”
The “vulnerable persons” targeted by these schemes, the Justice Department had initially asserted in its 2023 charges, were political opponents to communism and members of persecuted minorities, such as Tibetans and Uyghurs. China has for decades enacted an ethnic cleansing policy in Tibet, forcing children to learn Mandarin – a foreign language in the region – and separating them from their families, religion, and culture. In East Turkistan, the Uyghur homeland, China is conducting a genocide of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities such as Kazakh and Kyrgyz people, using concentration camps, “boarding schools” to abduct children, and forced sterilization to erase the indigenous people of the occupied region.
The FBI official working on the case, James Dennehy, issued a statement on Wednesday reaffirming that the illegal police station discovered in Manhattan was not, evidence indicates, pursuing any legitimate crimes, but rather silencing anti-communists.
“This illegal police station was not opened in the interest of public safety, but to further the nefarious and repressive aims of the PRC in direct violation of American sovereignty,” Dennehy noted.
American law enforcement agencies accused Chen and Lu of working directly with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security (MPS) to repress political opponents in America. The press statement on Wednesday on Chen’s guilty plea regarding conspiracy did not suggest he had also done so for the more serious obstruction of justice charge, in which the U.S. government asserts the two men deleted incriminating communications with an MPS operative. The Manhattan police station was allegedly working as an extended operation out of the MPS’s Fuzhou police branch.
Following the announcement of the 2023 indictments, Peace, the U.S. attorney, stated that, among the specific operations that the illegal police station was conducting was “helping locate a Chinese dissident living in the United States” to harass and silence them.
The indictments against Chen and Lu in 2023 occurred alongside the Department of Justice announcing that it was pressing charges against another 44 people, many of them believed to be in China, working to “harass PRC dissidents” on social media and threaten an unnamed American telecommunications company into silencing dissidents by not letting them use their technology to hold virtual events on human rights. The dozens indicted were identified as likely Chinese police officers.
“China’s Ministry of Public Security used operatives to target people of Chinese descent who had the courage to speak out against the Chinese Communist Party,” Acting Assistant Director Kurt Ronnow of the FBI Counterintelligence Division said at the time. “We aren’t going to tolerate [Chinese Communist Party] repression – its efforts to threaten, harass, and intimidate people – here in the United States.”
The NYC illegal police station reportedly shut down operations in 2022.
The Chinese government has repeatedly insisted that its illegal police stations are an American fabrication. Asked about Chen’s guilty plea on Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian insisted he was “not familiar with the specifics” of the case and added, “The so-called secret police stations do not exist.”
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