Two arrested after allegedly operating illegal Chinese ‘police station’ in New York
Mike Brest
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The Department of Justice announced on Monday that two people were arrested on allegations they participated in the operation of an illegal police station for the Chinese government in New York City.
Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping have been charged with conspiring to act as Chinese government agents, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York said. Both destroyed evidence of their communications with the Chinese national police when they learned about the investigation into their activity, according to Breon Peace, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, which he described as obstruction of justice.
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“Two miles from our office just across the Brooklyn Bridge, this nondescript office building in the heart of bustling Chinatown in Lower Manhattan, has a dark secret. Until several months ago, an entire floor of this building hosted an undeclared police station of the Chinese National Police. Now, just imagine the NYPD opening an undeclared secret police station in Beijing. It would be unthinkable,” Peace said.
The unofficial police station closed its office, a floor in a Chinatown office building, in the fall of last year when it became aware of the FBI’s investigation, according to a DOJ release on the arrests.
Peace acknowledged that it “was providing some government services, like helping Chinese citizens renew their Chinese driver’s licenses. More troubling, though, is the fact that the secret police station appears to have had a more sinister use on at least one occasion. An official with the Chinese National Police directed one of the defendants, a U.S. citizen who worked at the secret police station, to help locate a pro-democracy activist of Chinese descent living in California.”
“In other words, the Chinese national police appear to have been using the station to track a U.S. resident on U.S. soil,” he said.
If they are convicted of conspiring to act as agents of China, they face a maximum sentence of five years in prison, and the obstruction of justice charge has a maximum of 20 years’ imprisonment. Lu and Chen are expected to appear in court Monday afternoon before a magistrate judge.
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Separately, two other criminal complaints unsealed on Monday charged 44 people with various crimes related to the efforts by China’s national police to harass and target dissidents based in the United States and around the world.
“These cases demonstrate the lengths the PRC government will go to silence and harass U.S. persons who exercise their fundamental rights to speak out against PRC oppression, including by unlawfully exploiting a U.S.-based technology company. These actions violate our laws and are an affront to our democratic values and basic human rights,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division said.