Given everything we already know about the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to interfere in American society, it’s hardly any surprise that Beijing’s long arm reaches into New York City. And on Monday, the Justice Department announced the arrests of two people involved in the Chinese-government police station that had operated in Manhattan.
“These defendants did China’s bidding in secret while acting under the direction and control of a [Ministry of Public Security] official in China,” Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said at a press conference. He and other law-enforcement officials announced charges against dozens more Chinese police operatives who worked from abroad to harass, intimidate, and surveil Beijing’s opponents on U.S. soil.
The party has shown time and time again that it will follow its opponents to the ends of the earth. America is no exception.
Since the existence of the station was revealed last fall by the human-rights group Safeguard Defenders, Chinese officials have claimed that it was only used to renew the Chinese drivers’ licenses of people in the New York area. Over the course of their investigation, according to a criminal complaint unveiled Monday, federal law-enforcement agents found that the Chinese police outpost did do that — and more.
The two defendants in the case are Lu Jianwang, who also goes by Harry Lu, and Chen Jinping, both of whom have held various leadership roles in a New York–based group called the America ChangLe Association. That organization has portrayed itself as an independent club for immigrants from China’s Fujian province (ChangLe is a district in its city of Fuzhou). However, the association allegedly worked with Fuzhou’s public-security bureau to set up the police station in early 2022.
Lu, Chen, and additional America ChangLe members who have thus far avoided criminal liability have found themselves at the nexus of an alphabet soup of party influence networks and Chinese government bureaus.
Lu in particular, the criminal complaint explains, had a “longstanding relationship of trust” with the Chinese government, and, per his own admission to the FBI, he helped organize paid protests against Falun Gong practitioners at the behest of Chinese diplomats in 2015. The complaint also outlines a series of interactions with officials from the MPS and the Party’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) — the powerful party bureau that helps implement Beijing’s aims around the world.
While the very act of setting up a foreign government’s unauthorized police station is itself illegal, Lu is alleged to have gone even further than that, helping the MPS locate a Chinese dissident living in California and participating in a harassment campaign to force a Chinese fugitive to leave the U.S. and return to China. The case is centered on these efforts on behalf of the Chinese government, as well as alleged steps by Chen and Lu to destroy evidence and alleged lies to federal agents.
All of this should force a long-delayed reckoning with Chinese influence and interference efforts on U.S. soil, and it raises uncomfortable questions about Washington’s ability to strike back against such activities. Beijing regularly mobilizes purportedly independent front groups to advance its goals in America, as it recently did during demonstrations against Taiwan’s president several weeks ago in New York and Los Angeles.
But while law enforcement is catching up, and while the FBI and DOJ have acted admirably to confront this threat and Chinese transnational repression more broadly, it seems that the feds initiated their investigation only after the report by Safeguard Defenders. In other words, it possibly took a bunch of researchers based in Madrid to make the FBI aware that China had a police station in New York.
Disgracefully, local officials are often happy to look the other way. New York City mayor Eric Adams and other officials who should have known better attended the America ChangLe Association’s gala last fall.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration needs to stop pulling its punches when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party’s malign influence on U.S. soil.
While the State Department, in the waning days of the Trump administration, designated the National Association for China’s Peaceful Unification — a United Front group — as a Chinese government mission, therefore subjecting it to certain restrictions, the current team at Foggy Bottom has conspicuously declined to make further such designations.
In fact, as National Review has reported, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team has pulled back from even using the phrase “malign influence” to refer to Beijing’s activities. And not a single senior official at State or the White House has spoken publicly about the party’s United Front campaigns, even as they’ve otherwise worked to combat China’s harassment of people in the U.S.
Reports say that Blinken is eager to piece back together his plans to visit Beijing (the trip was postponed after the Chinese spy-balloon incident), but that the Chinese are unwilling to host him if Washington publicly releases its report on the spy balloon.
Instead, Blinken should order the expulsion of all Chinese diplomats based in the U.S. known to coordinate Beijing’s efforts with United Front groups. There’s precedent for this in the 2020 forced closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston over its persistent role in espionage campaigns.
Every American should want a better U.S. relationship with China. But the arrests made Monday are a reminder that sacrificing America’s national self-respect in return for friendlier relations with the CCP would be a terrible tradeoff.