A New York resident pleaded guilty Wednesday to working as an unregistered foreign agent after prosecutors said he ran a “secret police station” in the city on behalf of Beijing’s efforts to crack down on Chinese dissidents abroad.

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said Chen Jinping, 61, pleaded guilty to setting up a Manhattan office used to inform Beijing about Chinese nationals who committed petty and often vague crimes related to fraud while overseas.

Most Chinese nationals were “persuaded to return” and face charges after Chinese Communist Party surrogates harassed or imprisoned the dissident’s family members, according to the Safeguard Defenders watchdog group that monitored the police stations globally.

Chen admitted in his plea to destroying evidence about his correspondence with CCP officials over the unlawful pressure campaign. He faces up to five years behind bars when he’s sentenced in May.

“This illegal police station was not opened in the interest of public safety, but to further the nefarious and repressive aims of the [People’s Republic of China] in direct violation of American sovereignty,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge James Dennehy said in a statement.

Prosecutors said Chen and codefendant Lu Jianwang established and ran the “police station” based out of a building in Chinatown — the first overseas police station Beijing had opened in the states. 

In his plea, Chen acknowledged he scrubbed an online article about the police station in September 2022 so it wouldn’t come back to bite the CCP.

Mr. Lu, who has pleaded not guilty to charges of working as a foreign agent and obstruction of justice, is accused of trying to track down a pro-democracy activist on behalf of the ruling communist party. Prosecutors also said he intended to persuade a supposed fugitive to return to China in 2018.

The FBI raided the illegal police station in October 2022. Chen and Mr. Lu were arrested in April 2023. 

According to Safeguard Defenders’ report from 2022, Beijing’s Ministry of Public Security was operating 110 overseas stations internationally. Most of the stations were based in Europe.

The main criminal activities monitored by the CCP surrogates were fraud and telecommunications fraud.

For example, Safeguard’s report said a Chinese woman running a restaurant in Cambodia was contacted by authorities to return to China in 2022. The woman said she was not committing any fraud and was just doing business in the country.

Chinese officials then warned her months later that she would be put on a telecom suspect list and that they would cut water and power to her mother’s home if she didn’t return. Her mother’s home was later spray-painted with the term “House of Telecom Fraud.”

• Matt Delaney can be reached at mdelaney@washingtontimes.com.