Two U.S. citizens helped the Chinese government set up a secret, illegal “police station” in a Chinatown office building last year, setting up a spy operation to track and harass dissidents living in America, federal prosecutors said Monday.
The arrests of Lu Jianwang, 61, of the Bronx, and Chen Jianping, 59, of Manhattan, Monday morning, came as federal authorities charged dozens of officials with China’s Ministry of Public Security, or MPS, with running online operations to harass and troll dissidents, and have their Zoom meetings canceled.
“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,” Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said Monday.
“Now just imagine the NYPD opening an undeclared secret police station in Beijing. it would be unthinkable,” he added.
The station, located on the third floor of 107 E. Broadway, has shut down, officials said.
The FBI doesn’t know the full extent of what this “police station” was up to, because after agents raided it in October, they learned that Lu and Chen deleted their phone communications with their MPS go-between, prosecutors allege.
A federal complaint details at least one victim of the “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station” — the Chinese national police directed Lu in March 2022 to find the home of a pro-democracy advocate living in California who worked as an adviser to a U.S. congressional candidate.
The victim gave a harrowing account to an FBI agent about being repeatedly harassed by who he believed were proxies for the Chinese government, including an incident where his car was broken into after he gave a pro-democracy speech.
Around the same time as Lu’s efforts to find his adviser, a retired Chinese police officer was charged with a plot to undermine the congressional candidate’s 2022 campaign. Though the candidate isn’t named in court documents, his details matched Xiong Yan, a former student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests who later served in the U.S. military.