FBI arrest 2 Chinese ops for running illegal police station in Manhattan to 'spy on and harass dissidents' as DOJ announces charges on 44 others

[Hamartia Antidote]

FBI arrest two Chinese operatives for operating illegal police station

US attorney for the Eastern District of New York confirmed that two men have been arrested in connection with the station in New York City's Chinatown neighborhood.

www.dailymail.co.uk

FBI arrest two Chinese operatives for running illegal police station in Manhattan to 'spy on and harass dissidents' as DOJ announces charges on 44 others in major crackdown on espionage on US soil​

• Lu Jianwang, 61, and Chen Jinping, 59, are set to appear at a Brooklyn federal court on Monday
• Prosecutors say the illegal police station to 'silence and harass' individuals across America
• The DOJ announced three cases that accuse the Chinese government of spying in the US

The FBI have arrested two Chinese operatives on suspicion of running an illegal police station in downtown Manhattan to spy on and harass dissidents on US soil.

US attorney for the Eastern District of New York confirmed that two men have been arrested in connection with the station in New York City's Chinatown neighborhood.

Lu Jianwang, 61, of the Bronx, and Chen Jinping, 59, of Manhattan, were both arrested on Monday morning at their addresses in New York.

They have been charged with conspiring to act as agents for the Chinese government, and are expected to appear in federal court in Brooklyn.

More than a dozen Chinese nationals have been charged by federal prosecutors with waging a campaign of surveillance and harassment against dissidents living in the States.

Prosecutors say Jianwang tried to persuade a Chinese fugitive to return home, and continually 'harassed and threatened' the individual in 2018.

In 2022 China's government asked Jianwang to locate a pro-democracy Chinese activist living in California.

The pair admitted to the FBI that they deleted their communications with a Chinese government official after discovering they were under investigation.

Both are accused of running the station for a provincial branch of the Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

If convicted of conspiring to act as agents of the PRC, the defendants face a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

An obstruction of justice charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Jianwang admitted that in 2015, during President Xi Jinping’s visit to the US, he sent 15 members of the group to participate in counterprotests in Washington DC .

Acting Assistant Director Kurt Ronnow, of the Counterintelligence Division, said in a press conference on Monday: 'It is simply outrageous that China's Ministry of Public Security thinks it can get away with establishing a secret, illegal police station on U.S. soil to aid its efforts to export repression and subvert our rule of law.

'This case serves as a powerful reminder that the People's Republic of China will stop at nothing to bend people to their will and silence messages they don't want anyone to hear.'

Both are accused of running the station for a provincial branch of the Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China (PRC)

They ran the secret police station above a ramen store in Manhattan's Chinatown for several months

Lu Jianwang, 61, (third left) and Chen Jinping, 59, (second left) were both arrested on Monday morning at their addresses in New York

In addition to the case in New York, the Department of Justice announced two other cases accusing dozens of Chinese nationals of spying on US soil.

One is against 34 members of Beijing's Municipal Public Security Bureau (MPSB), and another against a group of 10 people that includes eight Chinese government officials.

Members of the MPSB are accused of creating fake social media accounts across various platforms to harass Chinese dissidents in the US and to promote propaganda from China – including relating to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The third case involves Chinese security officials allegedly spying on Zoom calls and then harassing those that they identified as targets.

Ten Chinese officials were charged with conspiracy along with an employee of a telecommunications company who worked in the People's Republic of China - Julien Jin.

An obstruction of justice charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison

Many of the stations are open in Western Europe, with only four in North America


Six were officers of the PRC Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and two are officials with the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC).

One civilian was also charged with conspiracy to commit interstate harassment and unlawful conspiracy to transfer means of identification. All the defendants are believed to reside in the PRC and remain at large

Breon Peace, the top federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, said in a statement: 'This prosecution reveals the Chinese government's flagrant violation of our nation's sovereignty by establishing a secret police station in the middle of New York City.'

The charges come after FBI Director Christopher Wray told a U.S. Senate committee in November that he was 'very concerned' about the presence of such stations in U.S. cities.

He said the Chinese government setting up a police presence in the United States 'violates sovereignty' and circumvents law enforcement cooperation.

 

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40 Officers of China’s National Police Charged in Transnational Repression Schemes Targeting U.S. Residents

Two criminal complaints filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York were unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging 44 defendants with various crimes related to efforts by the national police of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – the Ministry of Public...

www.justice.gov

40 Officers of China’s National Police Charged in Transnational Repression Schemes Targeting U.S. Residents​

Defendants Accused of Creating Fake Social Media Accounts to Harass PRC Dissidents, and Working with Employees of a U.S. Telecommunications Company to Remove Dissidents from Company’s Platform

Two criminal complaints filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York were unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging 44 defendants with various crimes related to efforts by the national police of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) – to harass Chinese nationals residing in the New York metropolitan area and elsewhere in the United States. The defendants, including 40 MPS officers and two officials in the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), allegedly perpetrated transnational repression schemes targeting U.S. residents whose political views and actions are disfavored by the PRC government, such as advocating for democracy in the PRC.

In the two schemes, the defendants created and used fake social media accounts to harass and intimidate PRC dissidents residing abroad and sought to suppress the dissidents’ free speech on the platform of a U.S. telecommunications company (Company-1). The defendants charged in these schemes are believed to reside in the PRC or elsewhere in Asia and remain at large.

“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,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “These actions violate our laws and are an affront to our democratic values and basic human rights.”

“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 – in one case by covertly spreading propaganda to undermine confidence in our democratic processes and, in another, by suppressing U.S. video conferencing users’ free speech,” said Acting Assistant Director Kurt Ronnow of the FBI Counterintelligence Division. “We aren’t going to tolerate CCP repression – its efforts to threaten, harass, and intimidate people – here in the United States. The FBI will continue to confront the Chinese government’s efforts to violate our laws and repress the rights and freedoms of people in our country.”

Disclosure: U.S. Attorney Breon Peace for the Eastern District of New York is recused from and has not participated in the case captioned United States v. Julien Jin et al., 20-mj-1103.

United States v. Yunpeng Bai, et al.

The two-count complaint charges 34 MPS officers with conspiracy to transmit interstate threats and conspiracy to commit interstate harassment. All the defendants are believed to reside in the PRC, and they remain at large.

As alleged, the officers worked with Beijing’s MPS bureau and are or were assigned to an elite task force called the “912 Special Project Working Group” (the Group). The purpose of the Group is to target Chinese dissidents located throughout the world, including in the United States.

“As alleged, the PRC government deploys its national police and the 912 Special Project Working Group not as an instrument to uphold the law and protect public safety, but rather as a troll farm that attacks persons in our country for exercising free speech in a manner that the PRC government finds disagreeable, and also spreads propaganda whose sole purpose is to sow divisions within the United States,” said U.S. Attorney Breon Peace for the Eastern District of New York. “I commend the investigative team for comprehensively revealing the insidiousness of a state-directed criminal scheme directed at residents of the United States.”

The complaint alleges how members of the Group created thousands of fake online personas on social media sites, including Twitter, to target Chinese dissidents through online harassment and threats. These online personas also disseminated official PRC government propaganda and narratives to counter the pro-democracy speech of the Chinese dissidents. As alleged, for example, Group members created and maintained the fake social media accounts through temporary email addresses, posted official PRC government content, and interacted with other online users to avoid the appearance that the Group accounts were “flooding” a given social media platform. The Group tracks the performances of members in fulfilling their online responsibilities and rewards Group members who successfully operate multiple online personas without detection by the social media companies who host the platforms or by other users of the platforms.

The investigation also uncovered official MPS taskings to Group members to compose articles and videos based on certain themes targeting, for example, the activities of Chinese dissidents located abroad or the policies of the U.S. government.

As alleged, the defendants also attempted to recruit U.S. persons to act as unwitting agents of the PRC government by disseminating propaganda or narratives of the PRC government. On several occasions, the defendants used online personas to contact individuals assessed to be sympathetic and supportive of the PRC government’s narratives and asked these individuals to disseminate Group content.

In addition, Group members took repeated affirmative actions to have Chinese dissidents and their meetings removed from the platform of Company-1. For example, Group members disrupted a dissident’s efforts to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre through a videoconference by posting threats against the participants through the platform’s chat function. In another Company-1 videoconference on the topic of countering communism organized by a PRC dissident, Group members flooded the videoconference and drowned out the meeting with loud music and vulgar screams and threats directed at the pro-democracy participants.

United States v. Julien Jin, et al.

This amended complaint charges 10 individuals, including a former PRC-based Company-1 employee, six MPS officers, and two officials with the CAC, with conspiracy to commit interstate harassment and unlawful conspiracy to transfer means of identification. Nine of the defendants are believed to reside in the PRC and remain at large. The tenth defendant is believed to reside in Indonesia or the PRC and also remains at large.

“The amended complaint charging a former PRC-based employee of a U.S. telecommunications company illustrates the insider threat faced by U.S. companies operating in the PRC,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Pokorny for the Eastern District of New York, who thanked Company-1 for its cooperation in the government’s investigation. “As alleged, Julien Jin and his co-conspirators in the Ministry of Public Security and Cyberspace Administration of China weaponized the U.S. telecommunications company he worked for to intimidate and silence dissenters and enforce PRC law to the detriment of Chinese activists in New York, among other places, who had sought refuge in this country to peacefully express their pro-democracy views.”

“These cases demonstrate that the Chinese Communist Party, once again, attempted to intimidate, harass, and suppress Chinese dissidents in the United States,” said Assistant Director in Charge David Sundberg of the FBI Washington Field Office. “In the United States, the freedom of speech is a cornerstone of our democracy, and the FBI will work tirelessly to defend everyone's right to speak freely without fear of retribution from the CCP. These complex investigations revealed an MPS-wide effort to repress individuals by using the U.S. communications platform and fake social media accounts to censor political and religious speech.”

In December 2020, the Department first announced charges against Julien Jin in connection with his efforts to disrupt a series of meetings on the Company-1 platform held in May and June 2020 commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. Jin served as Company-1’s primary liaison with PRC government law enforcement and intelligence services. In that capacity, he regularly responded to requests from the PRC government to terminate meetings and block users on Company-1’s video communications platform.

As detailed in the original complaint, Jin and others conspired to use Company-1’s U.S. systems to censor the political and religious speech of individuals located in the United States and elsewhere at the direction of the PRC government. For example, Jin and others disrupted meetings held on the Company-1 platform to discuss politically sensitive topics unacceptable to the PRC government – including the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Jin and his co-conspirators fabricated evidence of purported misconduct to cause U.S.-based employees of Company-1 to terminate the meetings.

The allegations in the amended complaint reveal that Jin worked directly with and took orders from defendants at the MPS and the CAC to disrupt meetings on the Company-1 platform and that the co-defendants had targeted U.S.-based dissidents’ speech on Company-1’s platform since 2018.

Starting in 2018, Jin and his co-defendants repeatedly sought to terminate video chat meetings organized by a Chinese dissident residing in New York City who has been a vocal critic of the PRC government and the Chinese Communist Party. After the CAC requested that Company-1 terminate the dissident’s meetings on the Company-1 platform, Jin worked to identify all accounts associated with the dissident, caused meetings related to the dissident to be hosted in a “quarantine zone” – that is, on a server with known lags in response time – and later worked to block all accounts associated with the dissident. Similarly, in 2019, Jin collaborated with the MPS and CAC to block accounts seeking to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

The FBI Washington Field Office investigated the cases.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Alexander A. Solomon, Antoinette N. Rangel, Ian C. Richardson, Nicholas J. Moscow and Jessica K. Weigel of the Eastern District of New York, and Trial Attorney Scott A. Claffee of the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section are prosecuting the cases.

The FBI has created a website for victims to report efforts by foreign governments to stalk, intimidate, or assault people in the United States. Please visit: www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/transnational-repression.

 

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China cracks down on citizens abroad as people flee country

"China's influence in the U.N. and other international institutions are diminishing because of its gross violations," a human rights expert told Newsweek.

www.newsweek.com

China Cracks Down on Citizens Abroad as People Flee Country​

Government repression inside China is leading to a crackdown on dissidents outside of the country, including increased surveillance, according to human rights experts.

Two New York residents, 61-year-old Lu Jianwang and 59-year-old Chen Jinping, were arrested last month on federal accusations of setting up and operating a "secret police station" on behalf of the Chinese government's Ministry of Public Security. The arrests have drawn additional attention to the so-called stations operated internationally by the Chinese Communist Party on five continents including Europe, North America and Africa.

The police stations need to be understood in the context that the Chinese government has been pursuing Chinese dissidents living abroad for several years, Yaqui Wang, a senior China researcher for Human Rights Watch, told Newsweek in a phone conversation.

"There's just so many people basically fleeing China because they criticized the government, or they run afoul with the government for other reasons," she said.

The Madrid-based nongovernmental organization (NGO) Safeguard Defenders documented the establishment of the stations in June 2022. The stations began as pilot programs run by the public security bureaus of Fuzhou and Qingtian counties and operated in 25 cities.

Updated data published by Safeguard Defenders in December detailed over 100 reported clandestine police stations across some 50 countries controlled by various entities of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, on behalf of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

Laura Harth, the campaign director at Safeguard Defenders, told Newsweek that South Africa is the only country that they've seen that explicitly gave its consent.

Nations like Italy have engaged in what she termed "willful blindness" to such activities, though officials there have rejected the idea of consenting to the targeting of citizens. A 2015 bilateral agreement on joint police patrols to help Chinese-speaking tourists appears to have contributed to the establishment of a station. The program ended in 2022.

Italy's interior ministry told the national newspaper Il Folgio last September that the Chinese stations were "of no particular concern," according to The Guardian.

"Despite having the largest number of liaison outposts on its soil, the Italian government is among the very few European countries that has not yet publicly announced an investigation into the Chinese overseas police stations or declared their illegality," Safeguard Defenders reported.

Safeguard Defenders focuses heavily on forced disappearances from the PRC and how their authorities discuss them, Harth said. Through the NGO's work helping defendants stop extraditions to China, Harth said they saw increasingly more clandestine methods of returning people to China for prosecution.

"And once we saw those initial [police] stations, we knew that this was probably going to be something that caught the authorities in the democratic nations' attention," Harth said.

Repression in China​

Wang told Newsweek that more attention has been drawn to human rights issues in China due to rising China-United States tensions.

"Whether the Chinese government is going to intensify its intimidation and harassment of the Chinese diaspora depends on how other governments address this issue," Wang said.

A United Nations report published last August stated that the Chinese government committed abuses that may amount to crimes against humanity in their alleged targeting of Uyghurs and other Turkic communities in the Xinjiang region.

"This report must be understood in the context that China has a lot of influence in the U.N., and to have this report out in such strong language is already a huge achievement," she said. "So, I would say this is progress. It shows that China's influence in the U.N. and other international institutions are diminishing because of its gross violations and other countries pushing back."

While it's known that China's cracking down on its citizens' rights, Wang said it's difficult to estimate how many individuals have been harassed or jailed by the PRC, saying there "are huge numbers of people."

Hong Kong is a strong example of repression prompting Chinese residents to flee the country. People in the city have had their freedoms "decimated" and many of them have gone into exile and organized in countries like the U.S. and the United Kingdom. Those individuals are "playing a huge role in pushing back and speaking up."

It seems like sinicization, Wang said, referring to the acculturation or assimilation of Chinese norms on neighboring East Asian societies or minority ethnic groups within China.

"The Chinese government wants to make the minorities more look like Chinese," she said. "That's why they are cracking down on the religious cultural practices in Xinjiang; why they are banning men having a beard, woman having [a] veil because those are not Chinese practices."

The "broader umbrella of the government's sinicization" including political, cultural and religious repressions as it pertains to Uyghurs, Tibetans and others has caused minorities in China to flee, she added.

The Global Response​

President Xi Jinping's battle for supremacy on an international stage has "accelerated" the crackdown on criticism of China's government both within its borders and around the world.

Harth referred to the secret stations as the "tip of the iceberg." The consequences have spilled into the wider world, with a likelihood of increased similar operations.

"As we are seeing the repression inside grow, it was never good," Harth said. "But it's getting worse and worse exponentially since Xi Jinping came into power."

The onus is on democratic nations to understand how the stations are put into place, such as abusing international mechanisms like Interpol, bilateral agreements like extraditions, and police cooperation agreements—as well as not registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

In April, the White House was asked about the stations—linked to potential Chinese surveillance following multiple spy balloon incidents—though neglected to comment.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that the presence of these Chinese stations in his country "concerns us enormously." Two stations in Quebec were specifically being investigated following Canadians of Chinese origin allegedly being victimized, according to the Los Angeles Times.

"We've known about the [presence of] Chinese police stations across the country for many months, and we are making sure that the RCMP is following up on it and that our intelligence services take it seriously," Trudeau said in March.

Following the arrests in New York City, Royal Canadian Mounted Police spokesperson Robin Percival told Newsweek that the "RCMP is actively investigating reports nationally of criminal activity in relation to the so-called 'police' stations."

The incident perked up the ears of officials in other countries as well.

French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said in comments shared with Newsweek that "under no circumstances will France tolerate attacks on its sovereignty."

"It intends to vigorously combat foreign influences on its soil and will not allow international rules providing for the admission of these citizens to undermine our good relations with certain nations," he added, "whether that be China or any other country."

A spokesperson for the German Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community told Newsweek that no permanent offices have been established.

"The Chinese Embassy was requested to immediately terminate activities outside the Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic and Consular Relations and to close down existing 'Chinese overseas police stations' in Germany. There is an exchange with the Chinese Embassy on this matter," the spokesperson said.

"This is about people being targeted and not able to enjoy their fundamental freedoms as they should because they are residents or citizens of our democratic nations," Harth said. "They're going to increase these kinds of things...We now really need to start increasing our countermeasures to make sure that people on our soil are protected and we speak with one united voice to Beijing when we say this is not acceptable."