A U.S. citizen who helped the Chinese government set up a secret, illegal “police station” in Chinatown to track and harass dissidents has pleaded guilty to federal charges.
Chin Jinping, 61, could face anywhere between no prison time and five years behind bars as well as the possibility of losing his U.S. citizenship after admitting his role in the brazen Chinese spying scheme. He will be sentenced in Brooklyn Federal Court on May 30.
Jinping, of Manhattan, and Lu Jianwang, 61, of the Bronx, were busted last year as federal authorities also charged dozens of officials with China’s Ministry of Public Security, or MPS, with running online operations to harass and troll dissidents and disrupt their Zoom meetings.
“I knowingly agreed to act as an agent of a foreign country, a foreign government,” Jinping said at a hearing before Brooklyn Federal Court Nina Morrison, speaking through a Chinese interpreter. “Acting on their behalf, I sought to remove an online article.”
Morrison had to press him to name China as the foreign government.
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Department of Justice Lu Jianwang of the Bronx in an undated photo.
He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as a foreign agent, a count that included his role in setting up the secret police station in lower Manhattan. The online article in question was written about the Chinese government’s operation of the police station, according to the indictment.
“At the time I did this, I had not informed the attorney general about me acting as a foreign agent, and I was not registered as a foreign agent,” he told the judge.
Chen and Lu were the leaders of a nonprofit organization founded in 2013 that described its mission as a “social gathering place for Fujianese people,” and Lu built what prosecutors describe as a “relationship of trust” with the Chinese government.
The nonprofit opened the secret police station, dubbed the “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station,” out of its Chinatown office at 107 E. Broadway in early 2022, the feds allege.
The station is shut down, and Lu and Chen deleted their phone communications with their MPS go-between after FBI agents raided it in October 2022, prosecutors allege.
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Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily News Chen and Lu’s nonprofit opened a secret police station, dubbed the “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station,” out of its Chinatown office on the third floor of 107 E. Broadway in early 2022. The building is pictured on April 17, 2023. (Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily News)
A federal complaint details at least one victim of the secret police station, a pro-democracy advocate living in California who worked as an adviser to a U.S. congressional candidate.
The Chinese national police directed Lu to find the advocate’s home in California, and the victim was repeatedly harassed by people he believed were proxies for the Chinese government, including one incident where his car was broken into after he gave a pro-democracy speech.
Around the same time Lu was looking for the victim’s home, a retired Chinese police officer was charged with a plot to undermine the congressional candidate’s 2022 campaign.
Though the candidate is not 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.
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Department of Justice Lu Jianwang, left, and Chen Jinping in an undated photo. (Department of Justice)
Even if it stuck by its stated mission, helping Fuzhou residents living abroad with administrative matters like renewing Chinese driver’s licenses, the “police station” would still have had to register with the U.S. Attorney General — which it did not.
The station, located on the third floor of 107 E. Broadway, has shut down, officials said.
The FBI does not 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.
