The U.S. charged 44 defendants over an alleged Chinese campaign to harass its citizens in New York and around the country who espoused anti-government views, part of a broader effort to push back on Beijing’s efforts to target dissidents beyond its borders.
The defendants, who live in China and elsewhere in Asia, created fake social media accounts to intimidate Chinese dissidents living abroad and sought to suppress their speech on the platform of a U.S. telecommunications company that wasn’t identified. They include 42 Chinese officials 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,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen said, using China’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.
In a related case, federal prosecutors charged two men for operating an illegal police station in Manhattan’s Chinatown on behalf of China’s Ministry of Public Security and then destroying evidence when FBI agents confronted them.
The two men, Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping, were arrested Monday at their homes in New York on allegations that they were acting as agents for China’s government and obstructing justice by destroying evidence of communications with Chinese officials, the Justice Department said in a separate statement.
Beijing has increasingly sought to pursue its critics overseas as its international clout grows and dissident groups seek to mobilize campaigns to punish the Communist Party for alleged human rights abuses in places like Xinjiang. The U.S.-government backed group Freedom House said in a 2021 report that the country has the most sophisticated campaign of transnational repression in the world.
According to U.S. officials, Lu participated in a counter-protest in Washington against “members of a religion that is forbidden” under Chinese law when President Xi Jinping visited the U.S. in 2015. It didn’t name the religion, but China bans the Falun Gong and the group holds such protests frequently. Three years later, Lu joined efforts that led a Chinese fugitive to return home. The victim alleged harassment, including threats of violence to family members in the U.S. and in China.
FBI agents searched the illegal police station in 2022 and found that Lu and Chen had deleted communications with a Ministry of Public Security official, prosecutors said.
“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,” Breon Peace, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in the statement. Olsen said the station was established to “monitor and intimidate dissidents and those critical of its government.”
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(With assistance from William Turton and Chris Strohm.)
