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The glass facade building,second from left,is believed to be the site of a foreign police outpost for China in New York’s Chinatown.Credit:AP

The charges come as the Department of Justice ramps up probes into what it calls“transnational repression” by US adversaries such as China and Iran to intimidate political opponents living in the United States.

“We cannot andwill not tolerate the Chinese government’s persecution of pro-democracy activists who have sought refuge in this country,” Breon Peace,the top federal prosecutor in Brooklyn,told reporters.

Also on Monday,prosecutors unveiled charges against 34 Chinese officials for allegedly operating a “troll farm” and harassing dissidents online,including by disrupting their meetings on US technology platforms.

They also added eight Chinese government officials as defendants in a case announced in 2020 charging a former China-based executive of Zoom Video Communications Inc with disrupting video meetings commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

The officials charged are all at large.

“The topics of the propaganda and official narratives are directed by Ministry of Public Security headquarters,and have included the advantages of the PRC’s CCP-dominated political system over democracy,US domestic and foreign policy,human rights issues in Hong Kong and Xinjiang Province,the Russian invasion of Ukraine,civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd and the COVID-19 pandemic,” the DOJsaid.

China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lu and Chen are both US citizens who lead a nonprofit organisation that lists its mission as providing a social gathering place for people from China’s Fujian province,prosecutors said.

Lu in 2018 sought to persuade an individual considered a fugitive by China to return home,prosecutors said. In 2022,he helped open the so-called police station and was asked by China’s government to locate an individual living in California who was considered a pro-democracy activist,they added.

Prosecutors said Lu and Chen admitted to the FBI that they deleted their communications with a Chinese government official. The police station closed in autumn of 2022,according to prosecutors.

Monday’s charges come after FBI Director Christopher Wray told a US Senate committee in November that he was “very concerned” about the presence of such stations in US cities.

Prosecutors previously charged more than a dozen Chinese nationals and others with waging surveillance and harassment campaigns against dissidents living in the United States,including by trying to forcibly repatriate people whom China considered fugitives.

Reuters

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