NEW YORK \u2014 A man accused of running a secret Chinese spy outpost from a nondescript office building in Manhattan\u2019s Chinatown neighborhood was convicted Wednesday of acting as an illegal foreign agent.<\/p>\n
Lu Jianwang, 64, was also convicted of obstructing justice by deleting text messages that U.S. prosecutors said included orders from Beijing to silence, harass and intimidate pro-democracy dissidents. He was acquitted on a related conspiracy charge.<\/p>\n
The weeklong trial in Brooklyn federal court pitted U.S. concerns about China\u2019s crackdown on dissidents against the defense\u2019s contention that prosecutors twisted a well-meaning Chinese American community leader\u2019s bureaucratic misstep to put him in prison.<\/p>\n
\u201cA police station operating in New York City at the direction of the Chinese government has been exposed, its sinister purpose disrupted, and its founder held accountable for blatantly disregarding the law and our country\u2019s sovereignty,\u201d U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. said.<\/p>\n
After the verdict, Lu spoke to supporters in his native Fujianese dialect but declined to answer questions from reporters. His lawyer, John Carman, said they would appeal.<\/p>\n
Carman said federal prosecutors passed off a mundane paperwork case as an international spy thriller. The foreign agent conviction relates to Lu\u2019s failure to inform the U.S. government about his work on behalf of China, which his defense team contends was limited only to helping members of the Chinese diaspora renew their Chinese driver\u2019s licenses.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not espionage. This is not spying. This is not intelligence gathering,\u201d Carman said as he stood alongside Lu outside the courthouse. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t charged with any of that.\u201d The subtext of the prosecution case, Carman said, was that Lu \u201cassociated with a lot of Chinese people.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIs that window dressing or dressing up a paperwork case? A hundred percent,\u201d Carman said.<\/p>\n
Lu, a U.S. citizen for decades who also goes by the name Harry Lu, remains free on bail while he awaits sentencing, which has not been scheduled.<\/p>\n
He faces up to 10 years in prison for acting as an illegal foreign agent and up to 20 years in prison for obstruction of justice.<\/p>\n
According to prosecutors, Lu and co-defendant Chen Jinping established the Chinatown outpost in 2022 after Lu attended a ceremony in his native Fujian province where China\u2019s Ministry of Public Security announced it was opening 30 such secret police stations around the world.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s communist government uses the outposts to monitor people it views as enemies of its interests, Assistant U.S. Attorney Antoinette Rangel said in a closing argument Tuesday.<\/p>\n
During the trial, jurors were shown a large banner from the Chinatown location that said: \u201cFuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, New York USA.\u201d They also heard testimony from Xu Jie, a Chinese dissident, activist and YouTuber living in California who prosecutors said was targeted by Lu\u2019s outpost.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe police station wasn\u2019t the defendant\u2019s idea or initiative, this was the Chinese government,\u201d Rangel told jurors in her closing argument. \u201cThis was the Chinese government\u2019s plan and the defendant made it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chen pleaded guilty in December 2024 to a charge of conspiracy to act as a foreign agent.<\/p>\n
Lu\u2019s lawyers contend the outpost was really a community center where people could renew their Chinese driver\u2019s licenses remotely without having to go back to China amid Covid-19 pandemic-era travel restrictions.<\/p>\n
Among other things, Carman said, people would also meet there to play ping-pong and mahjong. But, prosecutors said, even if Lu\u2019s only connection to China was through driver\u2019s licenses, that would be enough to violate the law.<\/p>\n
The Manhattan outpost, sandwiched between a hotel, spa and coffee shop, shared offices with the America ChangLe Association, a community organization that Lu and his brother, Jimmy, helped run. The organization described itself on tax forms as a \u201csocial gathering place for Fujianese people.\u201d ChangLe means \u201ceternal joy,\u201d Carman said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHarry\u2019s motives were pure. Harry\u2019s support in the community is enormous for a reason \u2014 not because he\u2019s some underworld operative,\u201d Carman said. \u201cHis support is there because he\u2019s helped a lot of people in the 45 years that he\u2019s been in the United States of America, becoming a citizen and reaching out to members of his community to help them.\u201d<\/p>\n
The FBI, spurred by a report from an organization that monitors Chinese transnational repression, raided the Chinatown outpost on Oct. 3, 2022. The next day, prosecutors said, Lu admitted to FBI agents that he established the outpost, that he kept in touch with his handler via WeChat and that he had deleted those messages.<\/p>\n
The messages, some of which were recovered through screenshots on Lu\u2019s phone, showed he was \u201cin lockstep with what the Chinese government tasked him to do,\u201d Rangel said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK \u2014 A man accused of running a secret Chinese spy outpost from a nondescript office building…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":230840,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[827,90620,39170,90621,90568,87505,87503,9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":["post-230839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-china","tag-chinatown-neighborhood","tag-chinese-government","tag-deleting-text-messages","tag-foreign-agent","tag-harry-lu","tag-john-carman","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230839\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}