Chinese embassy spox says US trying to ‘smear China’s image’ with latest Justice Department charges

A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in the U.S. is arguing that the Justice Department is trying to “smear China’s image” after it announced charges yesterday against two New Yorkers who allegedly ran a secret police station in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood. 

The revelations, which the Justice Department is describing as a “significant national security matter,” come as the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York also accused dozens of Chinese government police officers of belonging to an “army of Internet trolls” who have threatened and harassed Chinese democracy activists and dissidents worldwide, including in New York City. 

“By initiating prosecution against Chinese citizens under the pretext of ‘transnational repression’, the U.S. side is exercising long-arm jurisdiction based on fabricated charges,” Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in the U.S., told Reuters. 

“This is sheer political manipulation, and the purpose is to smear China’s image,” he added. 

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Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Wenbin also claimed Tuesday that there are no secret police stations being operated by China in New York City, despite the extensive amount of evidence unearthed by the Justice Department, according to Reuters. 

He reportedly said during a press briefing that Beijing upholds a policy of non-interference in other countries. 

In the announcement from federal prosecutors, Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping were each charged with conspiring to act as agents of China’s government by allegedly running the secret police station. 

Breon Peace, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said China’s Ministry of Public Security “has repeatedly and flagrantly violated our nation’s sovereignty, including by opening and operating a police station in the middle of New York City.” 

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“Two miles from our office, just across the Brooklyn Bridge, this nondescript office building in the heart of bustling Chinatown in Lower Manhattan has a dark secret. Until several months ago, an entire floor of this building hosted an undeclared police station of the Chinese National Police,” Peace said. “Now, just imagine the NYPD opening an undeclared secret police station in Beijing. It would be unthinkable.” 

“More troubling, though, is the fact that the secret police station appears to have had a more sinister use on at least one occasion,” Peace added. “An official with the Chinese National Police directed one of the defendants — a U.S. citizen who worked at the secret police station — to help locate a pro-democracy activist of Chinese descent living in California. In other words, the Chinese national police appear to have been using the station to track a U.S. resident on U.S. soil.” 

 

A third federal criminal complaint unsealed Monday charged an additional 10 people, including a former China-based employee of a U.S. telecommunications company, with conspiracy to commit interstate harassment and unlawful conspiracy to transfer means of identification. 

“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,” federal prosecutor Carolyn Pokorny said in a statement. 

Fox News’s Marta Dhanis contributed to this report.