A jury found the Chinese American who ran Beijing’s undercover police station in New York guilty of being a foreign agent for China.
He was also found guilty of obstructing justice by deleting WeChat messages documenting his direct communications with his contact in China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS).
Lu Jianwang, 64, community leader and former president of the America ChangLe Association, was convicted on May 13 in Brooklyn Federal Court.
The jury found him not guilty of the charge of conspiring with others as a Chinese agent.
Lu ran the Overseas Chinese Police Service Center out of the offices of the hometown association on East Broadway in New York’s Chinatown.
The New York branch of overseas Chinese police stations run by Lu was just one of 30 branch offices launched on Jan. 10, 2022, by the Fuzhou Ministry of Public Security.
The charges of not registering and of conspiring as a foreign agent for the Chinese regime each carried a maximum of 5 years prison sentence.
The maximum sentence for the obstruction of justice charge is 20 years in prison.
Lu, who first came to the United States in 1980, is a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Lu’s ties trace back to 2015 when the Chinese consulate called on New York hometown association leaders to bring their members to a counter-protest during the 2015 visit of Xi Jinping to Washington, according to court documents.
In interviews with the FBI, Lu said that local leaders each sent 15 members to counter Falun Gong practitioners demonstrating against Xi.
Tasks for Chinese state security continued in 2018, with Lu receiving requests from Huang Jiesheng to inquire if two people practiced Falun Gong in the United States.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice centered on the principles of truth, compassion, and tolerance. Introduced to the public in China in the early 1990s, it gained widespread popularity, reaching between 70 million and 100 million practitioners by the end of the decade, according to official estimates at the time.
In 2021, Huang also sent over a criminal complaint against two persons accused of fraud in China.
Prosecutors said that Lu gained a position of trust and confidence with Chinese state security, assisting with their requests and providing information on other overseas Chinese as the regime spread its governance across the globe.
They said it was Lin Youping of the All China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese (ACFROC), a united front work group, who connected Lu with China’s Fuzhou Ministry of Public Security.
ACFROC is an influence operation that connects with overseas Chinese to involve them in supporting initiatives of the CCP.
Lu joined in the launch of the overseas Chinese Police Service Stations on Jan. 10, 2022, in Fuzhou, China.
When he returned to the United States in February, 2022, he and the members of America ChangeLe Association created the banner for their New York station and started operations.
FBI analysis of Lu’s device revealed he was included in one WeChat group with MPS officials based in Fuzhou, including his main contact Liu Rongyan, as well as 65 individuals at police stations around the globe.
Once the New York station got started, the offices opened up for two hours a week in the evening to facilitate Chinese citizens living in New York to connect with Chinese motor vehicle officials to renew their driver license without returning to China.
Lu’s public defender, John Carman, disputed the prosecution’s argument that Lu was working under the direct control of the Chinese government.
“They had their own objective, their objective was helping people,” said Carman, who portrayed Lu’s work as a community service provided during a time when traveling back to China would require waiting days in quarantine.
Prosecutors said this was just the overt side of what Lu was engaged in, and that the darker side of the operation, which included tracking dissidents and other overseas Chinese to pressure them to return to China, started up shortly thereafter.
By March 2022, Liu Rongyan, who was based in Fuzhou, asked Lu to confirm the address and existence of Xu Jie, a Chinese dissident who posted videos on YouTube criticizing the CCP.
Chinese dissident Xu, 61, who testified May 11 at the trial, moved to the United States in 2018 and lives in Pomona, California.
Xu testified that his office and vehicle were vandalized but nothing was taken.
He said at the trial that he gave up on democratic rule under the CCP after seeing tanks run over students in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Liu was the key MPS official in Fuzhou communicating with Lu and the American ChangLe Association in New York that ran the unofficial police station.
Lu ran into a snag with his MPS handler Liu when in July 2022 he and the America ChangLe Association started charging $100 fees for license renewal, calling it a donation for the association.
Liu was getting complaints and told Lu that the association must refund all of the money collected from local Chinese people who had used their license renewal platform.
Liu was concerned her superiors would find out.
Lu pushed back, saying it was too much trouble to reach out to each and every person who had come by.
Instead the association agreed to send out a letter to advise all who had paid that a refund was available.
In Lu’s defense, Carman argued that Lu never paid back these donations, and the association simply wrote a letter announcing to those who paid that a refund was available.
Carman argued this was a clear example that Lu and others at the association were not agents of China’s MPS.
“If there was direction and control that money would be paid back,” said Carman.
The station was open for less than nine months—opening mid-February 2022 and closing Oct. 3, 2022.
In September non-government group Safeguard Defenders published a report on the 30 overseas Chinese police service stations operating around the world, the FBI saw the report and took action.
“The FBI was shocked and understandably embarrassed,” said Carman.
The FBI obtained a warrant and on Oct. 3 searched the facility.
“But is it a police station? Whatever it is, it’s a computer, a monitor, and a banner,” he said, downplaying that the outpost served any other function for Chinese state security.
Once he was alerted that the FBI was investigating the association, Lu deleted all of his direct, one-on-one messages with Liu via WeChat.
For this, Lu was charged with obstruction of justice for intentionally hampering an official investigation.
Lu was charged with conspiring with Chen Jinping and Chen Jinxiong in the police station scheme to act as agents of the Chinese regime.
