I find the older I get the madder I become at the stupidity of our government. And allowing Chinese Communists to operate police stations in the United States strains credulity.
There are at least six known Chinese Communist police stations operating in the United States. Their mandate is to intimidate Chinese citizens (and probably American citizens who oppose them) and remind them that Beijing’s arm has a very long reach.
Leftists who want to restrict the very idea of free speech should take note. There is no effort to persuade the dissidents, no effort to debate. This is raw, unrestrained intimidation — the kind of intimidation we’re headed for here unless we change course. And not surprisingly, it worked.
“These secret police stations reveal the CCP’s blatant disregard and disrespect for the American rules and privacy,” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. McCaul urged the administration to “root out these encroachments on U.S. sovereignty.”
In addition to another station in New York City, there are stations in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Houston, and Omaha.
It wasn’t until last year that the FBI was finally on to the CCP police stations in New York. And it took them months to shut it down and arrest the spies. If they had been Proud Boys or some other far-right group, you can bet they would have moved with lightning speed.
The stations appear to provide civilian cover for Chinese government operations deemed too risky for official Chinese diplomats to pull off. They provide toeholds in neighborhoods with large ethnic Chinese and Asian communities — the Manhattan facility was in Chinatown — that allow those operatives to function with relative anonymity.
They’re a “perfect platform to advance operations that are favorable to Chinese government interests, including misinformation and disinformation,” said Heather McMahon, a former senior director at the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which monitors the intelligence community’s compliance with the Constitution and relevant laws. Safeguard Defenders has reported that one of the purposes of these stations has been to “persuade” Chinese citizens who are implicated in crimes to return to China.
Granted, it takes the FBI and DoJ a while to build an espionage case against the Chinese Communists arrested this week. But the New York arrests almost certainly shut down operations at the other five police stations. Why not wait until the case had been made against most of them?
FBI Director Christopher Wray told a Senate hearing in November that he was aware of such an operation in New York City and was “very concerned” about it. That culminated with the arrest Monday of Chinese nationals Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping for conspiring to act as Chinese government agents.
That same day, the Department of Justice charged 44 individuals — including 40 members of China’s Ministry of Public Security and two officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China — with “transnational repression offenses targeting U.S. residents.” Those suspects “created and used fake social media accounts to harass and intimidate PRC dissidents residing abroad and sought to suppress the dissidents’ free speech,” said a DOJ statement published Monday.
One of the reasons the FBI was treating these spies with kid gloves was the enthusiastic support of Democratic politicians. Jianwang Lu and Jiangshun Lu were both leaders of the America ChangLe Association, a non-profit group that organized the police station. They donated more than $30,000 to Democratic politicians in New York City.
In December 2021, Jimmy Lu donated $2,500 to Hochul, who at the time was gearing up to run for her first full term as governor. (Hochul’s office did not respond to National Review’s request for comment.)
Throughout 2019 and 2021, he also donated several times to Adams, who served as Brooklyn Borough president before winning the mayoral race in 2021. The New York City Election Board’s website shows that Lu donated $2,500 to Adams’s mayoral campaign. In response to questioning from the Daily News, the mayor’s office said that Adams campaign will return the money to Lu. In response to questions about the donation, an Adams spokesperson referred National Review to his campaign.
Expect China to retaliate by arresting a few innocent Americans. That’s why we can’t expel the spies without proof or we’d get into the unprofitable tit-for-tat expulsion game. But surely, it’s time to roll up some of these networks — and quickly.
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