A federal jury in Brooklyn convicted Lu Jianwang, a 64-year-old Bronx man, of acting as an illegal foreign agent of the Chinese government and obstructing justice, charges tied to his role in establishing and operating what prosecutors called a covert police station in the heart of Manhattan's Chinatown neighborhood.
The conviction, reported by the Daily Caller, marks what federal officials described as the first criminal prosecution of its kind involving an alleged secret Chinese police station on American soil. Jianwang, also known as Harry Lu, faces up to 10 years in prison for the foreign-agent charge and up to 20 years for obstruction of justice. He remains free on bail ahead of sentencing.
Let that sink in. A foreign government, the Chinese Communist Party, set up a functioning police outpost inside a major American city, and the man who made it happen walked out of court on bail.
Prosecutors laid out a timeline that began in 2022, when Jianwang and his co-defendant, Chen Jinping, established what authorities called a "Police Overseas Service Station" for China's Fujian province. The station operated out of the America ChangLe Association office at 107 East Broadway in Manhattan, the New York Post reported. Jianwang ran that organization with his brother, and it has ties to the CCP, according to Influence Watch.
The station's origins trace back to a Fujian province event where China's Ministry of Public Security announced it was opening 30 secret police stations around the globe. Prosecutors said Jianwang attended that event and then carried out the plan in New York.
During the week-long trial in Brooklyn federal court, jurors saw a banner that read "Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, New York USA." Assistant U.S. Attorney Antoinette Rangel told the jury during closing arguments that the CCP used the outpost to monitor the activities of its perceived enemies.
Rangel made the chain of command plain, as the Washington Examiner reported:
"The police station wasn't the defendant's idea or initiative: this was the Chinese government. This was the Chinese government's plan and the defendant made it happen."
The obstruction charge centered on Jianwang's decision to destroy evidence. The FBI raided the Chinatown location on October 3, 2022. The following day, Jianwang told agents he had launched the outpost and communicated with his handler through WeChat, but admitted he had deleted the messages.
Prosecutors recovered some of those conversations through screenshots still on his phone. They said the messages contained orders from Beijing to silence, harass, and intimidate dissidents living in the United States.
One case stood out at trial. Fox News reported that prosecutors described a broader Chinese government effort to monitor and intimidate dissidents abroad. Trial evidence showed a Fujian security official asked Jianwang in 2022 to help verify the whereabouts of Xu Jie, a California-based pro-democracy dissident. Xu Jie himself testified during the trial.
The case of a former Arcadia mayor who agreed to plead guilty to acting as a secret agent of China underscores that the Lu Jianwang conviction is not an isolated incident. Beijing's influence operations have reached deep into American communities, from local government offices in California to a storefront in lower Manhattan.
Jianwang's lawyer, John Carman, offered a starkly different picture. He denied that his client had engaged in espionage and told the court the location was nothing more than a community center where individuals could renew their Chinese driver's licenses without traveling back to China. People gathered there to play ping-pong and mahjong, he said.
Carman framed the charges as a prosecutorial overreach:
"This is not espionage. This is not spying. This is not intelligence gathering. He wasn't charged with any of that."
That distinction is technically accurate, Jianwang was charged with acting as an illegal foreign agent, not espionage. But the jury clearly found the government's evidence persuasive. The deleted WeChat messages, the recovered screenshots, the banner identifying the site as an official Chinese police station, and the testimony of a dissident who said he was targeted all pointed in one direction.
Carman said he plans to appeal.
Chen Jinping, who helped Jianwang establish the station, pleaded guilty in December 2024 to one count of conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government, Just The News reported. His earlier plea removed any question about whether the operation existed. The only dispute at trial was Jianwang's role and intent.
The verdict drew a sharp statement from U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella:
"A 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's sovereignty."
FBI official James C. Barnacle Jr. added that the verdict should "send a message to other foreign agents" and said the bureau maintains "unwavering resolve to reveal and disrupt the clandestine operations of adversarial nations."
The Lu Jianwang case did not emerge in a vacuum. China's Ministry of Public Security announced plans to open 30 secret police stations worldwide. The Manhattan outpost was the first to produce a criminal prosecution in the United States, but the scope of Beijing's ambitions is global.
The pattern extends well beyond storefront police stations. Rep. Eric Swalwell's entanglement with a suspected Chinese intelligence operative raised serious questions about how deeply Beijing has penetrated American political circles. Swalwell has since moved to block the release of Chinese intelligence files related to his case, a curious posture for a lawmaker who once styled himself a transparency crusader.
The threat is not partisan. It is structural. When a foreign authoritarian government can plant an operational outpost in a major American city, staffed by a local resident, communicating with handlers via a Chinese messaging app, tasked with tracking down dissidents on U.S. soil, the question is not just whether one man broke the law. The question is how many more such operations remain undetected.
Prosecutors at trial made clear that the Manhattan station was used to target people who had fled China precisely because they feared the kind of surveillance and harassment that followed them across the Pacific. Xu Jie, the pro-democracy dissident, came to America seeking safety. Instead, a Fujian security official asked Jianwang to help track him down.
That is not a community center. That is a foreign government operating a coercive arm inside American borders, aimed at people who exercised their right to dissent. And the broader saga of Chinese intelligence operations touching American political figures suggests the problem runs far deeper than a single storefront in Chinatown.
Several questions hang over the case as sentencing approaches. The exact date has not been set. The precise content of the recovered WeChat messages, beyond what prosecutors described in general terms, has not been made fully public. And the 29 other secret police stations Beijing announced remain largely unaccounted for.
Jianwang's defense will get its day in appellate court. But the jury heard a week of evidence, the banner, the messages, the dissident's testimony, the co-defendant's guilty plea, and reached its conclusion.
The conviction also raises uncomfortable questions about the institutions that should have caught this sooner. A foreign government's police outpost operated openly enough to hang a banner in its window, yet it took until 2022 for the FBI to raid it. How long the station functioned before that raid remains unclear. The political leadership in states like California and New York has spent years focused on other priorities while Beijing built its infrastructure in plain sight.
A foreign dictatorship ran a police station in an American city to hunt down people who dared to criticize it. A jury held one man accountable. The harder work, dismantling the network and confronting the government behind it, is just getting started.
