Lu Jianwang, aka 'Harry Lu,' enters Brooklyn Federal Court alongside his supporters
A local China town community leader who the feds say ran a secret Chinese “police station” out of a nondescript Manhattan office building was found guilty Wednesday of acting as an illegal foreign agent.
“Harry” Lu Jianwang was convicted after evidence revealed his dealings with China’s Ministry of Public Security — which ordered him to hang a banner inside the glass-clad building at 107 East Broadway proudly announcing that the site was a “Police Overseas Service Station” for China’s Fujian province.in March 2022, just a month after Lu established the “station” inside the Manhattan headquarters of the America Changle Association, which advocates for Fujian immigrants. “Just help me verify if this person exists,” wrote Liu Rongyan, a Fujian security officer, of Xu Jie, a longtime critic of China’s government who fled the country in 2013 and lives in California.
“A friend is looking for him for a personal matter,” Rongyan added — punctuating her text with a sheepish grin emoji — in a chat with Lu on the Chinese messaging platform WeChat. Lu then messaged Keith Cheng, the leader of a separate Big Apple-based Fujian group, asking for details about the outspoken Beijing regime critic.
Security motorcade believed to be carrying Trump seen in Beijing for upcoming Xi meetingCBS News sends Tony Dokoupil to Taiwan after failing to get China visa in time for Trump visit: ‘very sloppy’ Lu faces up to five years in prison after a Brooklyn federal jury convicted him of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Beijing and obstructing justice by deleting some of his messages with Chinese officials when approached by the feds.
The verdict came after jurors got a glimpse inside the drab six-story building at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, where the feds claimed Lu opened the “station” in February 2022 after attending a ceremony in China where officials announced that they’d be opening 30 such outposts at sites all over the world. Jurors saw evidence of Officer Rongyan instructing Lu on how to hang the blue “police station” banner, which was displayed above a conference table in the site’s drab office.
Lu also had more than 50 contacts in his phone for officials in Chinese political and security officials, according to trial testimony. But prosecutors with the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District did not reveal any further details on Lu or his partner, Chen Jinping, using the site to surveil enemies of the Chinese government.
Trial evidence instead largely showed that the “station” — where the FBI discovered a handful of computer monitors, the conference table and banner, and a ping-pong table covered in a red tablecloth — helped Fujian natives renew their Chinese driver’s licenses remotely. Lu’s lawyer, John Carman, described the license setup — which prosecutors dismissed as a “front” — as evidence that Lu answered more to his neighbors than the Chinese government.
, along with Jinping, in what the US government had touted as part of a sweeping crackdown on China’s efforts to silence regime dissenters across the globe. Lu, a Bronx resident and naturalized US citizen, cooly observed closing statements from the defense table, where he sat in a dark suit with an American flag pin affixed to its lapel.
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