NEW YORK CITY—A Chinese American accused of operating an overseas Chinese police station in New York City admitted in FBI interviews that he opened the station, Assistant U.S. Attorney Lindsey Oken said May 6.
The defendant, Lu Jianwang, also acknowledged his link to Chinese state security, Oken said in opening statements at his trial.
Lu, 64, is an American citizen who is also known as Harry Lu. He is the former head of the America ChangLe Association, a New York City-based community organization. Lu admitted he had a handler in China’s main security and law enforcement organization, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), in interviews with the FBI in October and December of 2022, prosecutors said.
Lu is charged with conspiring to act as an agent of the Chinese government and with failing to register as a foreign agent. He is also charged with obstruction of justice for deleting his communications with China’s MPS.
Oken said Lu also admitted to the FBI that he communicated via Chinese messaging app WeChat with the MPS. After meeting with the FBI, Lu allegedly deleted messages from those communications. Oken said that the FBI was able to recover some of these messages from other devices and that the government will present them at trial.
Appearing in a black suit and a light blue tie, Lu seemed calm and at ease as his trial started Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, in the city’s Brooklyn borough.
Under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, anyone acting on behalf of a foreign government is required to declare their association by filing documentation with an office of the Department of Justice.
In his opening statement, Lu’s attorney, John Carman, said, “Harry Lu was arrested for failing to file a form.”
Carman told the jury that Lu opened the service center to fill a need of the Chinese community: driver's license renewals in China. He said that in 2021, traveling back to China was impossible or could require waiting weeks in quarantine. So, according to Carman, Lu set up computer stations at the offices of the hometown organization American ChangLe Association, where local residents could process the renewal of their licenses and meet on Zoom calls with motor vehicle officials in Fujian Province, China. The alternative, to let their licenses lapse, would require them to restart the licensing process, requiring them to reapply and retake a road test, according to Carman.
“If he was an agent, he was an agent for local people,” said Carman, who disputed that Lu was operating under the control of the Chinese government.
“Is he tasked? or asked? The difference is literally just a ‘t.’”
Prosecutors said they will show evidence of video conferences with Chinese officials during which they tasked Lu with assignments, as well as WeChat messages with instructions from Ministry of Public Security officials in China.
Oken said the overseas police station started small, processing Chinese driver's license renewals for the Chinese expatriate community. Oken said that even if all the office processed were driver's licenses, it was still illegal. Under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, any official representative of China’s government is required to register with the U.S. attorney general.
A 2022 report from nongovernmental organization Safeguard Defenders revealed that the stations are also tasked with tracking down, intimidating, and repatriating people wanted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including dissidents against the regime and its leader, Xi Jinping. Safeguard Defenders has documented a network of more than 100 overseas police stations in 53 countries.
Lu’s co-conspirator, Chen Jinping, who helped run the police station, pled guilty in December 2024 to conspiring to act as an agent of the Chinese government. FBI Assistant Director in Charge James Dennehy said at the time that the station served “to further the nefarious and repressive aims of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] in direct violation of American sovereignty.”
Lu stood outside the courthouse before his trial began with an assembly of supporters carrying signs that read “No Bias, No Profiling,” “We Love America,” “Chinese Americans are Americans,” and “Stop Racial Profiling in our Community.”
Prosecutors raised concerns about the group standing outside the courthouse because jurors arriving for duty would be forced to walk past them. Prosecutors said they were concerned this was a coordinated effort and “an attempt to send a message to the jury.”
Defense counsel dismissed the idea that there was a coordinated effort on the part of the defense team.
Many in the group continued to the courtroom to observe the trial.