FBI Counterintelligence Raided Chinese Police Station in New York: Report

T he FBI raided a Chinese police station in Manhattan last year, seizing documents from the facility in a criminal investigation into China’s overseas presence in the U.S., the New York Times reported today.

The paper revealed that the search took place last year, at a Chinatown facility scrutinized for its alleged role as a branch of the security bureau of the city of Fuzhou, citing people knowledgeable of the probe. The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn — which the Times reported was involved in the raid — declined to comment for the Times story.

The existence of the Manhattan outpost first came to light via a report by the NGO Safeguard Defenders, which has documented over 100 police stations run by various Chinese provinces and cities in several foreign countries. More than a dozen other governments have also launched investigations into stations operating in their own territory, though the FBI search reported on today is the first known instance of such a raid. Safeguard Defenders said that it found evidence that four such police stations exist in the U.S.: two in New York, one in Los Angeles, and another at an undetermined location.

There are likely more: Newsweek correspondent Didi Kirsten Tatlow reported last year that she had found evidence of nine police stations or courts in addition to nine more “Chinese Support Centers” that are part of the Chinese Communist Party’s “United Front” influence system.

The Times report specifies only that the raid took place at some point “last fall,” when official concern about the existence of the Manhattan station emerged. On November 17, FBI director Christopher Wray said during a Senate hearing that he was aware of the existence of the stations, which he called “outrageous,” and that he had “to be careful about discussing” his agency’s investigations.

While Chinese officials and people affiliated with the service stations claim that their sole function is to assist Chinese citizens with administrative issues, such as renewing driver’s licenses, Safeguard Defenders has linked some of the stations to illicit Chinese-government kidnapping campaigns. Those operations have taken place under China’s so-called Operation Fox Hunt.

In his testimony, Wray ripped into China’s decision to open the station, which he said “violates sovereignty and circumvents standard judicial and law-enforcement-cooperation processes.”

Subsequent media reports have revealed that the overseas service station in Manhattan is on the third floor of a building in Chinatown owned by the America ChangLe Association, named after a district in Fuzhou and led by a donor to New York City mayor Eric Adams’s political campaigns. The group’s tax-exempt status was revoked by the IRS last May, after it failed to file its taxes for three consecutive years, the New York Post reported.

While a spokesperson for Adams told the Times that the mayor does not know America ChangLe head Jimmy Lu, the Post also reported that Adams attended a dinner event last September sponsored by the organization alongside New York State and city officials and New York Police Department officers.

“As an important and powerful social organization, the ChangLe Association of the United States gathers a large number of economic talents, makes great contributions to New York where they live, and plays an important role in promoting new immigrants to improve their quality of life in New York,” Adams said in a speech during the event, per a Chinese-language news report about the event, whose purpose was to honor the inauguration of Lu and other new leaders of the group.

The reported raid coincided with a slew of Justice Department cases brought against individuals alleged to have participated in Chinese-government schemes to stalk and harass various dissidents and ethnic minorities on U.S. soil. Throughout 2022, federal prosecutors unveiled charges against more than a dozen individuals alleged to have participated in those criminal activities.

The involvement of federal prosecutors from Brooklyn in the reported investigation stands out because the Chinese police station in Manhattan is in the Southern District of New York, represented by a different office. The Eastern District of New York has taken the lead on several of the Chinese-malign-influence cases opened last year, including two Operation Fox Hunt–related schemes, involving several defendants from the U.S. and China. Two Americans pleaded guilty last year to charges in one of those schemes, which targeted three Chinese dissidents across the U.S., an EDNY spokesperson previously told National Review.

Safeguard Defenders campaign director Laura Harth said she doesn’t recall whether her group had already known about the raid before today’s Times report, but that “we were well aware and grateful the FBI is very much looking into this and taking the larger issue of the PRC’s transnational repression and other influence operations very seriously.”

Harth added that the organization is eager to see a similar level of attention paid to overseas Chinese police stations by law-enforcement agencies in other liberal democracies.