Jury convicts man accused of running secret Chinese spy outpost in New York City

NEW YORK (AP) — A man accused of running a secret Chinese spy outpost from a nondescript office building in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood was convicted Wednesday of acting as an illegal foreign agent.

Lu Jianwang, 64, was also convicted of obstructing justice by deleting text messages that U.S. prosecutors said included orders from Beijing to silence, harass and intimidate pro-democracy dissidents. He was acquitted on a related conspiracy charge.

The weeklong trial in Brooklyn federal court pitted U.S. concerns about China’s crackdown on dissidents against the defense’s contention that prosecutors twisted a well-meaning Chinese American community leader’s bureaucratic misstep to put him in prison.

“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,” U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. said.

After the verdict, Lu spoke to supporters in his native Fujianese dialect but declined to answer questions from reporters. His lawyer, John Carman, said they would appeal.

Carman said federal prosecutors passed off a mundane paperwork case as an international spy thriller. The foreign agent conviction relates to Lu’s failure to inform the U.S. government about his work on behalf of China, which his defense team contends was limited only to helping members of the Chinese diaspora renew their Chinese driver’s licenses.

“This is not espionage. This is not spying. This is not intelligence gathering,” Carman said as he stood alongside Lu outside the courthouse. “He wasn’t charged with any of that.” The subtext of the prosecution case, Carman said, was that Lu “associated with a lot of Chinese people.”

“Is that window dressing or dressing up a paperwork case? A hundred percent,” Carman said.

Lu, a U.S. citizen for decades who also goes by the name Harry Lu, remains free on bail while he awaits sentencing, which has not been scheduled.

He faces up to 10 years in prison for acting as an illegal foreign agent and up to 20 years in prison for obstruction of justice.

According to prosecutors, Lu and co-defendant Chen Jinping established the Chinatown outpost in 2022 after Lu attended a ceremony in his native Fujian province where China’s Ministry of Public Security announced it was opening 30 such secret police stations around the world.

China’s communist government uses the outposts to monitor people it views as enemies of its interests, Assistant U.S. Attorney Antoinette Rangel said in a closing argument Tuesday.

During the trial, jurors were shown a large banner from the Chinatown location that said: “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, New York USA.” They also heard testimony from Xu Jie, a Chinese dissident, activist and YouTuber living in California who prosecutors said was targeted by Lu’s outpost.

“The police station wasn’t the defendant’s idea or initiative, this was the Chinese government,” Rangel told jurors in her closing argument. “This was the Chinese government’s plan and the defendant made it happen.”

Chen pleaded guilty in December 2024 to a charge of conspiracy to act as a foreign agent.

Lu’s lawyers contend the outpost was really a community center where people could renew their Chinese driver’s licenses remotely without having to go back to China amid COVID-19 pandemic-era travel restrictions.

Among other things, Carman said, people would also meet there to play ping-pong and mahjong. But, prosecutors said, even if Lu’s only connection to China was through driver’s licenses, that would be enough to violate the law.

The Manhattan outpost, sandwiched between a hotel, spa and coffee shop, shared offices with the America ChangLe Association, a community organization that Lu and his brother, Jimmy, helped run. The organization described itself on tax forms as a “social gathering place for Fujianese people.” ChangLe means “eternal joy,” Carman said.

“Harry’s motives were pure. Harry’s support in the community is enormous for a reason — not because he’s some underworld operative,” Carman said. “His support is there because he’s helped a lot of people in the 45 years that he’s been in the United States of America, becoming a citizen and reaching out to members of his community to help them.”

The FBI, spurred by a report from an organization that monitors Chinese transnational repression, raided the Chinatown outpost on Oct. 3, 2022. The next day, prosecutors said, Lu admitted to FBI agents that he established the outpost, that he kept in touch with his handler via WeChat and that he had deleted those messages.

The messages, some of which were recovered through screenshots on Lu’s phone, showed he was “in lockstep with what the Chinese government tasked him to do,” Rangel said.