A United States citizen and New York resident has been convicted of acting as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China for running a secret police station from a building in the Chinatown neighbourhood of Manhattan. Federal prosecutors claimed the Beijing government uses global outposts to target dissidents and facilitate campaigns of transnational repression. The conviction came at a time of increased scrutiny of the Xi administration’s use of commercial actors to extend the capabilities of state cyber actors revealed in a new report by The Citizen Lab.

1. Introduction

The government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has a long history of harassing perceived overseas adversaries. The range of targets extends beyond the pro-democracy movement to other critics of the Communist Party including members of the Tibetan, Uyghur, Taiwanese and Hong Kong diasporas. The prosecution of Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping for running a covert police station in New York and the release of a new report by The Citizen Lab present an opportunity to review recent developments in transnational repression that I discussed in a previous post to On The Wire. (here)

2. Violations of Territorial Sovereignty

On May 13, 2026, a jury in Brooklyn, New York, convicted Lu Jianwang (known as “Harry Lu”) of acting as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China in connection with operating the police station in Chinatown and obstruction of justice for destroying electronic evidence. (here) The verdict was returned following a one-week trial before United States District Judge Nina R. Morrison and a jury. The foreign agent conviction relates to Mr. Lu’s failure to inform the U.S. government about his work on behalf of the Chinese government and the obstruction conviction stemmed from the destruction of electronic messages between him, the co-defendant Chen Jinping and an official with the PRC’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS). (here) Mr. Lu was acquitted of a related conspiracy charge.

On October 3, 2022, at the outset of the investigation, the FBI executed a search warrant at the police station located at 107 East Broadway in Manhattan. The defendants admitted to the agents that they deleted their communications with an MPS official after learning about the investigation. (here) On August 2, 2023, an indictment was filed in the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, charging the conspiracy and obstruction counts. (here) On March 25, 2026, a superseding indictment was filed adding the count of “acting as an agent of a foreign government” without notifying the Attorney General of the United States. (here)

Writing for The New York Times, Santul Nerkar described the trial as a showcase of the justice department’s crackdown on China’s global campaign to harass political dissidents. “Prosecutors depicted Mr. Lu as a willing operative of the Chinese government, eager to deepen his longstanding ties with party officials,” he said. “They presented the jury photos of Mr. Lu mingling with government officials in China, text messages in which a Chinese security official asked him for information on a prominent pro-democracy activist, and expert testimony about China’s global efforts to quell dissidents.” (here) The day after the verdict, staff writers at The Guardian commented that the justice department has been ramping up inquiries into “transnational repression” by U.S. adversaries such as China to intimidate political opponents living in the United States. (here)

In his closing address to the jury, defence attorney John Carman said Mr. Lu merely tried to help his fellow community members, Chinese Americans of Fujianese heritage. “This isn’t spy time,” he said. “This isn’t international espionage. This is license renewal.” Reporting for The Associated Press, Michael R. Sisak said the defence team contended the outpost was really a “community center where people could renew their Chinese driver’s licenses remotely without having to return to China amid COVID-19 pandemic-era travel restrictions.” (here) But prosecutors countered the claim by showing the jury a large banner seized from the Chinatown location that read: “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, New York USA”. The jury also heard testimony from Xu Jie, a Chinese dissident, activist and YouTuber who prosecutors said was targeted by Mr. Lu’s outpost.

The co-defendant, Mr. Jinping, had previously entered a guilty plea on December 18, 2024. Commenting on the guilty plea, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice described the undeclared police station as “a clear affront to American sovereignty”. (here) It appears, however, that the prosecution of Mr. Lu and Mr. Jinping did not involve an isolated outpost. On May 13, 2026, the same day as the Lu verdict, Nardine Saad reported for the BBC that at least 100 stations have been reported in 53 countries “with rights groups accusing China of using the outposts to threaten and monitor Chinese nationals abroad, as well as helping Beijing identify pro-democracy activists living in the U.S.” (here)

3. Digital Transnational Repression

On April 27, 2026, The Citizen Lab, a world renowned research facility at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, in Toronto, Canada, published a report titled Tall Tales: How Chinese Actors Use Impersonation and Stolen Narratives to Perpetuate Digital Transnational Repression. (here) In collaboration with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the report identified two actors aligned with China that have been targeting and impersonating journalists and civil society, Glitter Carp and Sequin Carp. The findings provide insight into Beijing’s practice of digital transnational repression and its shift to “a system of state-sponsored attacks carried out by private contractors.”

“Transnational repression typically aims to extend a government’s domestic political controls beyond its borders,” the report states. “It operates along national ties, targeting individuals and communities based on their citizenship, ethnic background, or descent as if they were still on home soil.” Activists and human rights defenders are at particular risk. The report concludes that by targeting a network of international journalists, China’s global practice of repression has “expand[ed] beyond the usual targets – persecuted diaspora groups – to include their allies who work for greater transparency and accountability.” These attacks reveal how China “seeks to control the narrative and silence global criticism of its human rights record.”

A key component of Beijing’s campaign of transnational repression has been the use of digital threats against overseas opponents. The report asserts that, since the late 2000s, individuals and organizations involved in “exiled political activism” have been remotely surveilled by Chinese state-linked efforts including: (a) the deployment of malware to covertly surveil digital devices used by overseas Tibetan institutions; (b) issuing direct threats on social media against writers and activists documenting the state’s human rights abuses; and, (c) using online platforms to amplify intimidation campaigns against foreign political candidates with ties to China or Hong Kong.

The report goes on to state that, over time, the Xi administration has integrated skilled individuals into formal state structures including the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of State Security. “By the late 2010s, China had developed a more institutionalized model, combining official state forces with private-sector partnerships,” the report states. “Beijing’s approach to digital operations has therefore evolved toward a more distributed model that increasingly depends on commercial actors to strengthen and extend the capabilities of state cyber actors.”

Two other prosecutions are highlighted in the report where U.S. authorities charged hackers with computer intrusions. In one, five hackers linked to Chendu 404 Network Technology, a private cybersecurity firm based in China, were charged with computer intrusions in two separate indictments. All five were residents and nationals of the PRC. The intrusions allegedly affected over 100 companies in the United States and abroad. (here) In the other, 12 Chinese nationals, employees of an ostensibly private PRC company known as “i-Soon”, are alleged to have participated in a hackers-for-hire ecosystem operating at the direction of the MPS. (here)

4. Conclusion

As a result of his guilty plea on December 18, 2024, Mr. Jinping was deleted from the superseding indictment. In a sentence memorandum filed in his case, prosecutors said they will seek a prison sentence of three years in “the first U.S. prosecution involving China’s overseas police stations.” Mr. Lu’s sentence hearing has yet to be scheduled. On the digital front, the authors of The Citizen Lab report concluded that the outsourcing of operations to private contractors provides state actors with a layer of plausible deniability allowing them to project power while complicating attribution. “More broadly,” they said, “the privatization of cyber warfare – in China and globally – weakens oversight, heightens security risks, fuels cyber arms races, and ultimately erodes the norms governing conflict and civilian protection.”