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 in New York City was convicted Wednesday of acting as an illegal foreign agent and destroying text messages from a Chinese government handler.

Lu Jianwang, 64, was acquitted of a related conspiracy charge in a case that pitted U.S. concerns about China’s crackdown on pro-democracy dissidents against the defense’s contention that prosecutors twisted a well-meaning Chinese American community leader’s bureaucratic misstep to put him in prison.

Lu spoke to supporters as he left Brooklyn federal court but declined to answer questions from reporters. His lawyer, John Carman, said federal prosecutors dressed up a mundane paperwork case with specious suggestions that Lu was involved in spying and intelligence gathering.

Lu, who also goes by Harry Lu, remains free on bail pending sentencing, which has not been scheduled.

According to federal prosecutors, Lu and a co-defendant, Chen Jinping, established the outpost in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood 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. During the trial, jurors were shown a large banner from the Chinatown location that said: “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, New York USA.”

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 members of the Chinese diaspora could remotely renew their Chinese driver’s licenses amid COVID-19 pandemic-era travel restrictions and meet to play ping-pong and mahjong. Even if Lu’s only connection to China was through driver’s licenses, that would be enough to violate the foreign agent law, prosecutors said.

The Manhattan outpost shared offices with the America ChangLe Association, a community organization that Lu, a U.S. citizen for decades, 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.

The FBI, spurred by a report from an organization that monitors Chinese transnational repression, raided the alleged New York City outpost on Oct. 3, 2022, rifling through drawers and paperwork, busting into locked cabinets and a safe, and seizing a computer and cellphones.

The next day, prosecutors said, Lu admitted to FBI agents that he established the Manhattan outpost, that he kept in touch with his handler via WeChat and that he had deleted those messages.