The Chinese government has it out for us. And they will do anything.
But now a Chinese secret police leader convicted in America for a staggering crime.
A Federal Jury Delivers A Verdict — And A Warning
A federal jury in Brooklyn convicted Lu Jianwang, 64, on Wednesday of acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government and obstructing justice by destroying text messages from his Chinese government handler — capping a trial that exposed in remarkable detail the operational reach of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance and intimidation network inside the United States.
Lu, a U.S. citizen also known as Harry Lu, was found guilty on both counts but acquitted of a related conspiracy charge. He faces up to 30 years in federal prison at sentencing, which has not yet been scheduled. He remains free on bail.
The verdict comes in the same week that a California mayor — Eileen Wang of Arcadia — resigned after being charged with acting as a Chinese government agent, making this a week of unusually concentrated legal accountability for what federal investigators describe as a years-long CCP effort to extend its coercive reach into American communities.
“Lu Jianwang used a police station in New York City to target PRC dissidents in furtherance of the Chinese government’s political agenda,” said James C. Barnacle Jr., the FBI’s assistant director in charge, in a statement after the verdict.
What The Police Station Actually Was
The “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, New York USA” operated out of Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood beginning in 2022, after Lu attended a ceremony in his native Fujian province in China where the Ministry of Public Security announced the opening of 30 such covert outposts around the world. A large banner bearing the station’s name was displayed at the Chinatown location and was shown to jurors during trial.
Lu’s defense attorney, John Carman, argued that prosecutors had inflated what was essentially a paperwork violation — Lu’s failure to register as a foreign agent — into a spy thriller. Carman told reporters after the verdict that prosecutors had dressed up a “mundane” case with “specious suggestions” that Lu was involved in spying and intelligence gathering.
Federal prosecutors presented a different picture. They argued Lu helped boost the Chinese government’s public image in the Chinese diaspora, worked to suppress pro-democracy dissent in the United States, and assisted Chinese authorities in locating a pro-democracy activist living in California — a detail that goes considerably beyond driver’s license renewals and ping-pong games, which the defense offered as the station’s primary functions.
Lu’s co-defendant, Chen Jinping, had already pleaded guilty in December 2024 to conspiring to act as an agent of the People’s Republic of China in connection with the same operation. Chen is awaiting sentencing.
The Broader Pattern — And Why It Demands A Reckoning
The conviction of Lu Jianwang is not an isolated incident. It is a data point in a pattern of CCP infiltration of American institutions that has now produced criminal convictions in multiple jurisdictions, a sitting California mayor’s resignation, active DHS investigations into Chinese influence networks in American local government, and a congressional investigation into how deeply Chinese money has penetrated Democratic Party fundraising infrastructure in California.
DHS Secretary Mullin has pointed directly at California Governor Gavin Newsom in connection with the Chinese agent investigations, arguing that the scale of CCP infiltration in California’s political class reflects a failure of state-level oversight that Newsom’s administration has not adequately addressed.
The FBI’s Barnacle was appropriately direct about what the Brooklyn conviction means in the larger context: “The FBI will relentlessly pursue those who undermine our democracy and threaten our national security at the behest of a foreign power.” That message applies not only to the man convicted in Brooklyn on Wednesday, but to the network of covert outposts, compromised officials, and coordinated harassment campaigns that the Chinese Communist Party has been quietly building inside the United States for years — often in plain sight, and often in communities that were too trusting, too deferential, or too politically sensitive to look closely enough.
