The House Select Committee on China is preparing new proposals to crack down on the Chinese government’s suspected use of clandestine “police stations” inside the United States to monitor dissidents and expatriate Chinese nationals, according to Rep. Mike Gallagher, the Wisconsin Republican who chairs the recently created panel.
While China has sharply denied the existence of such stations, U.S. officials say Beijing uses the secret operation for a range of activities, including spying on Chinese dissidents living in the U.S. Governments have cracked down on similar offices in Canada, Australia, Europe and in other countries with significant communities of anti-regime Chinese nationals.
Mr. Gallagher told The Washington Times in an interview that lawmakers are studying ways to increase penalties for existing laws to address transnational repression and to spur the FBI to step up its operations against the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s operations against people residing in America.
He spoke on the committee’s planned moves after last week’s arrest of two men in New York City on charges they were running such a police station for the Chinese government from a noodle shop in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood.
The FBI’s arrest of the men, identified as U.S. citizens “Harry” Lu Jianwang, 61, and Chen Jinping, 59, sparked widening concern about the scope of other potential clandestine Chinese government operations inside the United States.
Beijing may have as many as six more illegal police stations spread across America, according to human rights group Safeguard Defenders.
In a separate development last week, the U.S. Justice Department filed charges against 34 officers of the Chinese government’s Ministry of Public Security, alleging they operate a program to harass Chinese nationals residing in the New York metropolitan area and elsewhere in America.
Specific connections between the alleged stations and the Justice Department charges against nearly three dozen Chinese government’s MPS officers remain unclear.
Mr. Gallagher said in the interview over the weekend that the FBI briefed lawmakers on the issue of foreign police stations on U.S. soil weeks ago. The Wisconsin Republican expressed frustration about the lack of detail in the briefing, saying it was not useful and unsatisfying.
To combat the foreign police and push the FBI to act, Mr. Gallagher said he is examining options to increase the punishment for violations of existing laws.
“The idea is that by enhancing penalties for two types of crimes that are in U.S. code right now, you could force the FBI to take it more seriously and you could, it would have a deterrent effect,” he told The Washington Times. “The Chinese wouldn’t try to do something like this.”
Mr. Gallagher said the enlarged penalties would accompany crimes involving interstate harassment to suppress rights on behalf of a foreign adversary and the failure to register as a foreign agent in the U.S. while conducting police work for a foreign adversary.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) is designed to identify and register people engaging in American politics at the direction of a foreign country, but Mr. Gallagher said the statute is riddled with loopholes.
He has previously introduced legislation aiming to require agents of Chinese businesses to register with the U.S. government, ending exemptions applying to foreign agents who say they engage exclusively in nonpolitical activity.
New scrutiny
China’s alleged use of clandestine police stations outside its borders has drawn new scrutiny of its efforts to spread its influence through nontraditional means around the world.
The Madrid-based Safeguard Defenders identified more than 50 stations around the world last year, and told the New York Post that the Chinese government has also established stations in California, Minnesota, Nebraska and Texas.
China’s clandestine stations are a top issue in the crosshairs of the House’s China Committee lawmakers. Mr. Gallagher joined Reps. Neal Dunn, Florida Republican, and Ritchie Torres, New York Democrat, at a rally with human rights activists and dissidents in February outside one alleged unauthorized station in New York City.
“We have a moral duty to stand with you,” Mr. Torres said at the rally. “A few years ago, the FBI said, the Justice Department said that it’s committed to turning Operation Fox Hunt on its head so that the hunters become the hunted and the pursuers become pursued, and we will see to it that that promise is kept.”
Operation Fox Hunt is an initiative by China’s Ministry of Public Security designed to track down and repatriate refugees fleeing to the U.S. and other countries to escape prosecution, according to the Justice Department.
Critics say a fuller picture of how China’s ideological reach spreads around the world has begun to emerge publicly, but Mr. Gallagher said the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence community still lack an understanding of how the Chinese Communist Party uses a network of nonprofits to exert its influence inside America.
“It’s really the most poorly understood but insidious swarm of CCP aggression,” Mr. Gallagher said, “this united front work, this sort of complex combination of traditional espionage operations and influence operations and economic coercion and elite capture.”
Lawmakers from the China committee, established when the new Republican majority took control of the House earlier this year, visited Miami in March to study Chinese-made cranes amid concerns that China may use the machinery to track sensitive trade to the U.S. The committee then traveled to California in April for meetings with tech leaders in Silicon Valley and the entertainment industry in Hollywood.
Mr. Gallagher said the China panel may hold additional events at other suspected clandestine police stations and he is determined to get to the bottom of the extent of the Chinese policing operations in the U.S.
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
China’s Foreign Ministry last week sharply denied all allegations that Beijing is operating overseas police stations, saying U.S. officials are making “groundless accusations,” saying the suspect “service stations” were actually established to help Chinese and Chinese-Americans with such processes as applying for travel visas or qualifying for a driver’s licenses.
Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters last week the accusations against China applied more accurately to the U.S. government.
“The U.S. has long suppressed dissent through secret surveillance, illegal wiretapping, global manhunts and behind-the-scenes deals,” he said. “‘Transnational repression’ is an allegation that best matches the U.S.’s own practices.”
• Guy Taylor contributed to this story.
