FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed during a Senate hearing Thursday that communist Chinese agents have been setting up illegal “police stations” on American soil and targeting critics of Xi Jinping’s genocidal regime. Intimidation, espionage, and coercion campaigns have reportedly been coordinated and launched from these forward operating bases in cities such as New York.
Wray underscored that the FBI is not “just gonna let it lie” and intimated that an investigation into the stations may be underway.
Communist Chinese infiltration
Jettisoning past alarmist rhetoric about the alleged threat of white supremacy, Wray stated in his testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee that the “greatest long-term threat to our nation’s ideas, innovation, and economic security — our national security — is that from China.”
“The Chinese government aspires to equal or surpass the U.S. as a global superpower and influence the world with a value system shaped by undemocratic, authoritarian ideals,” said Wray, adopting the language used in a 2021 Pentagon report underlining China’s geopolitical ambitions.
The FBI director said the bureau has “seen a clear pattern of the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), exporting their repression right here into the U.S.”
Their agents of repression are engaged in “uncoordinated quote-unquote ‘law enforcement’ action right here in the United States, harassing, stalking, surveilling, blackmailing people who they just don’t like or who disagree with the Xi regime.”
One of the more concerted global repression efforts by the CCP is Operation Fox Hunt, an initiative launched in 2014.
As part of this ongoing operation, the CCP hunts down Chinese people it perceives to be its foes, including members of religious groups (e.g., Chinese house Christians and underground Catholics), ethnic minorities such as the Uyghurs, and political dissidents at odds with the communist party.
Big trouble in little China
TheBlaze previously detailed the key findings in the European pan-Asian human rights NGO Safeguard Defenders’ bombshell report entitled “110 Overseas: Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild.” The report outlined how the communist Chinese regime has employed “overseas police service stations” on five continents.
While these police stations were purportedly created to combat fraud, they are really a means to extend the genocidal, communist regime’s influence and powers of “transnational repression.”
When pressed by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) about the nature and extent the CCP’s extralegal police stations, Wray said, “I’ve [been] very concerned about this.”
“We are aware of the existence of these stations. I have to be careful about discussing our specific investigative work, but to me, it is outrageous to think that the Chinese police would attempt to set up shop, you know, in New York, let’s say, without proper coordination. It violates sovereignty and circumvents standard judicial law enforcement cooperation processes,” Wray noted.
The development of these centers occurred alongside the CCP’s campaign to intimidate and extort Chinese nationals and ex-pats to return to China to face criminal proceedings. Between April 2021 and July 2022, communist authorities claimed 230,000 nationals were “persuaded to return.”
One of the Chinese police stations was set up in Lower Manhattan and is run by the U.S. nonprofit America ChangLe Association NY Inc. The New York Post reported that it is on the third floor of 107 East Broadway on the Lower East Side.
The station reportedly houses the Fuzhou Police Overseas Chinese Affairs bureau.
On Friday, China’s embassy in Washington acknowledged the existence of allegedly volunteer-run sites in the U.S. but suggested that they were not police stations.
Embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu wrote in an email to Reuters that the “U.S. side should stop the groundless hyping of this issue.”
The Washington Examiner reported that when asked by Scott whether the Chinese police stations had a legal right to operate in the U.S., Wray was evasive.
“Well, we’re looking into the legal parameters of it, so I want to be a little bit careful not to get out over my skis on that,” said Wray. “But suffice it to say, I can tell you from an FBI director perspective, I’m deeply concerned about this, and I’m not just gonna let it lie.”
Wray did not specify what “remedies” the FBI might take to address the Chinese encroachment on American sovereignty but suggested that “there may be a State Department dimension this that we’re looking into.”
Caught red-handed
Although it is presently unclear if the State Department has or will do anything about the hostile foreign actors coordinating unlawful actions in the U.S., the Justice Department has recently made some inroads.
Late last month, the DOJ announced that it had charged 13 Chinese nationals, ten of whom are believed to be spies, for efforts to “unlawfully exert influence in the United States.”
Dozens more have been arrested and or charged in recent months for their alleged intimidation, spying, and kidnapping efforts.
Reporting by The Blaze.
