The U.S. is cracking down on Chinese 'police stations' with a tool Canada still doesn't have

The United States has launched a crackdown on so-called Chinese police stations operating on its soil using a legal mechanism that doesn't exist in Canada, at least not yet — a registry of foreign agents.

U.S. authorities this week announced they had shut down what they referred to as a Chinese police station in lower Manhattan.

The criminal charges they laid were against two American citizens who allegedly failed to register their work on behalf of the People's Republic of China.

In vivid detail, authorities alleged the American suspects frantically tried to hide those foreign contacts.

They said one spent seven minutes in the bathroom during the raid on the so-called station, desperately deleting text exchanges with a Chinese state security official.

Such efforts to obscure communications triggered a second set of criminal charges against the two men, Chen Jinping and Lu Jianwang: obstruction of justice.

One is accused of helping a Chinese state security agent who was trying to locate a dissident living in California who had participated in 1989's pro-democracy protests in Beijing and recently ran for the U.S. Congress. The description matches that of Xiong Yan.

These are believed to be the first charges laid anywhere in the world against people suspected of running extra-territorial Chinese police stations. More than 100 such stations are alleged to exist worldwide, including in Canada.

U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace said he was proud of that distinction. He called it surreal that an authoritarian state could set up a police outpost in the heart of Manhattan, near the Brooklyn Bridge.

He ended his remarks at a press conference with a message to the Chinese government: "We are on to you."

"We know what you're doing," Peace added. "And we will stop it from happening in the United States of America."

There are Canadian connections to the case — and not just because at least five such stations are believed to exist in Canada.

The indictment sheet says individuals from Canada and several other countries were at a 2022 ceremony launching Fuzhou municipal police offices around the world. The indictment sheet shows a photo collected from Lu's phone, allegedly of him attending that event with an official from China's Ministry of Public Security.

"It's huge," said Laura Harth, campaign director for Safeguard Defenders, the Spain-based NGO that has chronicled the existence of these stations using Chinese government open-source websites.