A Secret Police Station Grows in Chinatown
By Daniel Greenfield | April 24, 2023
There was a ramen restaurant offering spicy beef tendons on the ground floor and a spy base upstairs on a busy street in Manhattan’s Chinatown. When the FBI raided it last year, agents in dark blue shouldered their way past hole-in-the-wall produce stands selling cheap strawberries, ads for overseas mobile phone plans, and illicit gambling dens to search a secret police station.
Indictments charge that this police station did not belong to the NYPD, but China’s feared Ministry of Public Security. The men working there in the shadow of the rusted blue steel of the Manhattan Bridge were allegedly harassing and threatening Chinese Americans, organizing political events and donating to and meeting with local and national Democrat officials.
A handful of blocks away from police headquarters, federal court buildings, and the financial district where Wall Street’s brokers play with billions a day, sits a slice of Chinatown where elderly men still ride shaky bicycles and tiny elderly women carrying giant sacks of recycled cans on their backs pass by. An artist offers cartoonish sketches of Mao alongside Madonna and musicians squat on sidewalks playing haunting airs on stringed lutes.
While most New Yorkers think of Chinatown as being all one place, there are actually strict divisions between the generations of immigrants, mainlanders who predate the Communist takeover and later arrivals who are divided by language and politics. The feuds between these two groups across tenement property lines and community groups have been as furious as they have been invisible to the rest of the city. And it’s a struggle in which the new Communist arrivals with their superior numbers and political connections have won not only in Manhattan, but in San Francisco, Los Angeles and in other parts of the country served by the covert buses ferrying illegal migrants from city to city from depots near the illegal secret police station.
Where Cuban exiles mobilized and made Cuban Americans a bastion of anti-Communism despite aggressive and energetic efforts by Cuban intelligence operatives, traditional immigrant ‘Chinatowns’ (which represent a minority a the Chinese-American population in America) are dominated by Communist front groups to whom Democrat elected officials owe their allegiance.
Such was allegedly the case with 107 E. Broadway where the America Changle Association shared space with an acupuncturist, a restaurant and a handful of other typical neighborhood businesses. Prosecutors allege that the America Changle Association housed the secret Chinese police station which used its premises to coordinate with China’s Ministry of Public Security and to threaten opponents and fugitives from the brutal Communist regime.
The Changle district of the Chinese city of Fuzhou provides most of the cheap migrant labor for the sweatshops and restaurants in Chinatown. The Fuzhounese come in, sometimes legally and sometimes illegally, and then are bused to work in Chinese restaurants across America. If you’ve seen Chinese dishwashers who don’t speak English furiously scrubbing in the back of some red-and-gold painted eatery with Fu Dog statues out front, the odds are that they’re from Changle. And that they barely know that they’re in the United States of America.
The Chinese city of Fuzhou had allegedly set up the spy operation in Little Fuzhou. To most New Yorkers, the street it was on looks like just another packed Chinatown thoroughfare, but within Chinatown, East Broadway is the ‘broadway’ of Little Fuzhou. At the borders, the Cantonese of the older Chinese-Americans confronts the Fujianese of the new arrivals. And the Cantonese speakers have been delighted to see the FBI raid on one of the epicenters of Fujianese power in Chinatown. Local papers and TV stations have talked of little else.
They hope that the FBI raid on Little Fuzhou last year and the recent indictment of two men, Chen Jinping (no known relation to President Xi “Pooh” Jinping) and “Harry” Lu Jianwang, will be the beginning of a larger reckoning. But that may be excessively optimistic. Secret police stations are one thing but the America Changle Association has political connections to Mayor Eric Adams and most Democrat politicians, local or national, who represent the area.
At one America Changle Association event, Democrat politicians and representatives for Rep. Grace Meng were in attendance. Figures associated with the Fuzhou group were shown to have donated to Adams, Meng, as well as her father, Jimmy Meng, a Democrat state assemblyman who was sent to prison after soliciting an $80,000 bribe inside a fruit basket. Other recipients included Rep. Judy Chu, on whose behalf Chinese spy Fang Fang helped organize a town hall.
If all of these stories seem small, it’s because law enforcement is barely touching the tip of a political iceberg that could shred the country. Earlier this year, Canadian Security Intelligence Service documents leaked revealing that similar setups of immigrant association groups had been used to work to elect Trudeau and his Liberal Party. The secret papers exposed “undeclared cash donations” and “having business owners hire international Chinese students and ‘assign them to volunteer in electoral campaigns on a full-time basis.’”
Chinese diplomatic institutions were helping set up community associations and then mobilizing them to help the political candidates favored by Beijing, Trudeau and his Liberals, win.
It would be foolish to pretend that this is not happening in America. Had the CSIS materials not leaked, no one would know how Trudeau and his leftists were really elected. And, barring an FBI leak, we likely won’t learn what the Bureau really knows about China’s interference in our elections. And even if we do, China’s political puppets have learned to shout “racism” over any measure from expelling ChiCom spies to investigating research theft to banning TikTok.
The alleged secret police station in Little Fuzhou is one piece in a much larger political operation. And while the DOJ and the FBI have stepped in to resist China’s long standing practice of conducting police state operations on American soil, they aren’t about to blow up the secret relationship between Democrat elected officials and Communist front community groups.
The secret base above a ramen place was typical of Beijing’s operationalizing of its mass migration to western nations. Consulates coordinate community groups which become elected local and then national officials. Businessmen funded by the Chinese government and its oligarchs become community leaders, donate to politicians and set the agenda for Chinatown.
And that agenda becomes the Democrat agenda.
Harassing political dissidents, threatening violence against them and their families, organizing pro-China rallies, all things that “Harry” Lu Jianwang was accused of doing, are small stuff in the bigger picture. Last year, David Wenwei Chou opened fire in a Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods, California. Chou had been a director of Las Vegas Chinese for Peaceful Unification: allegedly a chapter of the China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification.
How many other Chinese Communist operatives would be willing to carry out terrorist attacks in this country in the event of hostilities? And what are Beijing’s plans for operationalizing them?
Such questions may not be asked even though plenty of patriotic Chinese-Americans have put them forward and warned that Communist infiltration presents a grave threat to their country.
Meanwhile, the secret police station near the Manhattan Bridge where the subway passes in a rattling show of sparks overhead has closed. Another one will open in its place. Little Fuzhou continues to grow and there will be no shortage of waiters with nothing to eat and struggling businessmen watching their loans balloon with the interest rates who will happily sign up as “volunteers” to serve the Ministry of Public Security. There will be knocks on tenement doors in the dead of night, red flyers, threats outside restaurants where roasted pigs and chickens hang spread out in the windows, and perhaps even a disappearance or two that will go unresolved.
And some of the same operatives will lend a hand and some cash for the Democrats.
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