New York
New York’s Chinese Dissidents Thought He Was an Ally. He Was a Spy.
The Chinese government’s paranoia about overseas dissidents can seem strange, considering the enormous differences in power between exiled protesters who organize marches in America and their mighty homeland, a geopolitical and economic superpower whose citizens they have almost no ability to mobilize. But to those familiar with the Chinese Communist Party, the government’s obsession with dissidents, no matter where in the world they are, is unsurprising. “Regardless of how the overseas dissident community is dismissed outside of China, its very existence represents a symbol of hope for many within China,” Wang Dan, a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests who spent years in prison before being exiled to the United States in 1998, told me. “For the Chinese Communist Party, the hope for change among the people is itself a threat. Therefore, they spare no effort in suppressing and discrediting the overseas dissident community — to extinguish this hope in the hearts of people at home.”
To understand the party’s fears about the risks posed by dissidents abroad, it helps to know the history of revolutions in China. “Historically, the groups that have overthrown the incumbent government or regime in China have often spent a lot of time overseas and organized there,” says Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins University. The leader Sun Yat-sen, who played an important role in the 1911 revolution that dethroned the Qing dynasty and led eventually to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, spent several periods of his life abroad, during which he engaged in effective fund-raising and political coordination. The Communist Party’s own rise to power in 1949 was partly advanced by contributions from leaders who were living overseas. “They are very sensitive to that potential,” Weiss says.
“What the Chinese government and the circle of elites that are running China right now fear the most is not the United States, with all of its military power, but elements of unrest within their own society that could potentially topple the Chinese Communist Party,” says Adam Kozy, a cybersecurity consultant who worked on Chinese cyberespionage cases when he was at the F.B.I. Specifically, Chinese authorities worry about a list of threats — collectively referred to as the “five poisons” — that pose a risk to the stability of Communist rule: the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, followers of the Falun Gong movement, supporters of Taiwanese independence and those who advocate for democracy in China. As a result, the Chinese government invests great effort in combating these threats, which involves collecting intelligence about overseas dissident groups and dampening their influence both within China and on the international stage.
Controlling dissidents, regardless of where they are, is essential to China’s goal of projecting power to its own citizens and to the world, according to Charles Kable, who served as an assistant director in the F.B.I.’s national security branch before retiring from the bureau at the end of 2022. “If you have a dissident out there who is looking back at China and pointing out problems that make the entire Chinese political apparatus look bad, it will not stand,” Kable says.
The leadership’s worries about such individuals were evident to the F.B.I. right before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Kable told me, describing how the Chinese worked to ensure that the running of the Olympic flame through San Francisco would not be disrupted by protesters. “And so, you had the M.S.S. and its collaborators deployed in San Francisco just to make sure that the five poisons didn’t get in there and disrupt the optic of what was to be the best Olympics in history,” Kable says. During the run, whose route was changed at the last minute to avoid protesters, Chinese authorities “had their proxies in the community line the streets and also stand back from the streets, looking around to see who might be looking to cause trouble.”
A man accused of running a secret police station in Manhattan at the direction of the Chinese government, using it to report to Beijing on political dissidents, was convicted of illegally working as a foreign agent on Wednesday.
Lu Jianwang, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said, opened the station with the goal of helping Chinese citizens renew their driver’s licenses while living in America. But a far more sinister aim, they said, was running the outpost as a hub to monitor outspoken critics of the Chinese Communist Party.
Mr. Lu, an American citizen also known as Harry, was accused of aiding China’s campaign of transnational repression by opening an illegal police station in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood.
Mr. Lu, 64, who wore an American flag pin on his suit during the trial, did not react as the verdict was read aloud. He was supported by dozens of members of a group linked to his hometown in China.
He was “in lock-step with what the Chinese government asked him to do,” Antoinette N. Rangel, a federal prosecutor, said during her closing argument on Tuesday.
After a full day of deliberations, a jury found Mr. Lu guilty on one count of acting as a foreign agent and another of obstructing justice. He was acquitted of conspiring to act as an agent of China.
Dozens of Mr. Lu’s supporters from his church and his Chinese community organization packed the courtroom. One supporter pumped her first as the verdict on the first charge, not guilty, was read aloud, but struck a somber tone after the guilty verdicts. Mr. Lu did not change his expression.
Mr. Lu had been “held accountable for blatantly disregarding the law and our country’s sovereignty,” Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, said in a statement. He added that his office would protect the rights of those “seeking freedom from repression and speaking out to bring democracy, reform and human rights to China.”
Mr. Lu, along with Chen Jinping, was arrested in April 2023. Mr. Chen pleaded guilty to working as an unauthorized agent of China in December 2024.
Mr. Lu was the president of the American Changle Association, a Chinese community organization and social club for people from the city of Fuzhou, like Mr. Lu. Such groups have attracted scrutiny for their persistent efforts to influence New York politics, through methods such as harassing and threatening candidates with platforms seen as harmful by the Chinese government, at the behest of the Chinese Consulate.
Mr. Lu’s brother, Jimmy, had made donations to former New York Mayor Eric Adams, who spoke at the club during an event in September 2022, days before it was raided by federal agents. In July 2022, Jimmy Li, a congressional candidate with roots in Fujian Province, which includes Fuzhou, visited the clubhouse and was endorsed by a number of the group’s leaders.
The weeklong trial showcased the Justice Department’s long-running crackdown on what it calls a global campaign by China to harass, intimidate and repatriate its political dissidents. Prosecutors depicted Mr. Lu as a willing operative of the Chinese government, eager to deepen his longstanding ties with party officials.
They presented the jury photos of Mr. Lu mingling with government officials in China, text messages in which a Chinese security official asked him for information on a prominent pro-democracy activist, and expert testimony about China’s global efforts to quell dissidents.
But Mr. Lu’s lawyer, John Carman, described the case as overreach by federal prosecutors. During his closing statement on Tuesday, he said Mr. Lu had merely been trying to help his fellow community members, Chinese Americans of Fujianese heritage.
“This isn’t spy time,” Mr. Carman said. “This isn’t international espionage. This is license renewal.”
In January 2022, Mr. Lu began working with Liu Rangyan, an official at the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, who became his official handler, prosecutors said. They met and were photographed at the global rollout ceremony in China for the overseas police stations.
Ms. Liu, prosecutors said, had directed “every detail” of the Manhattan station, down to the type size, logo and spacing of a banner inside the station. She wanted Mr. Lu to track down an outspoken critic of Beijing who was living in California and had taken part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
“Just help me verify if this person exists,” Ms. Liu wrote, referring to the dissident.
On the second day of the trial, two F.B.I. agents dramatically unfurled the banner in front of jurors. It read “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, New York, U.S.A.”
Prosecutors said Mr. Lu had aided the Chinese authorities beyond his work setting up the station. In 2018, he sent photos to another Chinese official of two members of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that is banned in China.
Just as the F.B.I. searched the organization’s headquarters in 2022, prosecutors said, he deleted messages from the social messaging app WeChat from his phone, which amounted to obstructing justice.
Ms. Rangel said the station was “stopped early in its tracks.” Though Mr. Lu was not financially compensated for his work, he received “continued bona fides from the Chinese government,” said Carrie Crossmore, an F.B.I. agent who interviewed Mr. Lu.
But supporters of Mr. Lu said they thought he was being punished for work that was ultimately benign.
“Harry’s motives were pure,” Mr. Carman said outside the courthouse, standing alongside Mr. Lu. “His support was there because he’s helped a lot of people in his 45 years in America.”
Baimadajie Angwang, a former New York City police officer who was cleared of accusations that he had spied for China, sat with Mr. Lu’s legal team throughout the trial. Like Mr. Lu, Mr. Angwang said he was wearing an American flag pin on his suit to quell any notion that he was disloyal to America.
“We have to do things like this to prevent people from coming after us,” said Mr. Angwang, who also served in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Michael Forsythe contributed reporting.
On Tuesday, the police arrested Daniel Santana, 45, of Unionport in the Bronx, and charged him with arson and three counts of homicide. On May 6, the police said, Mr. Santana came to Ori’s home, which housed a deli on its ground floor. He carried with him a container of accelerant and began to douse the building.
Video surveillance, and Mr. Santana’s own statements, indicate he intentionally caused the fire that killed the three men, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation who was not permitted to speak publicly. A motive was still being investigated.
Standing near the ash pit that was once the rooming house where she lived, Mecca Daniels, 51, shook with tears as she remembered Mr. De Leon, who put her up when no one else would. Drugs and alcohol flowed freely there, she and others said, but Mr. De Leon did not judge his tenants’ struggles. “We all looked at each like brothers and sisters, like family,” she said. “And Ori was our pop-pop.”
Almost a week after the fire, Ms. Daniels still wore the hospital bracelets from that night; she had jumped out of a bathroom window onto the neighboring roof, and her hands were covered in scrapes. She and Ms. Horton and another male housemate climbed down to the street using the chain of a roll-down gate, she said, and dropped the last few feet into the arms of a group of Muslim men who happened to be passing by on the way home from morning prayers.
Sandwiched between Tony’s fabric shop and a medical office, the two-story building was built in 1931. The ground floor was most recently home to El South Bronx Deli, with housing on the second story. Mr. De Leon grew up there and was a star baseball player, who liked to tell people he could have gone pro until an injury ended his career. Three generations of De Leons had lived in the home, according to his niece’s GoFundMe page. She did not answer calls. Reached by phone, a sister, Orpha Rivera, declined to comment.
“Wards of Newark” is far from Acevedo’s first major showing. In addition to photography, he works across various mediums, including drawing, animation and projected image. His work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, El Museo del Barrio and others.
Yet the Newark exhibition, which runs through Oct. 30, is a show of a different kind.
Acevedo, Tillet and Shakur spoke individually by phone and video with The New York Times about the exhibition. The interviews have been combined, condensed and edited.
Why is this exhibition outdoors?
SHAKUR Art doesn’t simply have to exist indoors. Having access outdoors helps spark dialogue and civic engagement, and tells our story. It also helps communities appreciate representation and seeing themselves depicted in art across the city.
Many people have photographed Newark. Salamishah, what drew you to Manuel’s images in particular?
TILLET Through Manuel’s eyes, you get this breadth and depth and diversity and dynamism of Newark at a time when there are the most stereotypes about its impoverishment, its crime in terms of the crack-cocaine epidemic. Then you have Manuel, who’s living in the city and showing us the depth of humanity.
Manuel, how did what you saw in the media about Black and brown people in Newark differ from what you saw every day, growing up in the city?
ACEVEDO Representation of Caribbean and African diaspora people has always been unjust. I had to contend with why we were being represented this way when in fact I could walk out of my house, go on to my porch, talk to my neighbors and hang out with my friends in a way that was never shown. I felt all I could do was point the camera to my reality, which was the opposite.
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