China’s Goons in America
A week ago Saturday, some 60 protesters demonstrated outside a Chinatown building housing a Beijing “service station” that reportedly conducts surveillance against prodemocracy dissidents living in New York.
The protest was sparked by news last month of an FBI raid on the “secret police” station tied to a worldwide network of similar outposts run by the Chinese Communist Party, all part of Operation Fox Hunt, the Xi Jinping regime’s global effort to spy on overseas-based critics and to intimidate citizens of other nations who have family ties in China.
Joining the demonstrators was Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chairman of the new House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. He warns the “secret police station is a terrifying threat to Chinese-Americans, other CCP targets, and to American sovereignty itself.” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-Bx.), a member of the committee, also showed for the rally.
The Xi regime is relentless and insidious in seeking respectable cover for its agents: ChangLe Association Inc., the charity that officially ran the center (supposedly to help Chinese nationals renew their Chinese ID), last year sponsored a gala dinner featuring Mayor Adams as a guest of honor.
Gallagher hopes the committee can build strong bipartisan support for ripping off such facades, ideally with help from Chinese-American (including Taiwanese-American) communities, whose members have often been reluctant to discuss the acts of intimidation and physical violence occurring under the nose of US authorities.
The CCP’s repressive surveillance apparatus and its network of agents enables Beijing to bring the threat directly into US communities, Gallagher warns. He spoke for most Americans in vowing support for the reformers and freedom fighters who’ve taken refuge here in the United States: “We cannot allow the threat they have fled to follow them to our shores here in America.”
As Chinese-American communities nationwide grow more politically engaged thanks to a host of domestic issues, we hope that awakening builds more confidence to call out this foreign threat, too — and to demand local officials act against it.
In all, Feb. 25 marked a coming-out event for a new generation of Chinese-American activists who’ll no longer be silent in the face of harassment — by CCP agents, local street thugs or a political class that ignores their interests. We expect US, and New York, politics to be healthier for it.