My Visit to China’s Eerie Police Station in Manhattan

M onths after FBI counterintelligence agents reportedly raided the Manhattan office of an alleged Chinese police station on U.S. soil, several people appear to continue to work from the location. That’s what it looked like when I walked into the building that houses it Thursday afternoon.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that during the search conducted sometime “last fall,” the FBI seized certain materials as part of a broader criminal investigation in tandem with federal prosecutors in Brooklyn. Before the FBI raid, the nonprofit group Safeguard Defenders revealed the existence of the “overseas service station” — which is allegedly operated by the city of Fuzhou’s security bureau — in a study citing Chinese government statements and media reports.

I’m not the first reporter to visit the office, which is on the fourth floor of a building in Manhattan’s Chinatown, on a street lined with markets that were bustling even in pouring rain on Thursday. Didi Kirsten Tatlow went to check it out last year, finding two very nervous men in suits, as she wrote in a Newsweek article on Chinese interference before the raid was reported.

But in the wake of the FBI search, whether the station was still operating was an open question.

The six-story structure houses several other businesses: a real-estate firm, an acupuncture clinic, an accountancy, and a ramen restaurant. The building’s owner is the America ChangLe Association, a purportedly independent group whose goal is to support immigrants from Fujian province. The fourth floor officially houses America ChangLe, but a Chinese-language outlet seemingly run by Fujian province for its overseas diaspora said in an article last spring that the association hosts the station there.

That article included several images from inside the outpost. In one image that’s been widely circulated since the Safeguard Defenders report, seven men in suits sit at a table under a blue banner that reads “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station.” The piece celebrated the station’s role in helping the Fujianese overseas diaspora maintain their driver’s licenses and complete paperwork for other certificates.

On Thursday, I took an elevator to the fourth floor (labeled 3A; as Tatlow explained, the number four is considered unlucky). When the doors opened, I saw a small, brightly lit hallway: To the left, it led into a larger, empty room with lettering and a seal on the wall, with a large wooden desk pushed up against it. The room resembled the one in the image of the police team, though on Thursday there was no banner. To the right of the elevator, there were two small offices with glass windows open to the hallway. What appeared to be a basketball game was playing on a television in one of the offices.

My arrival seemed to cause a stir. One older-looking man came out of the larger space to my right, while a woman and another man emerged from the one straight in front of the elevator. I introduced myself as a reporter for National Review, adding that I was looking into reports about the FBI raid and the Fuzhou overseas police station. The man, while friendly, repeatedly claimed not to know anything about an FBI raid or the police station and said that someone else might be able to help me. He then went down the hallway, into the larger room with the seal, and disappeared into a corner office that had its blinds drawn.

The older man then reemerged and motioned for me to enter that office; I hesitated for a moment, then walked in.

A third, middle-aged man wearing wire-frame glasses and a dark puffer jacket stood to greet me and shake my hand. I introduced myself again as a reporter and asked the same questions I’d asked the others about the FBI raid, the overseas police station, and the purpose of their office. He said, several times, “Sorry, no English.” Eventually, I just asked his name, and he gave one. I then walked back out into the hallway, said goodbye to the older man, and left. (Another reporter had a similar experience.)

For an office representing the long arm of a foreign totalitarian government, it all felt very quaint. According to Safeguard Defenders, some of the police stations — there are reported to be at least 100 around the world — have played a role in harassment and intimidation campaigns to force overseas Chinese to return to the mainland. The Justice Department is prosecuting several other cases in which alleged agents of the Chinese government harassed, and attempted to force the return of, Chinese dissidents and other persecuted individuals.

An important question in all of this is the role of the America ChangLe Association, whose president has donated to New York City mayor Eric Adams and hosted him at its annual gala last September, according to the New York Post. At the very least, the group reportedly has acted as a host for the police station, with the police personnel posing for pictures there.

There’s another link: Last February, five days after the police station reportedly opened its doors in the America ChangLe building, the blue police-station banner was mounted on the front of a float that took part in Chinatown’s Lunar New Year Parade. While I was at the parade by coincidence, the float’s presence seemed noteworthy, if only for the fact that it advertised a police station in New York, and I shot a quick video. What seems important now is that a banner at the back of the float names the America ChangLe Association, though the affiliations of the people on the float are unclear.

https://play.aniview.com/60d5e58543972f2377389576/63caf3becfa67c37340d1434/Video%20(1).mp4?_=1

In a brief phone call on Friday, Steven Tin, president of the group that organizes the parade, confirmed that America ChangLe hosted a float but said he didn’t know about the police station. “What [float sponsors] do, we really don’t know,” he told me, explaining that he runs a cultural, not a political, event and that sponsors usually keep him in the dark and change things up at the last minute. The association did not request to be in the parade this year, after participating in 2019, in addition to last year’s event, Tin added.

As federal law enforcement investigates, the group — which didn’t answer a call or respond to a request for comment submitted via a form on its website Friday — seems to be stepping back from at least one public event in which it previously participated. But its highly scrutinized office clearly remains open for business.