Alvin Bragg’s Office Hosted Chinese Consulate Hours before DOJ Publicly Linked it to an Espionage Scheme

The Manhattan district attorney’s office hosted the top official from the Chinese consulate-general in New York just hours before federal prosecutors unsealed a case implicating the senior Chinese diplomat’s team in a wide-ranging espionage and harassment scheme.

On Tuesday evening, the federal government unsealed an indictment against a Boston-area man, Litang Liang, who had allegedly acted under the control of the Chinese government. According to an indictment unsealed last night, Liang had set up a Chinese Communist Party front group, reported critics of the Chinese regime in the Boston area, monitored the Chinese diaspora in the city, and organized a counter-protest against regime critics.

Court documents revealed that this sprawling series of activities had been coordinated by several officials from China’s consulate-general in New York City. Liang had also been in contact with an individual who “at the time was one of the highest-ranking PRC diplomats in the United States” as well as officials from the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department — a key political influence bureau — per the court documents.

Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office hosted the most senior diplomat from that outpost, consul-general Huang Ping, for a ceremony on Tuesday afternoon.

Bragg announced yesterday that the U.S. was returning to China two stone carvings, which, he said, had initially been smuggled out of the country and loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by a collector. “It is a shame that these two incredible antiquities were stolen and at least one remained largely hidden from the public view for nearly three decades,” he said in a statement.

And Bragg’s office hosted Huang — who has vocally promoted the CCP’s hardline views on Taiwan and human rights atrocities — for a ceremony, where the Chinese official hailed the return of the artifacts as a boost to U.S-China cooperation. “The return of two 7th-century carvings symbolizes our cooperation in protecting cultural heritage. It will enhance friendship between our two peoples & bring positive energy into China-US relations,” Huang said.

Before yesterday, the Chinese consulate-general in New York had already been implicated in other espionage and harassment activities.

In 2022, senior Chinese consular officials visited the secret Chinese police station in Lower Manhattan, according to documents from a case brought in April. And in 2020, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the New York Post that the Chinese consulate-general in New York was engaged in activities “more akin to what spies are doing.”

But this history does not seem to have dissuaded local and state officials in New York from continuing to engage with China’s diplomatic presence in Manhattan.

During a Lunar New Year event in Chinatown this past February, Bragg and other top N.Y. pols, such as governor Kathy Hochul, joined officials from the Chinese consulate-general onstage. Bragg and Hochul held Chinese and U.S. flags as they spoke.

In the wake of Liang’s arrest this week, dissidents and human rights advocates urged Americans to take the CCP’s transnational repression threat more seriously. They said that Liang — who received a ceremonial plaque that read “Police” during a 2019 visit to the Chinese embassy in Washington, operated, apparently unhindered, for four years.

“I am so disappointed that this only happened after 4 yrs,” wrote Frances Hui, a Hong Konger who had been targeted by Liang in a Twitter thread. “This guy has always been around all along; in and out of PRC Embassy with PRC officials, leading an NGO in Chinatown, & engaging with city officials. He could have left the States anytime to escape federal scrutiny.”

Hui, now a policy coordinator for the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong, added that “the longer he wandered, the more risks pro-democracy activists were exposed to. In fact, Beijing takes advantage of the inefficiency so that they can send someone out to accomplish missions and swap them back when they found that they are exposed.”