‘Mafia Behavior’: House CCP Committee Receives FBI Briefing on Chinese Police Stations and Harassment Plots

The FBI updated the House Select Committee on the CCP about its efforts to combat Beijing’s malign activities on U.S. soil in a classified briefing last Thursday, following a letter by Chairman Mike Gallagher requesting more information on the bureau’s work.

“The FBI calls the Chinese Communist Party’s stalking, harassment, and assault of those who might oppose the Party ‘transnational repression,’ but to most Americans, the CCP’s bullying looks a lot like mafia behavior,” Gallagher said.

Many of the committee’s members from both parties attended the briefing, which is expected to be the first of an ongoing series of conversations between the FBI and the committee, a source familiar with the meeting said. Committee members got the impression that the FBI is starting to take Beijing’s repression campaigns in the U.S. more seriously but also came away with the sense that the FBI still needs to do more to combat it both through actions at the national level and in local field offices.

In response to an email from National Review asking about the briefing, a bureau spokesperson said, “the FBI has no comment.”

The Wisconsin Republican has brought a laser-like focus to CCP repression campaigns on U.S. soil in the initial months of the committee’s existence. In one of its first public events, Gallagher rallied members of both parties and Chinese human-rights advocates for an event in front of the Chinese government-run police station in New York City.

The Public Security Bureau of the city of Fuzhou reportedly set up that office on the premises of the America ChangLe Association — a group linked to CCP influence arms — in early 2022. Its existence was brought to light last September by the human-rights-watchdog group Safeguard Defenders, which also found that there are at least three other such stations on U.S. soil.

Safeguard Defenders has found that Chinese government-run police stations in other countries have been involved in efforts to illicitly force the return of Chinese nationals to China. While there’s no direct evidence linking the New York City station to a specific plot, Wray has said that the station’s existence is a violation of U.S. sovereignty, and the New York Times reported that the Justice Department is running a criminal investigation into the matter.

While the State Department told NR earlier this year that the FBI had confirmed that the station was shut down, Gallagher has requested more information.

In a letter to FBI director Christopher Wray on February 24, Gallagher wrote that he’s “troubled by the fact that the FBI appears to have been late to the game” in responding to the police station and requested a classified briefing from Wray.

The Chinese police station in Manhattan is merely one conduit through which Chinese Communist Party entities are alleged to have harassed individuals on U.S. soil. In a string of recent criminal complaints, federal prosecutors have outlined several plots where alleged agents of the Chinese government, and Chinese intelligence-service operatives, have interfered in American politics and sought to force people to return to China.

In one case, an agent with China’s ministry of state security even told a private investigator that he should orchestrate a car crash to incapacitate a candidate for Congress in Long Island. That candidate, Xiong Yan, is a naturalized U.S. citizen who played a leading role in the Tiananmen Square protests.

Agents of the Chinese regime also regularly threaten ethnic minorities who have emigrated to the U.S., targeting Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, Tibetans, and other groups regularly targeted by Beijing. In recent incidents surrounding protests against the Chinese government’s zero-Covid policy, Chinese students have been assaulted at U.S. colleges, including Columbia University and Berklee College of Music.

To combat harassment by China and other authoritarian regimes, the FBI set up a webpage on transnational repression that describes the forms that these plots can take and that also directs victims to a tipline.

“All levels of law enforcement have a responsibility to protect both American citizens and the many reformers, freedom fighters, and asylum seekers, who have taken refuge in our nation,” Gallagher said. “We want everyone in this country to know that if the CCP targets them, their voice will be heard at their local police station, at the FBI, and in the halls of Congress, and that we on the Select Committee on the CCP will do our best to end this ugly affront to our sovereignty.”