Summary
A New York man, Chen Jinping, pleaded guilty to operating an undeclared Chinese police station in Manhattan for China’s Ministry of Public Security.
The station, part of a transnational repression scheme, aided Beijing in locating and suppressing pro-democracy activists in the U.S., violating American sovereignty.
Authorities say the station also served routine functions like renewing Chinese driving licenses but had a more sinister role, including tracking a California-based activist.
Chen faces up to five years in prison, while a co-defendant has pleaded not guilty and awaits trial.
The US has no extradition treaty with China (or similar). So that would likely fall under spying and the “coercing a New Jersey man wanted by Beijing into returning to China” part is very much a major step over the line.
Edit: Also jeez people, he’s just asking relatively reasonable questions form ignorance, stop tearing him a new one! Being wrong shouldn’t immediately be cause for such backslash.
Thank you. Sadly people seem increasingly unable to cope with the fact that someone they disagree with is not a troll just a regular person trying to figure things out. I blame twitter… reddit too… all of them actually. It’s worse by an order of magnitude than 10 / 15 years ago.
when it comes to China, there are a lot of state paid shills trying to barrage people with misinformation. Maybe it’s genuine, but I’m disinclined to believe anyone actually believes we should allow foreign entities to have parallel authorities infringing on nations sovereignity.
I don’t think there should be! At all.
I’m just pedantically interested in exactly how the law works in that area.
For example, you characterise it as “infringing on a nations sovereignty”. But as far as I know nothing this guy was doing was affecting the rights of American citizens. That might just be the shortcomings of the article, which is why I said I assume there was more to it. I assume he was up to bad stuff. And acting like a gangster on behalf of another government is plainly wrong. It’s just that the article says he wasn’t physically intimidating anyone. Nor does it mention he’s sharing state secrets or personal info (from, say, a government job). Apparently he was passing publicly available information to the Chinese government and I was just surprised that that crossed a line.
Legally speaking there would have to be some ill intent (and perhaps that’s what all his communications show) because sending public info abroad in itself doesn’t strike me as illegal. (If someone were, say, sending info to the British government it doesn’t seem it would be automatically illegal. I assume there was some evidence that he was planning for harm to come from what he was doing)