Phone Records Show Lu Jianwang Had 22 Chinese Officials in His Contacts — 15 of Them in Public Security — as His Brooklyn Trial Enters Its Second Week
NEW YORK — A Brooklyn jury heard Monday from a Tiananmen Square survivor who said he was repeatedly targeted with vandalism and harassment after his YouTube broadcasts from Los Angeles caught the attention of China’s Ministry of Public Security and the networks allegedly tasked from a secret Fujian police station operating inside a nondescript building in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
The witness, Xu Jie, a Nanjing-born dissident who fled China, spent time in Laos, and arrived in the United States in 2018 after obtaining asylum and a green card, testified on behalf of the prosecution in the trial of Lu Jianwang. Under cross-examination, Xu acknowledged that he did not know Lu personally and had no direct interaction with him — though he had traveled to New York to broadcast a protest against the same Fujian public security outpost that Lu is accused of running.
Lu, 64, has pleaded not guilty. His lawyers maintain that the operation at the center of the case was a service center where overseas Chinese could renew their driver’s licenses during the pandemic.
But FBI evidence presented to the jury linked Lu’s phone contacts to 22 Chinese officials, 15 of them connected to public security. Among those identified in court were Wang Xizhang, Liu Rongyan, and Chen Lei, all tied to Fuzhou’s “Overseas 110” network — the covert overseas policing infrastructure exposed by the European human rights organization Safeguard Defenders in a landmark September 2022 report.
On March 24, 2022, Liu Rongyan allegedly asked Lu to help locate Xu Jie, providing his personal details and a possible address in the Pasadena area of California. Lu allegedly forwarded that request to Keith Cheng, a leader within a Fujian association, for further action.
The prosecution alleges that the network responded to the Safeguard Defenders exposure of the "Overseas 110" networks — which allegedly connected Lu with similar network leaders in Toronto, France, Spain and the Netherlands — with immediate damage control. Liu Rongyan allegedly demanded the urgent deletion of an online article describing cooperation between Fuzhou police and overseas hometown associations, the jury heard Monday.
WeChat records, prosecutors say, show Lu’s co-defendant Chen Jinping — who pleaded guilty in December 2024 to acting as an unauthorized agent of China — along with a US-based figure connected to a Chinese media outlet, assisting with that deletion. Lu initially denied to FBI agents that any material had been removed but later admitted the deletion had been carried out on instructions from public security, Epoch Times reported.
Lu’s lawyer has argued that while his client did liaise with Chinese security figures, he was asked rather than tasked to assist — a distinction plainly aimed at blunting the prosecution’s central claim that Lu functioned as an instrument of Beijing’s campaign to surveil and repress dissidents on American soil.
Some of the prosecution’s sharpest allegations concern tasking carried out over a span of years. In 2018, an official identified as Huang Jiesheng reportedly sent Lu photographs of two women in yellow shirts at a New York Falun Gong gathering and asked whether they practiced Falun Gong in the United States. In 2021, Huang allegedly transmitted what prosecutors characterized as a supplemental criminal report on a target — a document containing dates of birth, passport numbers, home addresses, and frozen bank account details. That category of information, the prosecution contends, is consistent with the Chinese party-state illegally deploying American residents to assist in its extraterritorial investigations and repression.
Prosecutors have described the Manhattan outpost as part of a global network of covert police posts, used by Beijing to monitor and silence people it views as enemies of its interests.
Last week FBI computer analyst Jessica Volchko testified that data deleted from Lu’s phone and technically recovered showed his contacts included three WeChat groups created by Liu Rongyan of the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau, totaling 2,619 chat records. One group comprised 65 members drawn from “Police-Overseas Chinese Service Stations” around the world; the other two groups held 39 and 81 members respectively.
The recovered messages revealed requests from Fuzhou for New York to install a Huawei cloud system connected to the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau enabling what was described internally as “backend police-overseas residents access permissions.”
The trial, before Judge Nina Morrison in the Eastern District of New York, is expected to conclude by mid-May.
Lu’s lawyers maintain that the operation at the center of the case was a service center where overseas Chinese could renew their driver’s licenses during the pandemic. Joke of the year! We have these “service centres” up here in Canada - actually lots of them! They are designed to terrorize, harass, control,
etc. Chinese Canadian citizens that fled communist China brutality, tortures, organ harvesting - by threatening to arrest, kill family still living under communist rule in China.
Canada’s PM Carney approves of these communist spy agencies being in Canada! It helps his goals to reduce the country to a satellite of Beijing!!
Oh China what a tangled web you weave! WOW!! Great reporting Sam Cooper, you are an integral part of waking up Canadians to China.