A Chinese police station set up to spy on the country’s nationals in Lower Manhattan is run by a US charity that is on an IRS blacklist, The Post has learned.
The non-profit America ChangLe Association NY Inc. owns and operates the “service station” located above a noodle shop on the third floor of 107 East Broadway on the Lower East Side, according to public filings.
In May, the IRS yanked the group’s tax-exempt status for its failure to submit tax filings for three straight years, according to public records.
The non-profit, which was incorporated in New York in 2013 and listed its charitable mission as a “social gathering place for Fujianese people,” paid $1.3 million three years later for the suite of offices that houses the Fuzhou Police Overseas Chinese Affairs bureau, filings show.
The Manhattan station is part of a web of more than 100 such law enforcement offices set up around the world by the People’s Republic of China, ostensibly to help Chinese nationals renew their government-issued identification and drivers’ licenses.
But the stations have more “sinister” purposes, such as spying on the Chinese diaspora for the Chinese Communist Party, according to a recent whistle-blower report.
“Openly labeled as overseas police service stations … they contribute to ‘resolutely cracking down on all kinds of illegal and criminal activities involving overseas Chinese,'” according to a September report by Safeguard Defenders, a Madrid-based human rights group that documents Chinese repression around the world.
The stations also participate in “intimidation, harassment, detention or imprisonment” to spy on dissenters and return migrants, according to the report.
In addition to New York, Safeguard Defenders found two Chinese police stations in Paris, three in Toronto, two in London and five scattered in the Spanish cities of Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia. The report accuses these stations of involvement in forcibly “returning” more than 200,000 overseas nationals to China.
The news of the Manhattan-based Chinese police station was greeted with outrage from Republican lawmakers Friday, who sent a letter to US Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to a report.
“The Department of Justice and State Department must explain why the Biden administration has allowed CCP police to set up an office on US soil,” said Republican Study Committee chairman Jim Banks of Indiana in a statement to Fox News.
A spokeswoman for Safeguard Defenders called the overseas stations a violation of international law and territorial sovereignty Friday.
“I think it shows how brazen the CCP is getting and how little regard they have for other governments,” Laura Harth, Safeguard Defenders’ campaign manager, told Fox News.
A US government watchdog condemned the use of the Manhattan non-profit as what it framed as a front for the police station.
“The use of an off-the-books cultural non-profit is a cynical ploy that weaponizes American values of community and cultural identity to covertly attack and harass innocent people is something all of our elected officials need to focus on and allocate resources to put an end to,” said Tom Anderson, director of the Government Integrity Project at the National Legal and Policy Center, a Virginia-based government watchdog group.
Calls to America ChangLe Association NY Inc’s president Harry Lu were not returned this week.
The non-profit listed donations of $135,950 and total assets of $1.1 million on its 2018 filing to the IRS — the last one it apparently filed.
