Biden admin rolls out red carpet for Chinese Communist who ran secret NYC police station
Secretary of State Antony Blinken rolled out the red carpet Friday for Liu Jianchao, China’s leading envoy — and the architect of its global scheme to kidnap and silence anti-Communist dissidents.
Liu’s “Operation Foxhunt” included setting up Chinese “police stations” including in New York, to find and extort dissidents.
His trip to the US was capped by the reception at the State Department by Blinken on Friday morning, the day after he met President Biden’s deputy national security adviser Jon Finer.
It had also included a visit to the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations in Manhattan, a reception with a billionaire Wall Street investor, and an audience with United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
But it sparked outrage among human rights and dissident groups whose friends and family members have been targeted by the Chinese Communist Party under “Operation Foxhunt,” which Liu ran.
Since 2015, Liu, 59, has served on the CCP’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and Central Anti-Corruption Coordination Group’s “International Fugitive Recovery Office,” according to reports.
He is the brains behind the campaign that uses Chinese operatives to spy, blackmail and bully the country’s nationals around the world — and in some cases even kidnap them.
Under Operation Foxhunt, Chinese operatives hired US private investigators to help track down dissidents in the US.
“To roll out the red carpet for him is a slap in the face,” said Martha McMahon whose husband Michael, a decorated former NYPD sergeant was convicted of acting as a foreign agent and interstate stalking while working as a private detective in New Jersey but vehemently protests his innocence.
“At minimum he should have been questioned by the FBI as soon as he hit the tarmac.”
Mark Simon, a Taiwan-based media executive said on X: “Liu hunted down hundreds of Chinese overseas… by using families as hostages, threats, & torture.”
Simon is campaigning for the release of his former boss, pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who was arrested in Hong Kong in 2020 and is now serving a five-year sentence denounced by Blinken’s State Department as unjust.
Shortly before Liu arrived, the FBI’s office in Houston issued a warning that the People’s Republic of China “may be cyberstalking, physically intimidating, and harassing Chinese citizens, naturalized US citizens, and families of dissidents who speak out against the Chinese Communist Party.”
In 2022, The Post revealed how a secret police station above a noodle shop in Manhattan’s Chinatown was being used to spy on dissidents, and being run by a shady charity that hosted a gala dinner for New York City Mayor Eric Adams in 2022.
Two US citizens were charged in April last year with setting up the police station and helping security officials from the authoritarian nation locate dissidents who were living in the US.
“Harry” Lu Jianwang, 61, of the Bronx, and Chen Jinping, 59, of Manhattan have not entered pleas and trial dates have not been set.
Liu, who is the top candidate to head up China’s foreign ministry after the last foreign minister disappeared from public life, said the purpose of his US tour was to promote better understanding between the US and China.
While in Manhattan, he posed at the Asia Society beside Steven Schwarzman, the billionaire CEO and co-founder of investment fund Blackstone.
The non-profit works to forge closer ties with Asia.
“We’re here to promote dialogues between the governments, legislators and political parties of the two countries, as we believe communication is the only way of increasing common understanding,” Liu said Tuesday at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations in Manhattan.
He also said that China had received help from the US Justice and Homeland Security departments in extraditing “criminal suspects” on the “basis of the US law.”
Just before Liu embarked on a similar diplomatic trip to Britain last year, Safeguard Defenders, a Madrid-based human rights group, petitioned unsuccessfully not to let him into the country, saying Liu “bore command and/or oversight responsibility” for human rights abuses.
A request for comment from the State Department was not returned Friday.
