US authorities have arrested two suspected Chinese government agents in connection with an alleged plot by Beijing to disrupt and ultimately topple the exiled anti-communist Falun Gong spiritual movement.
John Chen and Lin Feng were charged in an indictment unsealed on Friday with scheming to revoke a New York-based Falun Gong organization’s tax-exempt status and paying bribes to an undercover officer posing as a US tax agent.
The undercover officer recorded multiple conversations with Chen, and investigators obtained a wire tap to record phone calls in which Chen and Feng discussed instructions they purportedly received from Chinese government officials, prosecutors said.
Photo: AP
In one recording Chen referred to Chinese government officials as akin to “blood brothers,” and in another, he said Beijing would be “very generous” in rewarding the undercover officer for help in revoking the Falun Gong organization’s nonprofit status, prosecutors said.
Chen, a 70-year-old US citizen, and Feng, a 43-year-old permanent US resident, are charged with acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government, bribing a public official and conspiracy to commit international money laundering.
Chen and Feng were born in Chinan but live in the Los Angeles area, where they were arrested on Friday. Information on an initial court appearance or lawyers who could speak on their behalf was not immediately available.
Messages seeking comment were left with the Chinese embassy in Washington and with the Falun Gong movement.
China banned the Falun Gong movement in 1999, classifying it as an evil cult and one of the “Five Poisons,” or chief threats to its rule. Since then, Falun Gong practitioners have found refuge at a 162-hectare compound called Dragon Springs in upstate New York.
The US Department of Justice has made a series of prosecutions in recent years to disrupt China’s efforts in the US to identify, locate and silence democracy advocates and others who are openly critical of Beijing’s policies. Such practices by foreign governments are known as “transnational repression.”
“The Chinese government has yet again attempted, and failed, to target critics of the [People’s Republic of China] here in the United States,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
The US would “continue to investigate, disrupt, and prosecute” China’s efforts to “silence its critics and extend the reaches of its regime onto US soil,” Garland said.
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