US charges two over China-backed plot against Falun Gong

Two suspects were charged with crimes related to an operation to have the US tax-exempt status of the Falun Gong organization revoked.

Authorities in the United States have arrested two suspected Chinese government agents in connection with an alleged Beijing plot against the exiled anti-communist Falun Gong spiritual movement.

China banned Falun Gong, based largely on meditation, in 1999 after 10,000 members showed up in silent protest at Beijing’s central leadership compound.

The group has called on people to renounce the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

John Chen and Lin Feng were charged in an indictment unsealed on Friday with conspiracy to revoke the tax-exempt status of a New York-based Falun Gong organization and paying a bribe to an undercover agent posing as a US tax agent.

Chen, a 70-year-old US citizen, and Feng, a 43-year-old lawful permanent resident, are charged with acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government, bribing a government official and conspiracy to commit international money laundering.

Chen and Feng were both born in China but now live in the Los Angeles area where they were arrested Friday. Information about an initial trial or lawyers who could speak on their behalf was not immediately available.

In an effort to undermine Falun Gong in the US, federal prosecutors allege, Chen and Feng’s urged the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to revoke the organization’s nonprofit tax status. In a whistleblower’s complaint to the IRS in February, Chen described Falun Gong as a “massive mega cult” — echoing the language the Chinese government uses to describe the movement.

Chen and Feng then turned to the undercover agent to make sure the IRS would handle the complaint, offering a payment of $50,000 — and handing over $5,000 in cash as a down payment — if the IRS conducted an audit. , prosecutors said.

The undercover agent posing as the tax official recorded multiple conversations with Chen, and detectives obtained listening devices to record phone conversations in which Chen and Feng discussed instructions they allegedly received from Chinese government officials, prosecutors said.

In one recording, prosecutors said, Chen said Beijing would be “very generous” in rewarding the undercover agent’s help in cracking down on Falun Gong’s non-profit status.

Chen met with the officer at a restaurant north of New York City on May 14, prosecutors said. A few days later, the officer sent Chen a letter on counterfeit IRS letterhead saying the agency had opened a case against Falun Gong, prosecutors said. Chen relayed the news to Feng in a wiretapped phone call, indicating his intention to update Chinese government officials on their progress, prosecutors said.

Messages requesting comment were left at the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC and the Falun Gong movement.

The US Justice Department has launched a series of prosecutions in recent years to try to identify, track down and silence China’s attempts to identify, track and silence pro-democracy activists in the US and others who are openly critical of Beijing’s policies. to disrupt.

Such practices by foreign governments are known as “transnational repression”.

“The Chinese government has again tried, and failed, to evade critics of the [People’s Republic of China] here in the United States,” Attorney General Merrick B Garland said in a statement Friday.

The US will “continue to investigate, disrupt and prosecute China’s efforts” to “silence its critics and expand the reach of its regime onto American soil,” he said.

The charges against Chen and Feng come a month after federal agents arrested two New York residents on suspicion of running a Chinese “secret police station” in Manhattan’s Chinatown district.