An American sleuth and two Chinese men faced jurors yesterday [Macau time] in the first trial to come out of U.S. claims that China’s government has tried to harass, intimidate and arm-twist dissidents and others abroad into returning home.
Michael McMahon, Zheng Congying and Zhu Yong are charged with being part of a conspiracy to hound a former Chinese city official, his wife and their adult daughter to get him to go back to his homeland, where the government alleges he took bribes.
“If you are willing to go back to the mainland and spend 10 years in prison, your wife and children will be all right,” read a translated note that Zheng helped tape to their New Jersey door in 2018, though his lawyer said Zheng quickly had second thoughts and took the note down.
Prosecutors say it was one in a series of pressure tactics that included flying in the man’s then-octogenerian father to warn him that relatives would suffer if he didn’t come home.
“The victim and his family endured years of harassment,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Irisa Chen said in an opening statement. “It’s part of a public Chinese government initiative to force people living abroad to return to China against their will.”
The defendants, charged with acting as illegal agents for China, all say they weren’t aware they were doing Beijing’s bidding in what’s known as “Operation Fox Hunt.” Their lawyers said the men believed they were helping to collect a private debt.
The trial comes as grievances mount between Beijing and Washington. This year, a Chinese spy balloon flew over the U.S., U.S. law enforcement authorities accused China of setting up a secret police station in New York, and — just this Tuesday — the U.S. military complained that a Chinese fighter jet made an “unnecessarily aggressive maneuver” near an American reconnaissance aircraft over the South China Sea.
China told the U.S. to stop such surveillance flights, maintains that the spy balloon was a civilian aircraft that went off-course and says the supposed secret police outposts just provide such services as driver’s license renewals.
The U.S., meanwhile, has in recent years brought a number of cases like the one now on trial in a Brooklyn federal courthouse, saying they are examples “transnational repression.”
China in July 2014 announced “Operation Fox Hunt,” a plan to pursue and repatriate nationals it considers fugitives.
Beijing has denied all accusations of issuing threats to force repatriations and says the U.S. is discrediting legitimate Chinese crime-fighting.
The geopolitical backdrop was hardly invisible from the Brooklyn federal courtroom yesterday [Macau time].
Noting the recent rise in U.S.-China tensions, defense lawyer Paul Goldberger asked jurors “to take a long, hard look at what the (U.S.) government has done” in the case against his client, Zheng.
In response, U.S. District Judge Pamela Chen warned that “the U.S. government is not on trial.” (She isn’t related to the prosecutor.)
Zhu’s lawyer, Kevin Tung, said he was “not here to defend the People’s Republic of China,” but to defend “a person who I believe is innocent.”
The ex-official who was allegedly targeted, Xu Jin, came to the U.S. about a decade ago after falling out of favor with the Communist Party, prosecutors said. They said China initially went after him by issuing an international alert that he was wanted and by publicizing the bribery allegations. His family says they are false.
China has no extradition treaty with the U.S., so Beijing can’t legally compel suspects to return. Instead, according to U.S. prosecutors, the Chinese government “worked through intermediaries to try to squeeze Xu into deciding to return.”
JENNIFER PELTZ, NEW YORK, MDT/AP
