The glass-paned office building perched above a ramen store in the heart of Manhattan's Chinatown looked inconspicuous on a busy block of Chinese restaurants, grocery stores and apartments.
In 2022, Lu Jianwang, the 64-year-old president of a Chinese community group, set up shop on one of the floors, creating a space where his attorneys said he planned to help expats renew their driver's licences and play ping pong on a table in a conference room.
But it was not long before the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the space, and accused Lu of taking orders from the Chinese government to establish the first known overseas police station in the US.
This week, he was found guilty of acting as an unauthorised foreign agent for China, just days after a California politician pleaded guilty to similar offences.
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[Californian city] Arcadia Mayor Eileen Wang admitted she posted propaganda on a website targeting the Chinese American community at the behest of the Chinese government.
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Experts say ... the People's Republic of China (PRC) ... has ramped up its attempts to peddle influence around the globe over the past decade, both through its strategic use of "soft power" - funding projects and industries overseas - as well as more covert means.
"It's part of the same sort of strategic approach, which is to tamp down on dissent and to shape a clear narrative around the PRC, and to do that in bolder ways, as we're seeing," said Lauryn Williams, a deputy director with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which has tracked cases of Chinese espionage in the US since 2000.
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China has been accused of setting up such [illegal police] stations around the world, with at least 100 reported across 53 countries. Just last week, a UK immigration officer was found guilty of working for Chinese intelligence as part of a "shadow policing operation".
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China's attempts to crack down on opposition is just one part of its overreaching espionage campaign abroad, including hacking, stealing military and technology secrets and other sensitive information, said Douglas London, a Georgetown University professor who worked as a CIA officer for 34 years.
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China's campaign of keeping tabs on dissidents around the world is motivated by the belief that criticism threatens the country's stability, said Claire Chu, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Global China Hub.
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The country uses a number of harassment and bullying strategies to silence dissidents, Morris added, including tracking people's cell phones or even recruiting dissidents to spy on their friends. He added that it can be dangerous for those who still have family left in China who are more vulnerable to intimidation from the government.
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For decades, Beijing has also sought to cultivate relationships with so-called "talents" across the US government and business community, Chu said.
The Chinese government targeted Wang, the Arcadia mayor, who pleaded guilty this week to taking orders from Chinese officials to publish pro-China content.
Prosecutors say she published an essay arguing that there was no genocide in the Xinjiang province of China and "no such thing as forced labour". China has faced mounting criticism from around the world over its treatment of the mostly Muslim Uyghur population in the north-western Xinjiang autonomous region, where there is evidence of millions of Uyghurs being held in camps subjected to forced labour. China says the are for "re-education" purposes only.
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These types of cases pose a challenge for US prosecutors, because there are so many of them, and they require years of work and resources to prove, espionage experts said.
China views espionage as a "volume enterprise", London said.
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