Republican Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall introduced legislation Tuesday that would create an anonymous tip-line for concerned citizens to report suspected Chinese Communist Party espionage activities.
The Chinese Communist Party operates a network of police stations located outside the country, the human rights organization Safeguard Defenders revealed in 2022. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shut down a Chinatown, New York, station, although the CCP still operates the outposts in dozens of countries. Chinese government operatives reportedly use the stations to monitor local Chinese emigrants, and in some cases extraordinarily render them back to China.
Marshall’s bill, obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller, creates an FBI tip-line for individuals to use and report the existence of the police stations. It also prohibits CCP agents from “perform[ing] any function of a law enforcement agency; or engag[ing] in surveillance, harassment, intimidation, or coercion of another person in the U.S.” Any individual who violates the statute may be sentenced to ten years in prison. (RELATED: China Tried To Plant Spies Inside The Fed And Kidnap Economist, Investigation Finds)
Read the bill here:
Ccp Marshall Bill by Michael Ginsberg on Scribd
“The Chinese Communist Party is the greatest geo-political threat to our nation. Any actor committing surveillance, targeting, or spying of individuals on U.S. soil on behalf of the CCP must be prosecuted,” Marshall said in a statement to the Daily Caller. “We will not tolerate any CCP operative undermining American law and order. This hotline will allow us to intervene and hopefully end the CCP’s unlawful ‘policing’ in the U.S.”
The FBI raided and shut down the Chinatown CCP police station, located in a building operated by the 501(c)3 America Changle Association, in fall 2022. Changle’s president, Lu Jianshun, donated $4,000 to Eric Adams’ successful mayoral race in 2021. Chinese government officials have described the organization’s former chairman, Lu Jianwang, as a propagandist and special liaison officer for the United Front Work Department, which conducts overseas intelligence for the CCP.
One of the GOP’s main China hawks in the Senate, Marshall has taken a leading role in investigations into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. An investigation he commissioned found that Wuhan Institute of Virology may have double-billed the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Agency for International Development for millions of dollars spent on medical equipment, travel and salaries. The federal government funded gain-of-function research on bat-based coronaviruses at WIV in the years before the pandemic.
Marshall has repeatedly introduced legislation banning the federal government from funding gain-of-function research.