Man gets prison in US for helping pressure Chinese expat to return home

NEW YORK (AP) — A real estate businessman who aided a Chinese effort to pressure an expatriate to return home has been sentenced to over a year in a U.S. prison.

U.S. prosecutors say Quanzhong An’s activities were part of the Chinese government's “Operation Fox Hunt,” which Beijing says is about pursuing people who have fled justice. Washington sees it as transnational repression, a term for governments working to silence dissenters beyond their borders.

“Quanzhong An acted at the direction of the (Chinese) government to harass and intimidate individuals living on U.S. soil as part of a pernicious scheme to force their repatriation,” Brooklyn-based U.S. Attorney John Durham said in a statement Wednesday.

Messages seeking comment were sent Thursday to China's embassy in Washington and consulate in New York. China has previously denied threatening its nationals abroad.

An, a 58-year-old Chinese citizen and legal U.S. resident, pleaded guilty last year to acting as an illegal foreign agent. He was sentenced to 20 months behind bars. He has served seven of them already.

“Mr. An is in my opinion, on balance, a very fine man and accordingly, seeing him return to prison for even one additional day is heartbreaking,” his lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, said Thursday. But he noted that prosecutors had sought a considerably longer prison term.

According to prosecutors and an indictment, An was the key U.S.-based player in a transcontinental effort targeting a former manager of a Chinese state-owned company. Prosecutors haven't named the man or the company.

Beijing has accused the man of embezzlement, identified him as an “Operation Fox Hunt” priority and asked law enforcement agencies worldwide to find and apprehend him, according to the indictment.

An, who lives in suburban Roslyn Heights, New York, showed up at the home of the target's son to try to find the father in 2017, the indictment said.

Then, in a series of recorded meetings with the son starting in early 2020, An leaned on him to secure his father's return to China. An said he that was trying to help the Chinese government communicate with the two, and that he would look good to Chinese officials if he could arrange the father's return, according to the indictment.

While acknowledging that a Chinese embezzlement case against the father and son was a legally frivolous pressure tactic, An told the son that Chinese officials were monitoring the family's relatives and would “keep pestering you” if the father didn’t return, the indictment said.

“Their intent is to make your life difficult,” the indictment quotes him as saying.

An even offered to pay back the man's allegedly ill-gotten gains, according to the indictment, and eventually arranged for a Chinese official to press the man's son by phone.

In recent years, the U.S. Justice Department has charged dozens of suspects with acts of transnational repression on behalf of China, Iran or other countries. On Thursday, a Manhattan federal jury convicted two men of conspiring to kill Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad in what U.S. prosecutors claimed was a murder-for-hire plot financed by the Iranian government and foiled when police stopped the intended hit man's car. Tehran has denied involvement in any schemes to kill people in the U.S.

An was charged in 2020 along with six other people, including his daughter Guangyang An. She is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty last May. The current status of the other five isn’t immediately clear.

In a separate case in the same Brooklyn federal courthouse, three men were convicted in 2023 at the first trial surrounding U.S. claims about “Operation Fox Hunt.” Two of those defendants have been sentenced to prison; the third is awaiting sentencing.