A 71-year-old Chinese man was sentenced to 20 months in prison on Tuesday for taking part in a plot targeting the Falun Gong spiritual movement in the United States.
A street booth set up by the Hong Kong Falun Gong. File photo: xahl dera, via Flickr.
John Chen, of Los Angeles, was convicted of acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government and bribing a tax authority agent.
Chen and another Chinese national, Lin Feng, 44, who also lived in Los Angeles, took part in a Chinese government campaign to “repress and harass Falun Gong practitioners” in the United States, the Justice Department said in a statement.
In 2023, Chen and Feng sought to have the Internal Revenue Service strip the tax-exempt status of the Shen Yun Performing Arts Center, which is run by the Falun Gong.
As part of the scheme, they paid a US$5,000 cash bribe to a purported IRS agent who was in fact an undercover officer.
In addition to 20 months in prison, Chen was sentenced to three years of supervised release and ordered to forfeit US$50,000.
Feng was sentenced in September to time-served of 16 months in prison.
The Falun Gong movement is banned in China and prosecuted by authorities there.
