A New York man has pleaded guilty to running an undeclared police station for the Chinese government in lower Manhattan, more than a year after the US justice department unveiled efforts aimed at disrupting Beijing’s efforts to locate and suppress Chinese American pro-democracy activists.

Chen Jinping, 60, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to conspiring to act as an agent of the government of the People’s Republic of China, in connection with opening and operating an overseas police station for the PRC’s ministry of public security, or MPS.

Chen, who pleaded guilty for acting as an illegal agent, faces five years in prison when he is sentenced next year.

US attorney Breon Peace said Chen was part of a “transnational repression scheme to establish a secret police station in the middle of New York City on behalf of the national police force of the People’s Republic of China”.

Peace added that US prosecutors had made it a priority “to counteract the malign activities of foreign governments that violate our nation’s sovereignty by targeting local diaspora communities in the United States”.

FBI assistant director in charge James Dennehy said that Chen admitted to his role in establishing the illegal police station that had been opened “to further the nefarious and repressive aims of the PRC in direct violation of American sovereignty”.

Jinping and co-defendant “Harry” Lu Jianwang, 62, both US citizens, had been arrested and charged in April last year with illegally acting as foreign agents. Lu has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is awaiting trial.

US officials said that while the secret police station did perform some basic services, such as helping Chinese citizens renew their Chinese driving licenses, it also served a more “sinister” function, including to help the Chinese government locate a pro-democracy activist of Chinese descent living in California.

The arrests came after the justice department charged more than a half-dozen people in 2020 with working on behalf of the Chinese government in a pressure campaign aimed at coercing a New Jersey man wanted by Beijing into returning to China.

In September, the US charged Linda Sun, a former aide of New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, with secretly acting as an agent of the Chinese government. US officials have warned for years of Chinese determination to influence American policy and cultivate relationships with political figures, but also act to pressure US-Chinese nationals domestically.

According to US prosecutors, the two men charged in connection with the illegal police station did so under the direction and control of the MPS.

The police station – which closed in the fall of 2022 – occupied an entire floor in an office building in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The FBI raided the police station in October 2022, and confiscated Chen’s and Lu’s phones. An analysis of the device later found that communications between the defendants and an MPS official appeared to have been deleted.