(Bloomberg) -- The Justice Department charged five people for acting on China’s behalf to stalk, harass and spy on U.S. residents who have been critical of the country, including a former Tiananmen Square protester who is running for a congressional seat from New York. 

“In one of these schemes, the co-conspirators allegedly orchestrated a campaign to undermine the U.S. congressional candidacy of a U.S. military veteran who was a leader of the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing,” the department said in a statement Wednesday. 

Three people were charged for acting as unregistered agents of China and are in custody. Two others remain at large and one is a resident of China who acted as an intermediary, according to DOJ. Officials said they are detecting what they called an alarming rise in “transnational repression” -- where a foreign government seeks to harass or intimidate U.S. residents -- by nations such as China and Iran. 

“Transnational repression is part of a range of tactics that our adversaries employ to try to undermine our democracy, our economy and our institutions,” Matthew Olsen, head of the Justice Department’s national security division, told reporters Wednesday. “And is a threat not only to people in the United States but also to people around the world who seek to exercise their basic rights to freedom of expression and to stand up to authoritarians.”

The unnamed Congressional candidate one of the people allegedly targeted appears to be Yan Xiong, who was jailed in China for his protest activities before coming to the U.S. in 1992. He served as a chaplain in the U.S. Army and was deployed to Iraq for a year, according to his official website. 

Xiong is a Democratic candidate for New York’s first congressional district, consisting of eastern Long Island. That seat is held by Republican Lee Zeldin. 

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Court records filed Wednesday allege Qiming Lin, an apparent Chinese police officer and state security agent, plotted to set up Xiong with a prostitute to embarrass him and ruin his campaign. The plot was ultimately not carried out because of uncertainty over its cost, the records said.

In another case, prosecutors accused Shujun Wang, a 73-year-old college professor, with founding a pro-democracy memorial foundation in Flushing, Queens and then using his position in the group to collect information on the activities of U.S.-based dissidents and report it back to his handlers in China’s Ministry of State Security.

Wang allegedly reported his information to his handlers in face-to-face meetings on trips to China, through a messaging app and by writing “diaries” that he left in draft form in an email account, which was then remotely accessed from foreign countries. At least one of the democracy activists Wang reported on was subsequently arrested by Chinese authorities in Hong Kong, DOJ said.

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The DOJ indictments come amid heightened tensions between the U.S. and China over the war in Ukraine and continuing strains over a range of issues from human rights in Xinjiang to Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea.

It also comes after the Justice Department last month said it was ending the “China Initiative,” a program started under the Trump administration that came under intense criticism for fanning discrimination against Asian-Americans even as several of its high-profile criminal cases failed in court.

The program faced the most criticism for targeting professors and researchers who allegedly violated terms of their grant funding at U.S. universities and other institutions. Several high-profile cases fell apart in court.

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