Prosecutors said Li played a part in the Chinese regime’s ‘death by 1,000 cuts approach’ against the United States.
TAMPA, Fla.—A Florida engineer has received a four-year prison term for helping the Chinese regime collect intelligence on dissidents, such as practitioners of the persecuted faith Falun Gong.
The man, Li Ping, is a naturalized U.S. citizen who had worked for Verizon for 30 years. He had acted on behalf of a Chinese intelligence official in the United States for more than a decade, according to court filings.
Li, who turns 60 in December, passed a wide variety of information on to the Ministry of State Security, China’s top spying agency, including cybersecurity training materials taken from his tech corporate employer. Repeatedly, he fed the ministry details about pro-democracy advocates living in the United States and Falun Gong practitioners, a major target of the Chinese Communist Party over the past 25 years.
In addition to the prison sentence, U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday also granted prosecutors’ request for a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release.
“It’s bitterly disappointing and upsetting to American citizens” that someone would come from a foreign country that’s a hostile power, take advantage of things such as the U.S. public school system, and then work with that hostile power, Merryday said at the hearing.
Li’s lawyer, Daniel Fernandez, in part, blamed the Chinese intelligence official for using Li for the illegal acts, saying that his client felt “betrayed.”
Li attended high school and college in China before coming to the United States three decades ago. While in high school, he befriended a student who later became a Chinese state security officer, according to a filing that his lawyer submitted. The two kept in touch over the years and met whenever Li visited his family in China.
The officer, along with others from the ministry, took care of Li’s mother at his request—a “quid pro quo,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Marcet said at the Nov. 25 hearing.
Through the officer, Li became acquainted with a second officer from the ministry, a connection that led to requests that crossed the legal line, according to court documents.
One of his earliest tasks involved tracking a lawsuit that Falun Gong practitioners planned to mount against Chinese state officials. In August 2012, Li wrote to thank the officer for his help during Li’s China trip a month prior, then shared biographical details of a lawyer in St. Petersburg, Florida, who had written for a Falun Gong-related blog, prosecutors said. Li told the officer that the attorney had lent his wife Falun Gong books, the filings state.
Prosecutors noted that Falun Gong practitioners “both in China and abroad are of particular interest to the PRC [People’s Republic of China] government because of Falun Gong’s advocacy of ideas deemed subversive to the PRC government.” Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
In the following two years, Li supplied information about two Israeli authors of a Falun Gong children’s book and a Falun Gong practitioner in California who had protested at the state’s Chinese Consulate.
The officers also sought training applications that Verizon used for new employees, publicly available information regarding several politicians, and surveillance and hacking technologies, court filings show.
Prosecutors said the Chinese intelligence officials also asked Li about the U.S. government’s wiretapping capabilities, telling him they needed the information to learn how to bypass U.S. companies’ cybersecurity defenses.
One of the most recent instances cited was dated in June 2022.
The officer, calling Li his “big brother,” wanted to know what a purported fugitive from Hubei Province in central China was up to in the United States, according to the filings. With the address the officer gave, Li helped find details about the owner of the property, a link to a real estate company website with photographs, and tax information for the property, prosecutors said.Li’s lawyer maintained that Li was not a supporter of the Chinese regime and noted that he had not taken any payment for his services to the Chinese intelligence. He also argued that the information that Li shared was easily accessible on the internet.
But even if Li could find the information through open sources, the prosecutors said, it was nevertheless valuable given the internet restrictions in China. Further, Li’s Chinese handlers “simply may not understand how to find property, vehicle, or other information about U.S. persons,” the prosecutors wrote in a memo that described Li’s actions as a “willful, decade-long criminal conduct.”
As a “cooperative contact,” they wrote, Li had “aided Chinese intelligence services in both undermining the United States and suppressing political dissent.”
The judge at the hearing sided with prosecutors in issuing a heavier sentence to deter future would-be actors.
Li, who has a net worth of around $5.5 million including 12 rental properties and more than $30,000 in passive income each month, had made a calculation in doing what he did, and the exact consequences are still not known, Merryday said.
He made the analogy of “shooting into a crowd of people but turning your head away when pulling the trigger.”
“It’s astounding that you did this at all,” Merryday said.
Li’s lawyer, after the hearing, said the outcome was “disappointing” but that he was “not surprised.”
“I can’t defend his conduct,” he told The Epoch Times, but he insisted that Li hadn’t transmitted anything significantly harmful.
The prosecutors rejected the argument.
The Chinese authorities are using a “death by 1,000 cuts approach” against the United States, the assistant U.S. attorney said at the hearing. The Chinese regime “is not going to show all its cards,” he said, but Li was a small piece of the puzzle—he was playing a part.
Merryday has ordered Li to voluntarily surrender himself to the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Florida’s Sumter County by Jan. 8, 2025. The fine is due immediately.