A Chinese-American academic was convicted in the United States on Tuesday on charges of using his reputation as a pro-democracy activist to gather information on dissidents and feed it to China’s government.
A federal jury in New York delivered the verdict in the case of Wang Shujun, a naturalised US citizen who helped found a pro-democracy group in the city.
Prosecutors said that at the behest of China’s main intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, Wang lived a double life for more than a decade.
He held himself out as a critic of the Chinese government so that he could build rapport with people who actually opposed it, then betrayed their trust by telling Beijing what they said and planned, prosecutors said.
“The indictment could have been the plot of a spy novel, but the evidence is shockingly real that the defendant was a secret agent for the Chinese government,” Brooklyn-based US lawyer Breon Peace said in a statement after the verdict.
Wang had pleaded not guilty. His lawyers cast him as someone who was forthcoming with US authorities about activities he saw as innocuous, and they disputed that his communications were truly under Chinese officials’ direction or control.
“The jury felt they were and that was enough to convict him, even though there was no evidence that what he did caused any harm, was of any benefit to the Chinese government or that Professor Wang is anything other than a patriotic American who has devoted his life to fighting the authoritarian regime in China,” Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma said after the verdict.
Wang, 75, was convicted of charges including conspiring to act as a foreign agent without notifying the attorney general.
The charges carry the potential for up to 25 years in prison, though sentencing guidelines for any given case can vary depending on a defendant’s history and other factors. Wang’s sentencing is set for January 9.
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Meanwhile, four Chinese officials who were charged alongside Wang remain at large. They are among dozens of people whom US prosecutors have pursued to fight what Washington views as “transnational repression”, or deploying government operatives to harass, threaten and silence critics living abroad.
The Chinese embassy in Washington disputes that the country engages in the practice, saying it does not interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, abides by international law and respects foreign nations’ judicial sovereignty.
Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy, said in a statement on Tuesday that he was unaware of the specifics of the Wang case but that China opposes the United States’ “slander”, “political manipulation” and “malicious fabrication of the so-called ‘transnational suppression’ narrative and its blatant prosecution of officials from relevant Chinese departments”.
Wang arrived in New York in 1994 to teach after doing so at a Chinese university. He later became a US citizen.
He helped found the Queens-based Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, named for two Chinese Communist Party leaders who were sympathetic to calls for reform in the 1980s. A message was sent to the foundation seeking comment on Wang’s case.
Prosecutors say that underneath a veneer of advocating for change in China, Wang acted as a covert pipeline for information that Beijing wanted on Hong Kong democracy protestors, advocates for Taiwanese independence, Uyghur and Tibetan activists and others in the US and elsewhere.
Wang composed emails – styled as “diaries” – that recounted conversations, meetings and plans of various critics of the Chinese government.
One message was about events commemorating the 1989 protests and bloody crackdown in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, prosecutors said. Other emails talked about people planning demonstrations during various visits that Chinese President Xi Jinping made to the US.
Instead of sending the emails and creating a digital trail, Wang saved them as drafts that Chinese intelligence officers could read by logging in with a shared password, prosecutors said.
In other, encrypted messages, Wang relayed details of coming pro-democracy events and plans to meet a prominent Hong Kong dissident while the latter was in the US, according to an indictment.
During a series of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) interviews between 2017 and 2021, Wang initially said he had no contacts with the Ministry of State Security, but he later acknowledged on videotape that the intelligence agency asked him to gather information on democracy advocates and that he sometimes did, FBI agents testified.
But, they said, he claimed he did not provide anything really valuable, just information already in the public domain.
Wang’s lawyers portrayed him as a gregarious academic with nothing to hide.
“In general, fair to say he was very open and talkative with you, right?” defence lawyer Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma asked an undercover agent who approached Wang in 2021 under the guise of being affiliated with the Chinese security ministry.
“He was,” said the agent, who testified under a pseudonym. He recorded his conversation with Wang at the latter’s house in Connecticut.
“Did he seem a little lonely?” Margulis-Ohnuma asked a bit later. The agent said he did not recall.
Wang told agents his “diaries” were advertisements for the foundation’s meetings or write-ups that he was publishing in newspapers, according to testimony.
He also suggested to the undercover agent that publishing them would be a way to deflect any suspicion from US authorities.
Another agent, Garrett Igo, told jurors that when Wang found out in 2019 that investigators would search his phone for any contacts in the Chinese government, he paused for a minute.
“And then he said: ‘Do anything. I don’t care,’” Igo said.
