A federal court in New York convicted naturalized U.S. citizen Wang Shujun Tuesday of working as an agent for China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS).
Wang was accused of pretending to be a pro-democracy activist so he could spy on people actually opposed to the Communist tyranny in Beijing. He could be sentenced to up to 25 years in prison.
“The indictment could have been the plot of a John LeCarre or Graham Greene spy novel, but the evidence is shockingly real that the defendant led a double life, pretending for years to be an activist for democracy while he was secretly passing information to the Chinese government,” U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace said after the verdict was handed down.
Wang, 75, was arrested in March 2022 along with four other individuals for “stalking, harassing, and spying on U.S. residents on behalf of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).” Their schemes reportedly ranged from interfering with U.S. elections to plotting to destroy artwork critical of the Chinese Communist Party and its leader Xi Jinping.
The defendants were accused of maintaining sophisticated electronic surveillance on their victims. Even the petty scheme to trash dissident artwork allegedly involved littering the artist’s studio and vehicle with hidden cameras and GPS tracking devices.
Wang was a visiting Chinese scholar who helped establish a pro-democracy group called the “Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation” in his neighborhood of Flushing, Queens.
Hu Yaobang was a reform-minded Chinese Communist Party leader whose death in 1989 ultimately led to the Tiananmen Square protests – and China’s ensuing massacre of the protesters. Zhao Ziyang was a Party leader who opposed the use of deadly force to crush the student protests. Invoking them in the name of the foundation sent a powerful signal to sincere pro-democracy activists.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) said Wang began working as an agent of the MSS around 2015. The MSS saw a golden opportunity to use Wang as a spy against the genuine activists and dissidents he had cultivated a relationship with.
According to DOJ, Wang did not just spy on the people who showed up for meetings of his ersatz pro-democracy group in Queens. He also made contact with dissidents in Hong Kong, Taiwanese advocates for independence, Tibetan activists, and members of the oppressed Uyghur community in East Turkistan, which China refers to as its Xinjiang province.
Wang allegedly began supplying detailed “diaries” of his conversations with all of these people to his MSS handlers, who in turn gave him instructions to target dissidents and activists they found especially troubling. U.S. prosecutors obtained copies of his emails with his Chinese spymasters, including one where his MSS handler gave him a thumbs-up emoji for ratting out a human-rights activist critical of China.
The charges against Wang included lying to federal law enforcement officers when they asked about his contacts with Chinese officials and MSS agents. Wang was busted after spilling the details of his espionage activities to an undercover law enforcement agent.
“The defendant was a perfect stooge for the PRC, a well-known academic and founder of a pro-democracy organization who was willing to betray those who respected and trusted him,” Peace said of Wang on Tuesday.
“Today’s verdict demonstrates that those who would seek to advance the Chinese government’s agenda of transnational repression will be held accountable,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of DOJ’s National Security Division.
The New York Times (NYT) on Tuesday noted Wang was the latest in a string of high-profile prosecutions against China’s transnational repression, an effort that appears to have intensified as relations with China deteriorated.
Wang was “stone-faced” during his trial, as the NYT put it, but outside the courtroom he livened up and protested his conviction in Mandarin Chinese. He claimed the verdict would silence a genuine voice for reform in China.
“They got the evidence wrong. It’s unfair. They are playing with justice. It’s fiction,” he said, a claim which is rather difficult to square with him admitting many of his contacts with MSS officers during interviews with the FBI in 2021.
Wang’s lawyer Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma described Wang’s incriminating text messages as the “self-important musings of an old, kind of lonely guy in Chinatown.”
“He certainly didn’t mean to hurt anyone. He spent his life fighting the communist regime and, you know, life is complicated,” Margulis-Ohnuma said.
