Federal prosecutors filed charges in New York on Monday against Yuanjun Tang, a Chinese dissident and veteran of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, for working as an illegal operative of the People’s Republic of China.
Tang, 67, was arrested in Flushing, Queens, on Wednesday. He was born in China and spent some years imprisoned there as a political dissident after the Tiananmen massacre. He defected to Taiwan in 2002, successfully sought political asylum in the United States, became a naturalized U.S. citizen, and settled in New York about twenty years ago.
Tang was active in the Chinese dissident community and once served as chairman of the China Democracy Party, a group in New York founded by Tiananmen Square protest leader Juntao Wang.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has targeted such overseas dissident groups for surveillance and intimidation. Tang was allegedly willing to serve as Beijing’s agent against the dissident community he had infiltrated.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Tang began working as an agent of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) sometime around 2018. He carried out surveillance activities on behalf of the MSS until June 2023.
Investigators said Tang was recruited as a spy while attempting to arrange visits to his family back in China. Prosecutors said Tang’s compensation as an espionage agent included payments made to his family members by the Chinese government.
The MSS allegedly used email, encrypted messaging, and phone calls to direct Tang and receive his reports on “individuals and groups viewed by the PRC as potentially adverse to the PRC’s interests, including prominent U.S.-based Chinese democracy activists and dissidents.”
DOJ said Tang had at least three “face-to-face meetings with MSS intelligence officers.” During one of those meetings in 2022, an MSS officer allegedly loaded one of Tang’s cellphones with a device that would send “any photo, screenshot, or voice memorandum generated or captured on the compromised phone” directly to Chinese intelligence.
At the direction of these officers, Tang allegedly infiltrated dissident chat groups and spied on their members, compiling dossiers of “photographs, videos, and documents” for his Chinese Communist spymasters. U.S. law enforcement obtained some of this surveillance material and has entered it as evidence against Tang.
Among other missions, Tang was tasked with spying on events planned in New York to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre, gathering information on a U.S. congressional candidate who was once a Chinese dissident, and monitoring a group of about 140 Chinese dissidents living in the United States.
Tang faces up to 20 years in U.S. prison for working as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the U.S. Attorney General, conspiring to work as an agent of a foreign government, and making materially false statements to the FBI.
Many members of the Chinese dissident community were shocked by Tang’s arrest, although some told Radio Free Asia (RFA) on Thursday they had long been suspicious of him.
Juntao Wang, founder of the China Democracy Party, said Tang’s arrest was “really embarrassing,” but he also expressed sympathy for Tang’s struggles to see his family in China.
“It was actually dangerous for him to return to China. Because he was involved in the democracy movement, his family became very miserable,” Wang said.
“In the end, we still have to look at the FBI indictment and the U.S. government indictment to see what he did,” he added.
Those who were more suspicious of Tang cited his tendency to snap copious photographs at dissident events rather than participating in them. Some said the scenario of the regime in Beijing using threats against family members in China to control dissidents overseas was all too common. Others said the setbacks faced by dissidents in China have demoralized aging expatriates like Tang.
Tang is far from the first democracy activist to be accused of turning into a spy for the Chinese Ministry of State Security. In early August, a onetime activist named Wang Shujun was convicted in New York on charges similar to those filed against Yuanjun Tang.
“He’s changed somewhat in recent years, often criticizing the student movement for being too aggressive during the Tiananmen protests. I had many face-to-face debates with him about this, and I confronted him, ‘Why don’t you condemn the Chinese government instead for the massacre?’” recalled Chinese-American lawyer Mike Gao.
