Chinese American scholar convicted of spying on dissidents for Beijing

In a brisk week-long trial, prosecutors this week laid out what they said was clear evidence Wang had been acting as a double agent for more than a decade, working under the control of at least four agents from China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), the bureau that oversees China’s foreign intelligence collection.

“This defendant infiltrated a New York-based advocacy group by masquerading as a pro-democracy activist all while covertly collecting and reporting sensitive information about its members to the PRC’s intelligence service,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division said in a statement released Tuesday.

Prosecutors said Wang leveraged his role in the activist community to compile detailed “diaries” of information based on conversations with Hong Kong, Tibetan, Uyghur and pro-Taiwan independence activists, and shared them with the Chinese agents through encrypted chats and during in-person meetings in China.

Wang was “a perfect stooge” for the Chinese government, “a well-known academic and founder of a pro-democracy organization who was willing to betray those who respected and trusted him,” said U.S. Attorney Breon Peace for the Eastern District of New York.

Wang and his defense did not deny that he communicated with the Chinese agents, but said his communication was largely benign, and did not contain sensitive information. “I think we showed pretty effectively at the trial that what he was doing … did no harm to the United States or to anyone here,” said Wang’s attorney Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma. “I stand by what he said, that he’s pro-democracy and against the Chinese government,” he said.

Wang is one of five people indicted as part of the case. The other four are MSS agents who reside in China and are unlikely ever to face trial in the United States. Throughout the trial, Wang’s defense argued that his contact with the agents was benign, that he was committed to his pro-democracy work and that he had been open with U.S. investigators.

Wang’s 2022 indictment was part of a then-new initiative by the Justice Department to combat what it calls transnational repression — efforts by Beijing to silence its critics abroad through harassment and surveillance. Since then, further indictments have followed, including the arrest last year of two men accused of operating an unauthorized Chinese police station in New York that prosecutors claim was used to threaten critics of the Chinese Communist Party. In a related case, 34 Chinese police officers were accused by U.S. authorities of harassing Chinese nationals living in New York from outside the United States.

Chinese Embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu on Tuesday declined to comment on the specifics of Wang’s conviction, but said China “firmly opposes the U.S.’s slander, smear, and political manipulation, as well as malicious fabrication of the so-called ‘transnational suppression’ narrative and its blatant prosecution of officials from relevant Chinese departments.”

Wang moved to the United States in 1994 to teach, and helped found the Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, a pro-democracy group that sought to memorialize supporters of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. New York-based activists who knew Wang told The Washington Post that his indictment and conviction have left parts of the community in shock.

“He is a democrat and my friend, [even] though his major work for the Chinese authorities was to collect information about my activities and my organization … I sympathized with him,” said Wang Juntao, one of New York’s most well-known Chinese dissidents and formerly a prominent leader of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement before he escaped to the United States in 1994, the same year as Shujun Wang. The two are not related.

Wang is due to be sentenced Jan. 9.