Politics
Pro-democracy activist convicted in US of providing China with information on dissidents
NEW YORK — A Chinese-American academic was convicted Tuesday of using his reputation as a pro-democracy activist to collect information about dissidents and disseminate it to the government of his home country.
A federal jury in New York has reached its verdict in The case of Shujun Wangwho helped found a pro-democracy group in the city.
Prosecutors said that at the behest of China's top intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, Wang lived a double life for more than a decade.
The defendant pretended to be opposed to the Chinese government so he could get close to people who were actually opposed to the Chinese government, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ellen Sise said in an opening statement last month. And then the defendant betrayed these people, people who trusted him, by reporting information about them to China.
Wang was convicted on several counts, including conspiracy to act as a foreign agent without informing the attorney general. He has pleaded not guilty.
A message seeking comment was sent to Wang's lawyers.
Wang came to New York in 1994 to teach after teaching at a Chinese university. He later became a U.S. citizen.
He helped found the Queens-based Hu Yaobang And Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, named in honor of two leaders of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1980s.
Prosecutors say Wang wrote emails that appeared to be diaries detailing conversations, meetings and plans of various critics of the Chinese government.
One message concerned events commemorating the 1989 attacks. Demonstrations and bloody repression in Tiananmen Square in Beijingprosecutors said. Other emails discussed people planning protests during various visits by Chinese President Xi Jinping to the United States.
Instead of sending the emails and creating a digital trail, Wang saved them as drafts that Chinese intelligence agents could read by logging in with a shared password, prosecutors said.
In other encrypted messages, Wang conveyed details of upcoming pro-democracy events and plans to meet with a prominent Hong Kong dissident while the latter was in the United States, according to an indictment.
In a series of interviews with the FBI between 2017 and 2021, Wang initially said he had no contact with the Ministry of State Security, but he later acknowledged on videotape that the intelligence agency had asked him to collect information on democracy advocates and that he sometimes did so, FBI agents testified.
But, they said, he claimed he had provided nothing of real value, just information already in the public domain.
Wang's lawyers described him as a gregarious academic with nothing to hide.
“In general, you could say he was very open and talkative with you, right?” defense attorney Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma asked an undercover agent who approached Wang in 2021 under the guise of being affiliated with China’s security ministry.
The businessman testified under a pseudonym and recorded his conversation with Wang at Wang's home in Connecticut.
Did he seem a little lonely? Margulis-Ohnuma asked a little later. The officer replied that he did not remember.
Wang reportedly told the agents that his diaries were advertisements for foundation meetings or articles he published in newspapers. He also suggested to the secret agent that publishing them would be a way to deflect suspicion from U.S. authorities.
Another agent, Garrett Igo, told jurors that when Wang discovered in 2019 that investigators would search his phone for contacts within the Chinese government, he paused for a minute.
And then he said, 'Do whatever you want. I don't care,'” Igo recalls.
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