(TibetanReview.net, Aug07’24) – Wang Shujun wanted to be seen as a democracy activist with a passion to see his country become a free and open society, but a court in New York City has found that he was wearing that hat only to spy on critics of China, including Tibetans. The 76-year-old Chinese-American academic was convicted Aug 6 for illegally collecting information for Beijing.
A federal jury has found Wang guilty on four counts including acting as a foreign agent without notifying the US attorney general and lying to US authorities following a week-long trial in Brooklyn federal court. He is to be sentenced on Jan 9, 2025 and could be jailed for up to 25 years, reported Reuters and other news agencies Aug 7,
Federal prosecutors had said Wang portrayed himself as a proponent of democracy and fierce opponent of the ruling Communist Party of China (CP) to gain the trust of his targeted groups. His contacts were stated to include Hong Kong pro-democracy activists, supporters of Taiwan declaring independence as well as Uyghur and Tibetan campaign groups.
Prosecutors had accused Wang of interacting with them only for the purpose of spying on their activists and sharing information with China’s main intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS).
Wang composed emails — styled as “diaries” — that recounted conversations, meetings and plans of various critics of the Chinese government. He saved them as email drafts that Chinese intelligence officials could access and read by signing in with a shared password. He did not send those emails in order to avoid creating a digital trail.
The emails included those that talked about people planning demonstrations during various visits that Chinese President Xi Jinping made to the US.
The indictment said Wang also wrote separate encrypted messages that contained details of upcoming pro-democracy events and plans for him to meet with prominent Hong Kong dissidents.
Wang lived a double life for over 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 have 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 attorney Breon Peace has said in a statement after the verdict.
Prosecutors have also charged four Chinese intelligence officers who allegedly worked as Wang’s handlers. They are all at large and believed to be in China.
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Wang was arrested in Mar 2022. He came to New York in 1994 to teach after doing so at a Chinese university and later became a naturalized US citizen. He helped to found the Queens-based Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, named for two CPC leaders who were sympathetic to calls for reform in the 1980s, said the AP Aug 7.
The indictment was part of the US Department of Justice’s crackdown in recent years on “transnational repression” by Beijing, referring to its alleged attempts at overseas surveillance and intimidation.
During a series of FBI interviews from 2017 to 2021, Wang initially said he had no contacts with the MSS, 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.
Still, Wang had pleaded not guilty. His lawyers has 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 report said.
Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy, has claimed in a statement Aug 6 that he was unaware of the specifics of the Wang case but that China opposed 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.”