(TibetanReview.net, Sep17’25) – A prominent member of New York’s Chinese dissident community, granted asylum in 2002, has pleaded guilty Sep 16 to spying on his fellow activists on behalf of the Chinese government, reported the AP Sep 17. He is set to be sentenced in January and faces up to five years in prison if convicted.
The so-called dissident, Yuanjun Tang, 68, had long presented himself as an outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Party, joining monthly protests outside the country’s Manhattan consulate and founding a pro-democracy nonprofit in Flushing, Queens, where he has lived since 2002, the report noted.
But while publicly advocating against his homeland’s government, Tang was quietly acting on orders from Beijing’s intelligence service to collect information on his fellow Chinese American activists, the report cited his guilty plea as saying.
Federal prosecutors, who brought charges against Tang last August, believe he accepted the tasks in order to gain approval to visit family members in China.
“Tang’s betrayal of the ideals of the US to help the Chinese government repress pro-democracy activists goes against the very values he claimed to promote,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge Christopher G Raia has said in a statement.
Court documents are stated to show that at the direction of a Chinese intelligence officer, Tang agreed to photograph and record local protests against China, including a 2023 event in Manhattan dedicated to victims of the Jun 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
He was also stated to have also provided the officer with a list of immigration attorneys working to help dissidents gain political asylum.
Tang was granted asylum in the US in 2002, shortly after escaping to Taiwan from a Chinese prison where he was held for 12 years for his involvement in student-led protests in Tiananmen Square.
He then founded a Flushing-based pro-democracy group, the Chinese Democracy Party Eastern US Headquarters Inc., from which he voiced frequent public criticism of the Chinese Communist Party.
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Tang is not the first person to be arrested and tried for involvement in China’s attempts to harass and silence dissidents abroad in what federal officials have called a campaign of “transnational repression.”
The report noted that in a high-profile case last summer, a Chinese American scholar, Shujun Wang, who also co-founded a New York-based pro-democracy group, was convicted on charges of gathering information for the Chinese on Hong Kong democracy protesters, supporters of Taiwanese independence, Uyghur and Tibetan activists and others.
And the year before, the Justice Department brought charges against two men it said had helped establish a secret police outpost in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood on behalf of the Chinese government.
Tang gave a hint of his disillusionment about the role of a dissident abroad in 2018 while speaking with The New York Times about a book in which he was featured, the report noted.
“In the first year you speak brave, bold words,” he had said. “In the second, nonsense. By the third, you have nothing to say at all.”