NEW YORK — A Chinese-American scholar was convicted Tuesday on U.S. charges of abusing his reputation as a pro-democracy activist to collect and pass on information about dissidents to the government of his fatherland.
A federal jury in New York has returned the verdict in the case of Shujun Wangwho helped found a pro-democracy group in the city.
Prosecutors say Wang led a double life for more than a decade on behalf of China’s top intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security.
“The defendant pretended to be opposed to the Chinese government so that he could connect with 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 those people, people who trusted him, by reporting information about them to China.”
Wang was convicted of, among other things, conspiracy to act as a foreign agent without informing the attorney general. He had pleaded not guilty.
A request for comment has been sent to Wang’s lawyers.
Wang came to New York to teach in 1994 after teaching at a Chinese university. He later became an American citizen.
He helped found the Queens-based Hu Yaobang And Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, named after two leaders of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1980s.
Prosecutors say Wang compiled emails — described as “diaries” — detailing conversations, meetings and plans between various critics of the Chinese government.
One message was about events commemorating the 1989 attacks protests and bloody repression in Tiananmen Square in Beijingprosecutors said. Other emails spoke of people planning demonstrations during several visits Chinese President Xi Jinping made to the U.S.
Instead of sending the emails and creating a digital trail, Wang saved them as drafts that Chinese intelligence officers could read by logging in with a shared password, prosecutors said.
In other encrypted messages, Wang provided details about upcoming pro-democracy events and plans to meet a prominent Hong Kong dissident while he is in the U.S., the indictment said.
During a series of FBI interrogations between 2017 and 2021, Wang initially said he had no contact with the Ministry of State Security. But he later admitted on videotape that the intelligence agency had asked him to gather information on pro-democracy activists and that he sometimes did so, FBI agents testified.
But according to them, he has not provided anything of value, only information that is already public.
Wang’s lawyers portrayed him as a sociable academic with nothing to hide.
“Generally speaking, I would 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 ties to China’s Ministry of Security.
“That was him,” said the agent, who testified under a pseudonym. He recorded his conversation with Wang at his Connecticut home.
“Did he seem a little lonely?” Margulis-Ohnuma asked later. The officer said he couldn’t remember.
Wang told agents that his “diaries” were advertisements for the foundation’s meetings or reports that he published in newspapers, according to testimony. He also suggested to the undercover agent that publishing them would be a way to deflect any suspicion from U.S. authorities.
Another agent, Garrett Igo, told the jury that when Wang learned in 2019 that investigators would search his phone for contacts within the Chinese government, he hesitated for a minute.
“And then he said, ‘Do whatever you want. I don’t care,’” Igo recalls.