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| Yuanjun Tang,may have been a spy for the government he protested against. |
A United States citizen who was a pro-democracy activist in China and was granted asylum by the US was charged as being an unregistered agent of the People's Republic of China (PRC).
Yuanjun Tang, 67, who became a US citizen was charged by criminal complaint with acting and conspiring to act in the PRC) and making materially false statements to the FBI. Tang was arrested earlier this week in Flushing, Queens.
Tang allegedly used his personal history as a pro-democracy activist to infiltrate anti-PRC groups in the United States.
According to court documents, Tang is a former PRC citizen who was imprisoned in the PRC for his activities as a dissident opposing the one-party authoritarian political system controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the PRC’s sole ruling party.
In or about 2002, Tang defected to Taiwan; he was subsequently granted political asylum in the United States and has since resided in Queens, New York City, where he has regularly participated in events with fellow PRC dissidents and leads a nonprofit dedicated to promoting democracy in China.
Spying on anti-PRC dissidents
Between at least in or about 2018 and in or about June 2023, Tang acted in the United States as an agent of the PRC by completing tasks at the direction of the PRC’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), which is the PRC’s principal civilian intelligence agency. The MSS is responsible for, among other things, the PRC’s foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, espionage and political security functions.
Specifically, through a particular email account, encrypted chats, text messages and audio and video calls, Tang regularly received instructions from and reported to an MSS intelligence officer regarding individuals and groups viewed by the PRC as potentially adverse to the PRC’s interests, including prominent US-based Chinese democracy activists and dissidents.
He also traveled at least three times for face-to-face meetings with MSS intelligence officers and helped the MSS infiltrate a group chat on an encrypted messaging application used by numerous PRC dissidents and pro-democracy activists to communicate about pro-democracy issues and express criticism of the PRC government.
US authorities recovered instructions Tang received from the MSS and photographs, videos and documents that he collected or created for transmission to the MSS from numerous electronic devices and accounts belonging to Tang.
Tang also made materially false statements to the FBI. He falsely claimed that he was no longer able to access an email account through which he had communicated with his MSS handler through draft emails.
Tang is charged with one count of conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the Attorney General, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison; one count of acting as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the Attorney General, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison; and one count of making false statements, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy to the US said he was unaware of the details of the case.
Before fleeing China, Yuanjun, a native of China’s northeastern Jilin province, had been sentenced by the Chinese authorities to 20 years in prison for taking part in the 1989 democracy movement that resulted in the deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing, serving eight years before being released.
He remained active in advocating for democracy in China and was repeatedly detained, questioned and harassed by the authorities before fleeing to Taiwan, according to a Taipei-based rights group that helped with his asylum bid in 2002.
PRC infiltratration of America
Tang's alleged activities is part of the PRC's aggressive strategy to harass and intimidate US citizens and US residents and influence US policy towards the PRC.
The Justice Department has charged numerous individuals tied to transnational repression cases in recent years.
Communities of dissidents and pro-democracy activists living in the US have long been targets of China's intelligence agency, which uses the families of the activists still living in the mainland as a form of coercion as prosecutors alleged occurred in Tang's case.
On Wednesday, the DOJ filed charges agains Linda Sun, who used to be a top-ranked aid of New York Gov. Linda Horchul. In her influential position, she put the PRC in highly visible situations to receive honors for good promote that country in the public's eye. At the same time as the PRC was receiving praise, she blocked Taiwan from receiving similar honors and meetings with New York officials.
Earlier this month, a New York jury convicted a naturalized US citizen of Chinese dissent who led a pro-democracy group of secretly working with Chinese intelligence officers to surveille dissidents.
And last year, the FBI arrested two defendants on charges that they set up and operated an illegal Chinese police station in the middle of New York City in order to influence and intimidate critics of the Chinese government in the US.
The charges against Tang and the other alleged suspects has shaken the Chinese diaspora, especially those critical of the PRC. However, some were not surprised.
Mike Gao, a Chinese American lawyer who said he has known Tang for 20 years, told Radio Free Asia that Tang’s attitudes toward the Communist government in China appeared to soften as he grew older.
“He’s changed somewhat in recent years, often criticizing the student movement for being too aggressive during the Tiananmen protests,” Gao told RFA in an interview. “I had many face-to-face debates with him about this, and I confronted him, ‘Why don’t you condemn the Chinese government instead for the massacre?’”
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