A Chinese-American scholar was found guilty Tuesday on US charges of using his reputation as a pro-democracy activist to gather information on dissidents and pass it on to the government in his homeland.
A federal jury in New York delivered the verdict in the case of Shujun Wang, who helped found a pro-democracy group in the city, saying that at the behest of China's top intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, Wang led a double life for more than 10 years.
“The defendant pretended to oppose the Chinese government so that he could get close to people who were actually opposing the Chinese government,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ellen Sise said in her opening statement last month.
“Then the defendant betrayed those who trusted him, by reporting information about them to China.”
Wang was found guilty of several charges, including conspiring to act as a foreign agent without notifying the attorney general. He has pleaded not guilty.
Wang came to New York in 1994 to teach. After teaching at a Chinese university, he became a U.S. citizen. He helped found the Hu Yaobang Foundation and the Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, based in Queens, New York.
The foundation is named after two Chinese Communist Party leaders from the 1980s. According to prosecutors, Wang wrote “diary-style” emails detailing conversations, meetings and plans of critics of the Chinese government.
One of the messages discussed events commemorating the 1989 protests and bloody crackdown in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, prosecutors said. Another described people planning demonstrations during Chinese President Xi Jinping's visits to the U.S. (ps/jm)
