Chinese American man convicted in US of spying on dissidents for China

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.

Wang was convicted of charges including conspiring to act as a foreign agent without notifying the attorney general. Faced with up to 10 years in prison, he pleaded not guilty.

Wang came to New York in 1994 to teach after doing so at a Chinese university. He later became a US citizen.

He helped found the Queens-based Hu Yaobang Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, named for two leaders of the Chinese Communist party in the 1980s.

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 relayed details of upcoming pro-democracy events and plans to meet with a prominent Hong Kong dissident while the latter was in the US, according to an indictment.

During a series of FBI interviews between 2017 and 2021, Wang initially said he had no contacts with the ministry of state security, 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.

But, they said, he claimed he did not provide anything really valuable, just information already in the public domain.

Another agent, Garrett Igo, told jurors that when Wang found out in 2019 that investigators would search his phone for any contacts in the Chinese government, he paused for a minute.