(New York) An investigation worthy of a “John le Carré novel”: the American justice system on Tuesday convicted a 75-year-old American professor of Chinese origin for espionage, who posed as a pro-democracy activist while he was a “lackey” agent of Beijing.
The case “could have been the plot of a John le Carré or Graham Greene spy novel, but the evidence is shockingly real: the defendant led a double life, pretending for years to be a democracy activist while secretly passing intelligence to the Chinese government,” thundered Brooklyn, New York, federal prosecutor Breon Peace.
Shujun Wang, a 75-year-old professor born in China and naturalized American, had been prosecuted since 2022 for having provided Beijing, via four agents of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) also charged in their absence, with information on opponents and defenders of democracy and human rights in Hong Kong, Taiwan, for the Uighurs and for Tibet.
After a week-long trial in New York, a jury convicted him of espionage and he will be sentenced in January.
The septuagenarian faces up to 25 years in prison for “acting and conspiring as an agent of a foreign government without making himself known to the American authorities.”
“The defendant was a complete lackey of the People’s Republic of China, a renowned professor and the founder of a pro-democracy organization who sought only to betray those who respected and trusted him,” prosecutor Peace stormed in a statement.
As the co-founder of an organization in the New York borough of Queens with a large Chinese community (the Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyan Memorial Foundation) known to be critical of the Chinese regime, Wang has used his status to gather information on pro-democracy activists in the United States.
He then delivered them by encrypted messaging to his four correspondents in Beijing – Feng He, Jie Ji, Ming Li and Keqing Lu – who remain untraceable, according to the courts.
Mr. Wang has been acting in this manner since 2006, according to Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen.
“This conviction underscores the FBI’s commitment to counterintelligence against those who collect information on activists in the United States for the benefit of China,” said a federal police director who questioned Mr. Wang between 2017 and 2021.
Two years ago, Minister Olsen warned that Washington “would not tolerate any attempt by the PRC or any authoritarian regime to export [aux États-Unis] the slightest repressive practice” after several espionage cases targeting Beijing and revealed by the American justice system.