Shujun Wang, Acting as a Covert Chinese Agent, New York 2024

A 75-year-old New York resident, Shujun Wang, has been convicted of acting as a covert Chinese agent. The former academic and author led a double life, pretending to be a pro-democracy activist while secretly collecting and reporting sensitive information about activists to the Chinese government.

Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen stated, ‘This defendant infiltrated a New York-based advocacy group by masquerading as a pro-democracy activist all while covertly collecting and reporting sensitive information about its members to the PRC’s intelligence service.’

Wang, a naturalized US citizen of Chinese descent, was convicted on all four counts of an indictment charging him with acting and conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government without prior notification to the U.S. Attorney General, criminal use of identification, and making false statements to law enforcement.

This conviction underscores the FBI’s commitment to countering espionage schemes by holding those accountable who collect US activist information for the benefit of China.

According to court documents, Wang operated under the direction and control of his co-defendants – four officials of China’s Ministry of State Security – since at least 2006. At the MSS’ direction, Wang gathered information on people and groups that the PRC considers subversive, such as Hong Kong democracy protestors, advocates for Taiwanese independence, and Uyghur and Tibetan activists, both in the United States and abroad.

The defendant, Shujun Wang, is one of the founders of the pro-democracy Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, an organization located in Flushing, Queens. Wang made false statements to law enforcement and used an encrypted messaging application to receive taskings from his co-defendants and to send and receive written messages and files.

Law enforcement recovered from Wang’s residence approximately 163 ‘diary’ entries that he wrote to He, Ji, Li, and Lu and other MSS officials.

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