Shujun Wang had long billed himself as a scholar and democracy activist who fled China to build a new life in New York.
But American prosecutors say he was actually a spy for the Chinese Communist Party.
Mr. Wang is on trial this week in Brooklyn federal court on charges that he acted as an agent of a foreign government without registering with the attorney general, as is required by law. He vigorously disputes the charges. If convicted, he could face up to 25 years in prison.
The case is part of a rash of prosecutions taking aim at what the Justice Department calls transnational repression, efforts by the Chinese government to control that country’s vast diaspora through intimidation and harassment.
“The Chinese government will stop at nothing to lie, steal, and cheat its way to wealth and power, to silence those who oppose it, and to project its authoritarian view around the world — and within our own borders,” the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, said in April 2023 as he announced charges in two new cases.
Wang Wenbin, then a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, responded that the allegations were a smear and called for the United States to “abandon the Cold War mentality.”
Here’s what to know about the case against Mr. Wang.
Who is Shujun Wang and what is he accused of?
Mr. Wang, 75, is an American citizen who settled in New York in the 1990s after a stint as a visiting scholar of East Asian studies at a local university. He was also a leading member of a group in the Flushing area of Queens founded to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising.
When Breon S. Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, announced Mr. Wang’s indictment two years ago, he said the defendant had “acted as a covert intelligence asset in his own community,” collecting information about Chinese nationals living in the New York area.
The indictment said that Chinese government officials had directed Mr. Wang to target people pushing for democracy in Hong Kong, those who supported independence for Taiwan and Tibet and Uyghur activists, among others.
He then relayed the information, prosecutors said, in correspondence and face-to-face meetings with his handlers, four members of China’s Ministry of State Security, who were also charged by the U.S. attorney’s office, though they are in China.
Mr. Wang says he is innocent of the charges and argues that they are spurious claims based on inaccurate translations, including ones that mixed up the name of his daughter’s cat with that of a Chinese official.
The case against him relies in part on his interactions with an undercover F.B.I. agent who showed up at Mr. Wang’s home and claimed to be working for Chinese security officials. The undercover agent told Mr. Wang that he was under investigation by the F.B.I., according to the indictment. Mr. Wang is then said to have given the agent his email passwords so that he could delete incriminating messages.
Mr. Wang’s lawyer, Kevin Tung, has argued that it was a case of entrapment.
At a recent court appearance, Mr. Wang, who speaks limited English, brought a wheeled shopping cart containing a thick stack of news clippings from Chinese-language newspapers related to his activities in New York.
He had highlighted sections and added English translations and commentary, calling the accusations against him slander.
He pointed to the reports as proof that the activities of his group, the Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, were widely publicized. The group was named for Chinese officials who were seen as reformers but were pushed out of power; Mr. Hu’s death in 1989 gave rise to the student protests in Tiananmen Square that ended in an infamous massacre.
Mr. Wang questioned why he would need to pass information about his group to the Chinese government when voluminous, detailed information was already available.
In a strange twist, another key figure in the Flushing group, the lawyer Jim Li, also known as Li Jinjin, was stabbed to death by a client in his Queens office just days before Mr. Wang was arrested. The prosecution of his assailant, a 25-year-old woman, is pending; no evidence has emerged connecting the stabbing to Mr. Wang’s case.
Mr. Tung said that another leader in the group would testify on Mr. Wang’s behalf during his trial.
What other cases are prosecutors pursuing?
The U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn has charged dozens of people, including Chinese government officials, in cases related to transnational repression in recent years. Many of them are in China, which does not have an extradition agreement with the United States, though others live in the New York area.
Prosecutors won a case last summer against three men, including a former Police Department detective, who were found guilty of stalking a family in the New Jersey suburbs on behalf of the Chinese government. The former detective, Michael McMahon, and his co-defendants, Yong Zhu and Congying Zheng, are set to be sentenced in September.
But not all the cases are ending in convictions. In a surprise move in January of last year, prosecutors dropped spying charges against Baimadajie Angwang, a young police officer of Tibetan descent, saying that new information had come to light.
Another case heading to trial is the one against Lu Jianwang, who also goes by Harry Lu, and Chen Jinping. They are accused of running a secret police station for the Chinese government in a nondescript building in Lower Manhattan. The station was housed in the offices of a nonprofit the two men ran called the America Changle Association NY, according to prosecutors.
Prosecutors say the station was used to surveil members of the diaspora, and was one of more than 100 such outposts around the world. But the Chinese Embassy in Washington has played down the role of the police outposts, saying they were staffed by volunteers who helped Chinese nationals perform routine tasks like renewing their driver’s licenses back home.
Why are prosecutors pursuing these cases now?
Fengsuo Zhou, executive director of the nonprofit Human Rights in China, was a student leader in the Tiananmen Square protest movement, and now curates a small museum in New York memorializing the uprising. Without commenting on Mr. Wang’s case specifically, he said that spies had long tried to infiltrate groups like his on behalf of the Chinese government. People who go back and forth to China or have relatives who remain there are most endangered, he said.
As China has grown in strength and wealth, the government’s influence has, too, he said.
Still, his group stays active — including holding a rally outside the alleged secret police station last year, before any charges were announced.
“This was like an open secret,” he said. “They didn’t even try to hide it.”
Orville Schell, who runs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, said the cases were an outgrowth of the escalating tensions between China and the United States over the last decade.
“They’re incredibly concerned about political dissent by Chinese abroad,” he said, referring to the Chinese government. “What they do is they infiltrate these Chinese democratic groups, and then they threaten family back in the mainland if these people don’t stop their activity. So this is not unknown, and in fact, it’s rather common.”
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