For decades, Shujun Wang presented himself as a champion for Chinese dissidents. A military scholar who fled China after the Tiananmen Square massacre, Mr. Wang settled in Queens, where he helped found a group that promoted democracy and criticized Beijing’s authoritarianism.
Federal prosecutors said his activism was a charade, choreographed to collect and transmit information about critics of the Chinese Communist Party, and they charged him in 2022 with spying on behalf of the Chinese government. He was convicted after a swift trial and faced the possibility of years in prison.
But on Monday, a judge in Brooklyn federal court declined to put him behind bars, instead sentencing Mr. Wang to three years of supervised release.
In issuing the sentence, the judge, Denny Chin, said that though Mr. Wang had committed “serious” crimes by sharing information with Chinese officials, there was no evidence that anyone had been physically harmed as a result of his actions. He noted that Mr. Wang, 76, suffered from a variety of ailments, and that a doctor had said his behavior was “consistent with senile dementia.”
Before the sentence was announced, Mr. Wang, speaking through a Mandarin interpreter, gave a rambling statement in which he accepted responsibility for his actions, before noting his work as a scholar of the Pacific theater in World War II and his love for democracy.
“Ever since I was young, I dreamed of a democratic United States,” Mr. Wang said. After the proceeding, he walked out of the courtroom with the aid of a cane, supported by one of his lawyers.
The case against Mr. Wang was part of an effort by federal prosecutors, particularly in the Eastern District of New York, to crack down in recent years on what they call transnational repression by China. Under its leader, Xi Jinping, the Chinese government has hunted down Chinese nationals living abroad and pressured them to return home, a campaign known as Operation Fox Hunt. The government has harassed and intimidated groups it views as subversive and has even sought to discreetly influence American elected officials.
Last month, An Quanzhong, a Queens businessman, was sentenced to more than a year in prison for trying to pressure a U.S. resident into leaving for China to face corruption charges. Last September, Linda Sun, a former aide to two New York governors, was indicted on charges that she was secretly working as an unauthorized agent for China. In December, a man pleaded guilty to running a secret police office in Manhattan on behalf of China.
Mr. Wang, an American citizen, arrived in the United States as part of a wave of scholars who left China after the pro-democracy uprising in 1989. He became a visiting scholar at Columbia University in 1994, and his wife and son later followed him to the United States.
In 2006, Mr. Wang helped found the Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, an organization named for Chinese government reformers, including one whose death helped spark the Tiananmen Square protests. The group said its mission was “working together with democratic forces” inside and outside China to “strive for China’s constitutional transformation.”
But prosecutors said that Mr. Wang, who directed the foundation’s media relations, used his position to gather information about prominent Chinese dissidents, which he then passed along to China’s Ministry of State Security. In 2022, Mr. Wang was indicted in the Eastern District, along with four members of the ministry who were living in China and were not arrested.
During a weeklong trial in August, prosecutors presented reams of records that showed Mr. Wang’s communications with Chinese intelligence officials. According to prosecutors, Mr. Wang frequently informed his Chinese handlers of a spectrum of activities seen as hostile to the Chinese Communist Party. He was instructed to target those pushing for democracy in Hong Kong, Uyghur activists and those who supported independence for Taiwan and Tibet, among others.
When approached by U.S. investigators, Mr. Wang lied about his contact with Chinese intelligence officials, prosecutors said. When he returned from a trip to China in 2019, border agents searched his luggage and found a handwritten document with the names and phone numbers of dozens of dissidents, as well as a book with the contact information of several Chinese officials.
After one day of deliberations, a jury convicted Mr. Wang of all the charges, which included acting as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the attorney general and sharing dissidents’ contact information with Chinese officials.
During and after his trial, Mr. Wang’s lawyers argued that their client was a lonely, aging man who would talk to just about anyone. In a letter to Judge Chin before the sentencing, Mr. Wang’s doctor said Mr. Wang had been experiencing years of cognitive decline, dating back to when he had been speaking with Chinese officials.
“This is a senile, old man,” Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, one of Mr. Wang’s lawyers, said on Monday.
Dozens of friends, family members and pro-democracy activists had also written to Judge Chin on Mr. Wang’s behalf, some arguing that his communications with the Chinese government were being taken out of context.
Juntao Wang, one of the activists Mr. Wang was accused of targeting, wrote that though Mr. Wang “is indeed a C.C.P. agent,” he was nonetheless a sincere promoter of democracy in China.
“His dual identity is a common and understandable phenomenon,” Juntao Wang wrote. “The C.C.P. holds absolute control over individuals’ lives and reputations.”
Other letters to the judge offered a more sinister portrayal of Mr. Wang’s actions.
Ming Xia, a political science professor at the City University of New York who was active in the pro-democracy foundation, was one activist whose personal details were disseminated by Mr. Wang to Chinese officials.
Mr. Xia wrote that Mr. Wang had caused “psychological, reputational and physical” damage to him, and that he had “taken extra precautions” to protect himself.
The judge on Monday seemed to take a sympathetic stance toward Mr. Wang. “Frankly, I am baffled as to what his motivations were,” he said.
Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.
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