Founder Of NYC Pro-Democracy Group Pleads Guilty To Spying For China

Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A Chinese man living in New York City has pleaded guilty to spying on his fellow activists on behalf of the Chinese regime’s intelligence agency, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced on Sept. 16.

Tang Yuanjun, 68, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was a prominent figure in New York City’s Chinese dissident community, having participated in protests outside the Chinese Consulate in the New York City borough of Manhattan and founded a pro-democracy group, the Chinese Democracy Party Eastern U.S. Headquarters Inc., based in the Flushing neighborhood of the borough of Queens.

Despite his public advocacy against Beijing, Tang was secretly working under the direction of the Chinese intelligence service to collect information on his fellow Chinese American dissidents, according to a guilty plea entered on Sept. 16.

As part of the plea, Tang admitted to one count of conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the attorney general, which is punishable by up to five years in prison.

“For years, Yuanjun Tang abused the trust he had gained among pro-democracy activists in New York City and around the United States by secretly accepting tasks from Chinese intelligence officers and reporting on persons of interest to the [People’s Republic of China] and events conducted in support of democracy,” U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement.

“Tang’s covert operations violated our nation’s sovereignty and threatened the security of New Yorkers exercising their fundamental rights to free speech and free association. Tang’s plea … illustrates our profound commitment to protecting American ideals from malign foreign influence.”

Tang was arrested in Flushing in August 2024 and was subsequently charged with acting as an agent for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the United States from 2018 to June 2023. During this time, Tang completed “tasks” at the direction of China’s top intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), federal prosecutors said.

An MSS agent tasked Tang with photographing and recording local protests against the CCP, including a 2023 event in Manhattan commemorating the victims of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, according to a court filing.

Tang provided the MSS agent with a list of Chinese American immigration lawyers working to help dissidents gain political asylum, the court document states.

According to the court document, Tang helped the MSS agent “infiltrate communications” exchanged among Chinese dissidents in a messaging group with about 140 members. He did this by assisting the agent in creating a profile linked to a U.S. phone number and adding it to the group.

Tang defected to Taiwan in 2002 and was later granted political asylum in the United States, after having spent 12 years in Chinese prison for his involvement in the 1989 student-led protests in Tiananmen Square, according to Taiwanese English language newspaper Taipei Times.

“Tang’s betrayal of the ideals of the US to help the Chinese government repress pro-democracy activists goes against the very values he claimed to promote,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge Christopher G. Raia said in a statement.

According to the U.S. attorney’s office, Tang is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 29, 2026.

Tang’s lawyer could not be reached for comment.

Tang’s case highlights the CCP’s ongoing efforts to conduct influence operations in the United States that undermine human rights and democracy, a practice commonly known as transnational repression. Federal prosecutors have highlighted a series of such cases in recent years.

Former New York City Police Sgt. Michael McMahon; Zheng Congying, a lawful permanent U.S. resident; and Zhu Yong, a Chinese retiree, have each been sentenced this year for their roles in pressuring a former Chinese official in New Jersey to return to China. Zhu was sentenced to two years in prison, Zheng to 16 months, and McMahon to 18 months.

In August 2024, a Chinese American scholar named Wang Shujun was convicted on charges that he had lived a double life as an MSS spy for more than a decade, allegedly collecting information on Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters, advocates for Taiwan’s official independence, and Uyghur and Tibetan activists.

In April 2023, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York announced the arrests and charges of two New York City residents for allegedly operating a secret Chinese police station in Manhattan on behalf of the CCP.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.