US charges former Chinese democracy advocate with being illegal agent for Beijing
- Yuanjun Tang, dissident jailed in China during Tiananmen Square crackdown, arrested in New York for allegedly acting as unregistered Beijing agent
A naturalised US citizen from China has been arrested on charges of acting as an unregistered agent for Beijing and for lying to the FBI after he allegedly ran a pro-democracy civic group while providing intelligence on dissidents to the Ministry of State Security (MSS).
Arraigned in federal court in New York on Wednesday, Yuanjun Tang, 67, faces up to 20 years in prison, charged with one count of acting as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the US Attorney General, one count of conspiracy and one count of making false statements.
According to court documents, Tang was imprisoned in China during the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown as a dissident opposing Beijing’s one-party state and Chinese Communist Party control before defecting to Taiwan around 2002.
Tang was subsequently granted political asylum in the US where he “regularly participated in events” with fellow Chinese dissidents, according to the criminal complaint.
In 2018 and 2023, and possibly on other occasions, however, Tang worked as an agent for MSS, China’s principle civilian agency handles foreign intelligence, counter-intelligence, espionage and political security activities.
Prosecutors allege that Tang agreed to cooperate in a bid to see his family back on the mainland. They add that after a visit home in 2018, he was introduced to an unnamed MSS official at which point the MSS provided money to his family.
