The defendant’s ‘covert operations violated our nation’s sovereignty and threatened the security of New Yorkers,’ U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said.
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.
By Frank Fang
