Chinese Transnational Repression Is a Real Issue—but Shujun Wang Is a Bad Example

On May 18, viewers of 60 Minutes were promised a show that would reveal the depths of Chinese surveillance in the United States. One lengthy segment dedicated its time to the case of Wang Shujun: an elderly historian who was convicted last year in the US of secretly passing information to the Chinese security state. Anchor Norah O’Donnell used Wang, who is an American citizen, as the archetypical example of a conniving spy who burrowed deep inside the Chinese dissident community in Queens, New York, in order to betray the diaspora.

Transnational repression of dissidents by the Chinese Communist Party is a real and pressing issue. Officials in Hong Kong have placed bounties on multiple activists residing overseas, including in the United States. Other individuals have carried out campaigns of stalking and violent harassment on behalf of Beijing. But Wang’s a bad example, and one that raises considerable questions about the ability of the US government to pursue the real perpetrators of China’s transnational crimes and the hyperbolic terms in which the government and media celebrate them.

Wang came to the United States in the early 1990s as a visiting scholar at Columbia University. In 2006, he helped to establish the Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit with a mission of promoting democracy in China. The organization, a low-budget operation, gave him access to other dissidents and events around the US. In August 2017, the FBI met with Wang at a restaurant in Queens to ask him about the foundation, discuss his travels to China, and any contacts he may have had with the Chinese government, particularly the Ministry of State Security (MSS). They were interested in seeing if Wang might be able to help them out.

Wang lied and said he had no contacts with the MSS: He said he was allowed to travel freely to China because, while his foundation was pro-democracy, it wasn’t explicitly anti–Chinese Communist Party. Two years later, he was stopped at the airport while returning from China at the request of the FBI: A search of his luggage turned up an address book with the contact information for Chinese security officials, and combing through his iCloud and e-mail accounts revealed recaps of meetings he had with other activists and notes on conversations that he was passing to MSS handlers. Wang was a terrible liar and it was catching up with him.

Many of Wang’s contacts were dissidents who arrived in the US following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. They hoped that the outrage over the crackdown would make China a pariah and eventually set it on a path toward democracy. This never happened: Instead, the country was welcomed back into the international fold and grew into an economic and military power without ever democratizing. The state of the movement was not lost on Wang.

Still looking for a potential lead for the US government, in 2021, the FBI sent an undercover agent posing as an intermediary to meet Wang. The two discussed his work and how Wang might be able to delete evidence of what he was doing. A year later, he was arrested for acting as a foreign agent without notifying the US attorney general, criminal possession of identification documents, and lying to law enforcement. His trial began two years later. “The FBI’s methods in this case were pretty heavy-handed and likely missed an opportunity to get to the root of more serious overseas repression by the Chinese authorities,” said Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, Wang’s lawyer—adding that he thought the FBI “went to pick what they thought was low-hanging fruit.”

Each day, Wang would shuffle into the Theodore Roosevelt Courthouse in Brooklyn in an outfit that appeared cobbled together from thrift store finds, his thinning and unnaturally black hair slicked to the side of his head. The eccentric old man carried a cane and pulled a wheeled cart bursting with books, documents in Chinese and English, food, and newspaper clippings.

When court was in session, Wang would sometimes appear engaged, while at others, fall asleep. Judge Dennis Chin, who has run seminars on the history of accusations of espionage against Asian Americans, often seemed frustrated. It turned out that Wang, according to a doctor’s report submitted to the court, was exhibiting behavior consistent with senile dementia. His mental fitness had been declining for years.

Seven years into their pursuit, prosecutors were sure they would be able to lock Wang up. An expert witness was flown in from Australia to explain the basics of the Chinese government and the country’s intelligence operations to the jury. Prosecutors time and again tried to link Wang’s actions to a jailed dissident in Hong Kong, despite no evidence of such. Though it is difficult to tell from the dramatic rhetoric surrounding his case, Wang was not charged under the Espionage Act—not even close. He was charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires agents of foreign principals to register with the attorney general and occasionally report the details of the work they are undertaking. For decades, the government pursued only a handful of cases for violation of the act, opting instead to simply send warning letters. Much of what Wang had passed on to the MSS, it turns out, was useless and dated. Even his handlers seemed annoyed at times over the quality of what he was producing.

Prosecutors likened Wang’s work to that of a John LeCarré or Graham Greene novel, comparisons that beggared belief if you had the real facts. In reality, authorities spent the better part of a decade chasing a big score only to be forced to settle for a consolation prize whom they now needed to make appear far more important than he actually was. Wang was hardly a competent mole, let alone the Communist Party mastermind the government sought to portray him as. Meanwhile, the true MSS agents, not their bumbling functionaries, remained free and out of reach of US law enforcement.