How A Chinese Academic Managed A US Spy Network for Decades Before Being Arrested

New Delhi: A US court has found a Chinese-American scholar guilty of using his reputation to obtain information on dissidents and giving it to the Chinese government, despite the scholar's self-portrayal as an activist for democracy.
without giving the US Attorney General any warning. The verdict was rendered on Tuesday by a federal jury in New York, according to The Guardian.

According to the prosecutors, the 75-year-old led a double life for more than ten years at the Ministry of State Security, China's primary intelligence organization.

US lawyer Ellen Sise claimed in her opening statement last month that Wang had staged her opposition to the Chinese government in order to "get close to people who were actually opposed to the Chinese government."Subsequently, the accused turned on those who had faith in them him, by reporting information on them to China," Sise noted.

The plot of a spy book

Wang was found guilty of giving his country's intelligence service the contact details of well-known dissidents. He misrepresented the plan to federal law enforcement officials as well. After a week-long trial in federal court in Brooklyn, the jury returned a guilty verdict on four charges, according to Reuters.

The US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Breon Peace, stated in a statement on Tuesday that "the indictment could have been the plot of a spy novel, but the evidence is shockingly real." 
Peace said that Wang was "willing to betray those who respected and trusted him."

When Wang is sentenced on January 9 of next year, he might spend up to 25 years behind bars.

Shujun Wang is who?

Following his time as a visiting university scholar of East Asian studies, Wang, an American citizen, resided in New York in the 1990s, according to The New York Times.

In the Queens neighborhood of Flushing, he assisted in the founding of a pro-democracy club in 2006 to honor individuals connected to the Tiananmen Square movement of 1989.

The Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation honors two Chinese Communist Party leaders from the 1980s. The organization's goal, according to its official website, is to advance China's "constitutional transformation." 

Prosecutors, however, claimed that Wang had been acting as a "covert intelligence asset in his own community" since at least 2006 by taking advantage of his standing and influence within the Chinese community.