Yuanjun Tang (唐元雋), a naturalized US citizen, was charged by criminal complaint with acting and conspiring to act in the US as an unregistered agent of China and making materially false statements to the FBI. Tang was arrested on Aug 21.

Tang is a former 🇨🇳 citizen who was imprisoned in China for his activities as a dissident opposing the one-party authoritarian political system controlled by the CCP. In or about 2002, Tang defected to Taiwan; he was subsequently granted political asylum in the US and has since resided in New York City, where he has regularly participated in events with fellow Chinese dissidents and leads a nonprofit dedicated to promoting democracy in China.

Between at least in or about 2018 and in or about June 2023, Tang acted in the US as an agent of China by completing tasks at the direction of the 🇨🇳 Ministry of State Security. The MSS is responsible for, among other things, China’s foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, espionage and political security functions.

Tang first sought opportunities to visit his family in China in 2018 and was ultimately introduced to an unnamed 🇨🇳 MSS intelligence officer.

Through a particular email account, encrypted chats, text messages and audio and video calls, Tang regularly received instructions from and reported to the MSS intelligence officer regarding individuals and groups viewed by China as potentially adverse to China’s interests, including prominent US-based Chinese democracy activists and dissidents.

Tang also traveled to China including Macau at least three times between 2019 and 2023 for face-to-face meetings with MSS intelligence officers and helped the MSS infiltrate a group chat on an encrypted messaging application used by numerous Chinese dissidents and pro-democracy activists to communicate about pro-democracy issues and express criticism of the 🇨🇳 government. Law enforcement recovered instructions Tang received from the MSS and photographs, videos and documents that he collected or created for transmission to the MSS from numerous electronic devices and accounts belonging to Tang.

Tang also made materially false statements to the FBI. He falsely claimed that he was no longer able to access an email account through which he had communicated with his MSS handler through draft emails.

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