The Guardian-Chinese American man convicted in US of spying on dissidents for China
August 6, 2024 3 min 601 words
这篇报道主要内容是：一名美籍华裔学者王曙光被美国联邦陪审团定罪，罪名是充当中国政府间谍，监控和收集在美国的异见人士信息。报道称，王曙光在美国纽约创办了一个亲民主团体，实际上是受中国国安部指示，借此接触和监控反对中国政府的人。王曙光否认了指控，他的律师也表示他没有任何隐瞒，是一个很开放的人。最终，王曙光被定罪，面临最高10年的监禁。 评论：这篇报道有几个值得注意的地方。首先，它提到王曙光是“美籍华裔学者”，但强调了他的“中国身份”，而忽略了他作为美国公民的权利和义务。其次，报道提到王曙光“帮助创办了一个亲民主团体”，但并没有详细说明这个团体的活动和影响力，给读者一种这个团体是假的无实际影响的印象。再次，报道中提到的证据主要是王曙光与中方情报人员的“密码共享”和“加密信息”，但这些证据的有效性和可靠性有待商榷。总的来说，这篇报道有选择性地呈现信息，忽略了一些可能对被告有利的细节，从而可能引导读者形成对中国和美国政府都持怀疑态度的观点。
A Chinese American scholar was convicted on Tuesday in the US on charges of using his reputation as a pro-democracy activist to gather information on dissidents and feed it to his homeland’s government.
A federal jury in New York delivered the verdict in the case of Shujun Wang, who helped found a pro-democracy group in the city.
Prosecutors said that at the behest of China’s main intelligence agency, the ministry of state security, Wang lived a double life for more than a decade.
“The defendant pretended to be opposed to the Chinese government so that he could get close to people who were actually opposed to the Chinese government,” assistant US attorney Ellen Sise said in an opening statement last month. “And then, the defendant betrayed those people, people who trusted him, by reporting information on them to China.”
Wang was convicted of charges including conspiring to act as a foreign agent without notifying the attorney general. Faced with up to 10 years in prison, he pleaded not guilty.
Wang’s attorneys did not immediately return a request for comment.
Wang came to New York in 1994 to teach after doing so at a Chinese university. He later became a US citizen.
He helped found the Queens-based Hu Yaobang Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, named for two leaders of the Chinese Communist party in the 1980s.
According to prosecutors, Wang composed emails – styled as “diaries” – that recounted conversations, meetings and plans of various critics of the Chinese government.
One message was about events commemorating the 1989 protests and bloody crackdown in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, prosecutors said. Other emails talked about people planning demonstrations during various visits that Xi Jinping, Chinese president, made to the US.
Instead of sending the emails and creating a digital trail, Wang saved them as drafts that Chinese intelligence officers could read by logging in with a shared password, prosecutors said.
In other, encrypted messages, Wang relayed details of upcoming pro-democracy events and plans to meet with a prominent Hong Kong dissident while the latter was in the US, according to an indictment.
During a series of FBI interviews between 2017 and 2021, Wang initially said he had no contacts with the ministry of state security, but he later acknowledged on videotape that the intelligence agency asked him to gather information on democracy advocates and that he sometimes did, FBI agents testified.
But, they said, he claimed he did not provide anything really valuable, just information already in the public domain.
Wang’s lawyers portrayed him as a gregarious academic with nothing to hide.
“In general, fair to say he was very open and talkative with you, right?” the defense attorney Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma asked an undercover agent who approached Wang in 2021 under the guise of being affiliated with the Chinese security ministry.
“He was,” said the agent, who testified under a pseudonym. He recorded his conversation with Wang at the latter’s house in Connecticut.
“Did he seem a little lonely?” Margulis-Ohnuma asked a bit later. The agent said he did not recall.
Wang told agents his “diaries” were advertisements for the foundation’s meetings or write-ups that he was publishing in newspapers, according to testimony. He also suggested to the undercover agent that publishing them would be a way to deflect any suspicion from US authorities.
Another agent, Garrett Igo, told jurors that when Wang found out in 2019 that investigators would search his phone for any contacts in the Chinese government, he paused for a minute.
“And then he said: ‘Do anything. I don’t care,’” Igo recalled.