Chinese Dissident Who Spied on Fellow Activists for Beijing Walks Free With Probation

Yuanjun Tang, 69, avoided prison Thursday when Judge John G. Koeltl sentenced him to three years' probation in Manhattan federal court. The judge said claims by people who believe they and their families were targeted because of Tang's spying could not be proven. Tang pleaded guilty in September 2025 to failing to register as an agent of the People's Republic of China with the U.S. attorney general's office.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jane Chong had pushed for five years, the maximum Tang faced under the plea. She said his betrayal of fellow activists furthered the 'story of transnational repression that is still playing out in America today,' and that his victims 'can never stop looking over their shoulders.' Tang's arrest in October 2024 followed several high-profile federal investigations into China's efforts to harass and silence dissidents abroad.

Prosecutors said Tang fed Chinese authorities information on dozens of individuals from at least 2018 to 2023, including helping a Chinese handler join an online chat called 'Friends of the Chinese Democracy Party' that Tang had started with 140 Chinese-American members. He had built trust by joining monthly protests outside China's Manhattan consulate and founding a nonprofit in Flushing, Queens, where he lived from 2002. At a Chinese intelligence officer's direction, he also photographed and recorded local protests, including a 2023 Manhattan event honoring victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Defense attorney Michael Bradley described Tang as a democracy advocate and writer desperate to visit his ailing parents and brother in China, who connected with a man he believed could arrange it. Bradley said Tang didn't know the man was a spy until he reached China, where his mother and brother had already died. Speaking through a Chinese interpreter, Tang told the judge he betrayed his ideology to 'see my parents again.' 'I deeply regret my actions,' he said. 'My actions have caused a certain harm to other people.'

Four people who believe they were victimized spoke at the sentencing. Several said they now find the deaths of family members in China suspicious after their U.S. activities were exposed, and one man said he did not consider it a random attack when he was stabbed in the throat with a knife. Tang had been held in a Chinese prison for 12 years over his role in the 1989 student-led Tiananmen Square demonstrations, defected to Taiwan in 2002 and then reached the U.S., where he won political asylum and became a naturalized citizen in July 2018. By then, Chong said, he was already working for the Ministry of State Security, China's main civilian intelligence agency.

The FBI met with Tang in June 2023 to warn him his phone likely carried malware planted by China, according to court papers. Prosecutors said he then confessed to carrying out tasks for the Ministry of State Security for years in return for roughly $4,200 annually.