Dissidents thought he was an ally, but he was a spy

Source: NYT (1/10/25)
New York’s Chinese Dissidents Thought He Was an Ally. He Was a Spy.
Shujun Wang seemed to be a Chinese democracy activist, but an F.B.I. investigation showed just how far China will go to repress citizens abroad.
By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

One morning in late July last year, Shujun Wang shuffled into a courtroom at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, leaning on his cane as he made his way to the defense table. Settling into a seat next to his lawyers, the 76-year-old Chinese American scholar smoothed his jet-black hair and adjusted his tie, whose red-and-blue pattern, set against his white shirt, vaguely suggested the American flag. After an exchange of greetings with his Chinese interpreter, he surveyed the courtroom with an amused expression, almost beaming at the visitors’ gallery. For someone facing trial on charges of working as an illegal agent for China, Wang looked remarkably cheerful. It was hard to say if he was oblivious to the gravity of his situation or pleased to be the center of attention.

The government accused Wang of having led a double life for years. A historian who migrated to the United States from China in 1994, he had written many books on military and naval history, including one about the heroism of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific during the Second World War. Starting in the mid-2000s, he had also been a member of a community of Chinese dissidents in the United States who oppose the Chinese Communist Party and push for democratic reforms in China. Wang helped organize events and rallies in the greater New York area to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre and protest the authoritarianism of the Chinese government. In 2006, he founded, with a group of prominent dissidents, a nonprofit in Flushing, Queens, called the Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, with the mission of promoting democracy in China. Warm and affable, Wang became a recognizable face within the organization, managing its media relations and working to publicize the foundation’s activities in New York’s Chinese-language newspapers.

Secretly, according to federal investigators, he was working for China’s Ministry of State Security. Evidence presented at trial would show that at the direction of his handlers in the M.S.S., Wang spied on Chinese dissidents in Flushing and the New York area for years. His enthusiastic participation in the Chinese pro-democracy movement appeared to have been a ploy to gain proximity to its leaders and activists and to collect information about them for the ministry. United States authorities say the Chinese government uses such intelligence to intimidate and silence dissidents overseas.

Like other authoritarian regimes, China’s communist government is anxious about potential challenges to its power. Since becoming president in 2013, Xi Jinping has emphasized the need for China to take lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union, which Chinese scholars have attributed in part to ideological decay brought on by Western influence. An internal directive of the Chinese Communist Party released that year warned its workers to remain vigilant against “Western constitutional democracy” and other corrupting ideas. The document also claimed that the West was trying to engineer “color revolutions” in China — a term for popular uprisings in several former Soviet republics during the 2000s that came to be known by colorful names like the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

How intensely China has sought to monitor and counter such perceived threats can be gauged by a series of cases of Chinese spying and influence-peddling in the United States that have come to light in recent years. In November, a man named John Chen was sentenced to 20 months in prison for acting as an unregistered agent for China and bribing an undercover officer posing as an I.R.S. official in a plot directed against U.S.-based practitioners of Falun Gong, a movement that the Chinese government regards as a threat. In September, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against Linda Sun — a former aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York — charging her with, among other allegations, failing to register as an agent of the Chinese government, from which she received financial benefits amounting to millions of dollars. Sun is accused of using her position to further China’s interests. At the bidding of Chinese officials, for example, she is said to have removed any mention of the plight of China’s Uyghurs from a 2021 speech by Hochul, who was New York’s lieutenant governor at the time. She is also accused of blocking Taiwanese government officials from communicating with Hochul and other senior New York State officers.

Just shy of two weeks earlier, in August, the F.B.I. arrested Tang Yuanjun — a 67-year-old Chinese American living in Flushing — and charged him with spying on Chinese dissident groups in the United States. Like Shujun Wang, Tang had been a part of the Chinese pro-democracy movement for years. He had been imprisoned in China for opposing the Communist Party before defecting to Taiwan in the early 2000s and subsequently being granted asylum in the United States. But in 2019, after seeking permission from Chinese authorities to visit his recently incapacitated parents in China, Tang began — at the direction of M.S.S. officers, according to the Justice Department — to collect information about dissidents. In return, Tang was granted a visa in early 2022 and visited China later that year, by which time his mother had died. In a letter written to pro-democracy activists shortly after his arrest, Tang described the reunion with his father and brother back home as “unforgettable.”

These recent cases follow the unsealing of a federal complaint in April 2023 in which two Chinese Americans were charged with operating a clandestine “police station” in New York out of a building in Chinatown. Last month, one of these men pleaded guilty in a federal court in Brooklyn. The Manhattan “police station” closed down in October 2022 as the F.B.I. was preparing to search its premises. According to one human rights N.G.O., it was one of 102 such outposts that Chinese security agencies established in 53 countries between 2016 and 2022. The Chinese government denies these were police stations; at a news conference in Ottawa in May 2023, a Chinese spokesman described them as service centers to help overseas Chinese nationals renew their driver’s licenses in the wake of pandemic travel restrictions.

Officials at the Justice Department have described these Chinese intelligence operations as attempts to export to the U.S. the repressive tactics that the government employs inside its own borders. In a statement issued after Wang’s indictment in May 2022, Matthew G. Olsen, assistant attorney general of the department’s national-security division, called the charges brought against Wang a reflection of “the Justice Department’s unwavering commitment to hold accountable all those who violate our laws in seeking to suppress dissenting voices within the United States and to prevent our residents from exercising their lawful rights.”

At his trial, Wang struck me as an improbable spy. In manner and appearance, he seemed more like an absent-minded academic than someone steeped in spycraft. During a break on the second day, just as the prosecution was getting ready to lay out its evidence, I saw Wang emerge from the courtroom and move down the hall with an urgency that suggested a full bladder. A little later, I found him standing in front of the restroom door, looking befuddled, probably because the sign next to it was obscure. Speaking in barely understandable English, he asked me where the restroom was. I pointed him to the door. Later, returning to the courtroom, he gave me a wide smile and said, with almost exaggerated courtesy: “Thank you, my friend!” The proceedings resumed, and I sat down to hear the prosecution make its case.

Over the six days of Wang’s trial in Brooklyn this past summer, I spoke to him on the sidelines — at times in the hallway, at times while he sat on a bench outside the courthouse during lunch breaks. A member of his defense team — and on one occasion, a teenage granddaughter of his — served as the translator for these conversations, during which Wang told me how coming to the United States had been his cherished dream since childhood. He said he owed his early fascination with America to his father, who spoke English and worked as an interpreter for the commander of a United States naval fleet that visited the port of Qingdao in eastern China in 1945, after Japan’s surrender.

In 1982, after graduating with a degree in history from Shandong University, Wang began working as a researcher at the Qingdao Academy of Social Sciences, where he produced a series of books describing the war between American and Japanese forces in the Pacific. Like many Chinese academics who fled China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989, when the Chinese government brutally crushed a student protest movement, Wang sought out opportunities to emigrate. In 1994, he secured an invitation to be a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s East Asian Institute and moved to New York with his wife.

Shortly after he arrived at Columbia, Wang became acquainted with another visiting scholar from China, a dissident named Yan Jiaqi, who was an adviser to Premier Zhao Ziyang in the 1980s and fled China after the Tiananmen Square massacre. For his first decade in the United States, however, Wang wasn’t involved in the pro-democracy movement. Then, in 2006, Chen Yizi, an economist and prominent dissident living in exile in the Boston area, started the Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, named after two reformist leaders. Yan introduced Wang to Chen, who Wang says took a liking to him and asked him to serve as his executive secretary. Wang, though he wasn’t a well-known figure in the dissident community, ended up becoming one of the foundation’s 14 founders.

Hu Ping, another of the founders, also says that Wang’s role in the foundation was more secretary than leader. “He was very friendly and polite to everyone, always smiling,” Hu told me. When the foundation organized conferences, Wang’s job was to handle logistics, like setting up the venue and driving to the airport to pick up guest speakers invited by Chen. He would also liaise with the Chinese-language media in New York, seeking coverage for the foundation’s activities. Wang himself was never a notable speaker at its conferences; if he took the lectern, he did so only to make general remarks or to introduce other speakers. “He did not have any important opinions to share on the issues we discussed,” Hu said.

What Wang did have, by virtue of his position, was an insider’s access to dissident activities, not all of which were public. Moving in dissident circles gave him the opportunity to listen in on private exchanges that were of great interest to the Chinese government. His behavior raised some concerns within the pro-democracy community starting in 2008. That July, Chen Yizi and a handful of other activists held a closed-door meeting with the Dalai Lama in Bethlehem, Pa., to discuss China’s crackdown on demonstrations in Tibet earlier that year. Because the discussion was sensitive and confidential, everyone was asked not to record the proceedings or take notes, according to Amei Zhang, another founder, who has served as the foundation’s president since 2022. Sometime after the meeting started, Chen found out that Wang had an audio recorder in his pocket that was turned on. Zhang, who wasn’t there herself, told me she got the details of the incident from a fellow activist. (This colleague declined my request for an interview.) “Yizi got very angry,” Zhang said. “He said: ‘I told you, no recording! Why are you still recording?’” Wang was ordered to delete the recording immediately. (Wang denies that this episode took place.)

If Chen was troubled by Wang’s behavior, he didn’t seem to let it change his own. Wang told me he and Chen had a close relationship: Chen and his wife sometimes visited Wang and stayed with Wang’s family in their Queens apartment. Chen gave Wang the task of interviewing pro-democracy activists in the United States and overseas for a documentary to mark the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre; as part of the effort, Wang traveled to Hong Kong in 2008 to interview well-known dissident politicians including Albert Ho, who at the time was chairman of the Democratic Party there.

Other members of the dissident community, however, remained suspicious of Wang’s conduct. One of them was Yan Zhao, an investigative journalist who was jailed in China after being charged with illegally passing along state secrets while working as a researcher for The New York Times’s Beijing bureau; he moved to the United States after his release. Zhao told me that Wang was overly inquisitive about the things the democracy activists were doing that had no connection to the foundation. Wang sometimes invited Zhao to his home for social gatherings. According to Zhao, Wang offered to introduce him to a woman he thought Zhao might date. (Wang says he did not introduce a woman to Zhao.) Wang often shared personal details to draw people close. “I felt he was always trying to get people to drop their guard,” Zhao said.

In 2011, Zhao attended a two-day conference in New York to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1911 revolution that overthrew the last imperial dynasty to rule China. Wang’s invitation was only for the first day, not the second day, which was open to a smaller group of participants — individuals who were knowledgeable about human rights work inside China. That second morning, as Zhao was on his way to the event’s venue, Wang called Zhao to find out exactly where he was so they could go together. Zhao recalls expressing his reluctance to have Wang accompany him. “I said, ‘It seems you are not part of today’s meeting,’” Zhao told me. Wang dismissed his objections. “Oh, I’ll just come along with you,” he told Zhao, and sneaked into the gathering with Zhao. Embarrassed, Zhao made it a point to inform the organizers that despite appearances, he had not invited Wang to accompany him. Partway through the meeting, Zhao told me, Wang was asked to leave. (Wang says he has no recollection of attending this event.)

For some, Wang’s seeming proximity to officials in the Chinese government was another point of concern. While most prominent dissidents are unable to return safely to their homeland, it wasn’t surprising that Wang — who was never involved in any protests while back home — had no difficulties visiting China. What was surprising, however, was his ability to provide assistance to a dissident named Liu Lu, who needed to travel to China to see his ailing father in 2012. To help Liu renew an expired visa at the Chinese consulate, Wang suggested he post a statement online denouncing Wang Juntao, an exiled pro-democracy activist seen as a leader of the movement in the United States. “Lu said, ‘I don’t know how to write this statement,’” Yan Zhao, who learned the details of the incident from Liu, told me. “Wang said, ‘I’ll write it for you — you just have to sign it.’” The effort succeeded, and Liu was able to travel to China. (He declined to be interviewed for this article; Wang denies Zhao’s account and says he asked Liu to condemn Xi Jinping, not to denounce Wang Juntao.)

In 2015, Wang traveled to China for a book launch. While he was there, he received a handwritten letter of congratulations from Chi Haotian, who served as China’s national defense minister for a decade starting in the early 1990s. Returning to the United States, Wang bragged about the compliment, showing the letter to many in the Chinese community.

It’s unclear if the concerns that some in the dissident community had about Wang were ever conveyed to law enforcement, or if they had anything to do with the F.B.I.’s taking an interest in him. In August 2017, Garrett Igo, a special agent with the F.B.I., met with Wang and two other F.B.I. colleagues at a restaurant in Flushing and interviewed him about the foundation, his travels to China and contact he had had with Chinese government officials. (It isn’t unusual for the F.B.I. to conduct such interviews.) Igo would later testify that Wang denied any such contact, apart from getting his visa at the Chinese consulate.

This wouldn’t be his last encounter with Igo. On April 12, 2019, when Wang arrived at Kennedy Airport in New York after a trip to China, he was pulled aside by Customs and Border Protection agents for an inspection that had been requested by the F.B.I. Igo and his colleagues interviewed him while his luggage and phone were inspected. Wang denied any contact with government officials in China. But in his luggage, agents found a little black address book containing names and phone numbers for several people whom prosecutors would later claim were Chinese officials, including officers in the Ministry of State Security. They also found handwritten pages with the names and phone numbers of more than 60 people. Most of them, investigators subsequently claimed, were pro-democracy activists.

The luggage and phone were returned to Wang, and he was allowed to go home. But F.B.I. agents were able to obtain a search warrant that allowed them to secretly look through Wang’s email and iCloud accounts. There they discovered messages indicating a relationship between Wang and people suspected of working for the M.S.S. that dated back several years.

According to prosecutors, Wang used the Chinese messaging app WeChat to communicate with Ji Jie, a section chief in the Qingdao State Security Department, and with Little Li, who was an assistant to He Feng, an official in the Guangdong State Security Department. Wang had also been communicating through emails he saved in the drafts folder of his Hotmail account — the labels included “Wang’s Diary” and “New York William’s Diary” — which were read by M.S.S. officers who logged into his account. Wang had sent some of these diary entries to an email address, found in his address book, with a 163.com domain name that was run by a Chinese email service provider and possibly beyond the reach of American law enforcement.

The WeChat messages and the diary entries contained accounts of meetings held by democracy activists, reports of conversations Wang had had with dissidents and other information relating to dissidents’ plans and activities. Although Wang was in communication with Little Li and Ji Jie, prosecutors said, it was evident that his reporting was intended for their superiors: He Feng (or “Boss He”) and a person referred to as “Boss Lu.”

Investigators said that the M.S.S. had been assigning Wang specific information-gathering tasks. On Nov. 14, 2016, for instance. Little Li told Wang through WeChat to contact Albert Ho, the dissident politician in Hong Kong, and get his thoughts on the upcoming election for Hong Kong’s chief executive post.

Two days later, Wang — who had interviewed Ho years earlier for the documentary the foundation helped produce — messaged back: “Just finished talking to him on the telephone and the conversation went very well. Asked all the questions that should be asked and his answers were also straightforward.”

Little Li responded: “You can write it up in the diary.”

“Will write down the dialogue between the two of us,” Wang replied. “Will be clear as crystal.” Soon afterward, Wang left a diary entry in his Hotmail draft folder recounting the phone conversation. Ho had seemed pessimistic about the prospects that Hong Kong would have any degree of autonomy. Ho told him that the final decision on who would become chief executive in the upcoming election was “in the hands of Xi Jinping,” Wang wrote in his diary. Over WeChat, Little Li encouraged Wang to plan a trip to Hong Kong the following year, telling him that Boss He “would like to pay for your plane ticket.”

Other tasks for Wang involved assessing the plans and strategy of the democracy movement, monitoring interactions among different dissident groups and finding out how certain activists were being funded — gathering “specific details like the timing, by what connections used for the application, the amount that is granted.” Ji Jie, the officer from the Qingdao branch of the agency, pressed Wang to leverage his status in the foundation to hold private discussions and put specific questions to select individuals. For example, Wang was instructed to ask a scholar who was writing about Xi Jinping “the main contents of the book and its progress, the book’s planned completion date, the place of publication.”

In diary entries introduced as trial exhibits, dating as far back as January 2013, Wang referred to some of the activists he was reporting on in affectionate terms, as if underlining how close he was to them. “I talked with Brother Tao in the Democratic Party office from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m.,” he wrote of one July 2016 meeting. In a memo earlier that year, Wang wrote about protests organized during Xi Jinping’s visit in 2015. A key organizer behind those protests, Wang noted, was Yan Zhao — “my old friend in New York.” After he asked Zhao about the possibility of protesters’ blocking Xi Jinping’s car again during a visit in March 2016, he concluded the chances were low, based on Zhao’s comments. “I haven’t caught wind of them organizing any events,” he wrote.

Three years later, on March 21, 2019 — a month before Xi Jinping’s scheduled visit with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago — Wang again reported on the likelihood of protesters’ trying to embarrass the Chinese leader. “At Wang Dan’s birthday party, I sat at the same table as the king of petitioning and car-blocking, Ms. Ma Yongtian,” he wrote. She told him that she would “definitely go and block his car.” Wang’s overall analysis of the dissident community, however, would have made for happy reading at the M.S.S. “These old soldiers of the democracy movement within the United States are down to their last breath,” he remarked.

On the morning of July 31, 2021, a man walked up to the door of a residence in Norwich, Conn., where Wang sometimes spent time when not in Queens. After Wang answered the door, the man introduced himself as an associate of He Feng — the given name of the person referred to as “Boss He” in Wang’s WeChat messages. Wang, dressed in a red-and-black-checkered shirt, invited the man inside. He subsequently learned that the name of his surprise visitor was Little Song, from China.

After being invited in, the man told Wang that he had been sent by He’s office to get rid of the diaries and emails that Wang had written over the years. This was necessary to protect Wang, the man explained, in case Wang were to be investigated by American law enforcement.

Wang listened to his guest intently, his curiosity seeming to give way to concern. He had good reason to be worried — although he was oblivious to what was really happening. The visitor had not been sent by the M.S.S., and his name wasn’t Little Song. He was an undercover F.B.I. agent, and his hidden camera was filming their exchange.

Wang’s guest tried to put him at ease with a bit of flattery. “You were a national treasure when you were in China,” he said. “Because if you were not that valuable to them, they wouldn’t have asked me to come just for you, to give you a message.”

Wang laughed. He had started eating what looked like greens out of a bowl. The undercover agent explained the importance of erasing any digital evidence. “The development of big data is quite scary now,” he said. “Because now, if they want to check, everything can be discovered.” He said that it would be futile for Wang to delete the diaries and emails on his computer. “Because those now all go to the cloud, all on the server of the database. I need to delete them from the server in North America.”

Wang pulled out his black address book and put on his glasses. “You are like my father,” the undercover agent said, as Wang looked through the diary’s pages. “Now his eyesight is blurry. He gets dizzy after reading.”

Wang then showed his guest two 163.com email addresses and their passwords written in the book. In addition to saving diaries in the draft folder of his Hotmail account, Wang logged into these Chinese domain addresses, according to investigators, to leave information for Boss He and Ji Jie. The F.B.I. had these addresses from the search of Wang’s luggage two years earlier; now investigators figured they had confirmation from Wang that the addresses were linked to the two M.S.S. officials.

Wang told the undercover agent that he had known Ji Jie, who Wang said was a former neighbor of his in China, since around 2003, and had been corresponding with him over the internet starting a couple of years after that. Wang knew Boss He through his daughter and son-in-law, who were based in Hong Kong. Wang had been in touch with He since roughly 2016. The entries in the Hotmail folder labeled “Wang’s diary” were for Jie; the ones marked “William’s diary” were for Boss He. The only difference between the two diaries was that He’s included reporting on matters related to Hong Kong.

Wang downplayed the importance of the diaries. “There are no secrets — they just want to know what’s happening,” he said, referring to those who read his draft emails. He seemed to be confident, according to the prosecution’s case, that he couldn’t get in trouble for revealing sensitive information because, he explained with a chuckle, he had made it a practice to get some of this information about the foundation’s meetings simultaneously published in Chinese-language newspapers in New York. “If they question me,” he said, “I’ll just say that those are all published in the newspapers.”

Less than two weeks later, on Aug. 11, Garrett Igo of the F.B.I. went to see Wang, accompanied by another agent and an interpreter. Igo told Wang that the F.B.I. had arrested Little Song and wanted Wang’s help in that investigation. The agents then spent more than six hours interviewing him on his back patio. After initially denying that he knew He Feng, Igo later testified, Wang disclosed that he had met with him more than once in Hong Kong. He told the agents that he had been introduced to He Feng by his daughter and son-in-law, who had business dealings with He and had sought his help in recovering stolen money.

The Chinese government’s paranoia about overseas dissidents can seem strange, considering the enormous differences in power between exiled protesters who organize marches in America and their mighty homeland, a geopolitical and economic superpower whose citizens they have almost no ability to mobilize. But to those familiar with the Chinese Communist Party, the government’s obsession with dissidents, no matter where in the world they are, is unsurprising. “Regardless of how the overseas dissident community is dismissed outside of China, its very existence represents a symbol of hope for many within China,” Wang Dan, a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests who spent years in prison before being exiled to the United States in 1998, told me. “For the Chinese Communist Party, the hope for change among the people is itself a threat. Therefore, they spare no effort in suppressing and discrediting the overseas dissident community — to extinguish this hope in the hearts of people at home.”

To understand the party’s fears about the risks posed by dissidents abroad, it helps to know the history of revolutions in China. “Historically, the groups that have overthrown the incumbent government or regime in China have often spent a lot of time overseas and organized there,” says Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins University. The leader Sun Yat-sen, who played an important role in the 1911 revolution that dethroned the Qing dynasty and led eventually to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, spent several periods of his life abroad, during which he engaged in effective fund-raising and political coordination. The Communist Party’s own rise to power in 1949 was partly advanced by contributions from leaders who were living overseas. “They are very sensitive to that potential,” Weiss says.

“What the Chinese government and the circle of elites that are running China right now fear the most is not the United States, with all of its military power, but elements of unrest within their own society that could potentially topple the Chinese Communist Party,” says Adam Kozy, a cybersecurity consultant who worked on Chinese cyberespionage cases when he was at the F.B.I. Specifically, Chinese authorities worry about a list of threats — collectively referred to as the “five poisons” — that pose a risk to the stability of Communist rule: the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, followers of the Falun Gong movement, supporters of Taiwanese independence and those who advocate for democracy in China. As a result, the Chinese government invests great effort in combating these threats, which involves collecting intelligence about overseas dissident groups and dampening their influence both within China and on the international stage.

Controlling dissidents, regardless of where they are, is essential to China’s goal of projecting power to its own citizens and to the world, according to Charles Kable, who served as an assistant director in the F.B.I.’s national security branch before retiring from the bureau at the end of 2022. “If you have a dissident out there who is looking back at China and pointing out problems that make the entire Chinese political apparatus look bad, it will not stand,” Kable says.

The leadership’s worries about such individuals were evident to the F.B.I. right before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Kable told me, describing how the Chinese worked to ensure that the running of the Olympic flame through San Francisco would not be disrupted by protesters. “And so, you had the M.S.S. and its collaborators deployed in San Francisco just to make sure that the five poisons didn’t get in there and disrupt the optic of what was to be the best Olympics in history,” Kable says. During the run, whose route was changed at the last minute to avoid protesters, Chinese authorities “had their proxies in the community line the streets and also stand back from the streets, looking around to see who might be looking to cause trouble.”

The Chinese government’s clampdown on dissenting voices abroad has grown more aggressive over the years. Emily Morales, a deputy assistant director for analysis at the F.B.I. and a former section chief, summarized that stance in two words: “zero tolerance.” How far the Chinese are willing to go to squash dissidents on distant shores may be indicated by what happened to a sculpture in California by a little-known dissident Chinese artist named Chen Weiming. The artwork — depicting Xi Jinping’s head as a coronavirus molecule — burned down in July 2021, weeks after its unveiling at Chen’s Liberty Sculpture Park in the Mojave Desert. Federal investigators subsequently learned that a Chinese intelligence agency had tasked an American, a bodyguard and former correctional officer, with destroying the sculpture. On Aug. 19 last year, another fire broke out at the sculpture park.

The Chinese government has also been linked to online attacks directed at dissidents. Last year, Deng Yuwen, an exiled writer who moved to the United States in 2018, was traumatized by a barrage of posts from users with fake identities on social media platforms attacking him and his teenage daughter, falsely insinuating that she was a drug user and a prostitute. Wang Dan told me that these acts of intimidation were having an undeniably chilling effect on democracy activists. “While this cannot deter our determination to continue advocating for democracy in China, it does instill fear among some of our supporters,” he told me. “This fear can make them more cautious and hesitant in their support for us.”