U.S. authorities have charged a Florida telecommunications worker with spying on the persecuted Falun Gong community and other Chinese dissidents for years on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a newly unsealed federal indictment shows.
The man, Li Ping, is a U.S. citizen who emigrated from China. For more than 12 years—from about January 2012 through this month—Mr. Li allegedly worked as a cooperative agent for the Ministry of State Security, China’s top intelligence gathering agency.
At the request of an officer from the ministry in Wuhan, China, the 59-year-old allegedly collected the personal details of Chinese dissidents, pro-democracy activists, U.S. politicians and nonprofits, and practitioners and supporters of the spiritual group Falun Gong, which the regime has tried for 25 years to eliminate through various forms of persecution, brainwashing, and torture.
Federal marshals arrested Mr. Li on July 20, and he made his first court appearance on July 22 before being released. If convicted, Mr. Li faces up to 15 years in prison.
The case is the latest U.S. government action against Beijing’s long-arm attempt in the United States to suppress Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, a spiritual discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. Mr. Li’s arrest date also coincides with the 25th anniversary of the persecution of Falun Gong in China, a day that the U.S. authorities marked by calling for Beijing to “cease its repressive campaign and release all who have been imprisoned for their beliefs.”
In May 2023, the Justice Department charged two men with attempting to bribe the Internal Revenue Service into revoking the nonprofit status of an entity run by Falun Gong practitioners.
With the strict limitations on information access over the internet, Chinese intelligence officers frequently rely on overseas “cooperative contacts” to obtain sensitive information from the United States and other countries and to intimidate political dissidents, according to the indictment.
This is where Mr. Li, who at various times worked for a “major U.S. telecommunications company and an international information technology company,” played a part, according to the court document.
In communicating with the Chinese intelligence officer, Mr. Li created “numerous” email accounts with fake subscriber information and deployed various ways to evade U.S. law enforcement detection.
Among what Mr. Li emailed at the request of the foreign officer were the name and biographical information of a Falun Gong practitioner in St. Petersburg, Florida, and details about two Israeli authors who had written a book concerning Falun Gong, in August 2012 and April 2013, respectively, according to the document.
Beijing’s repression of Falun Gong extends far beyond China’s geographical boundary.
Its practitioners are “of particular interest” to Chinese intelligence services “because of Falun Gong’s advocacy of ideas deemed subversive to the CCP,” the indictment states.
Public and leaked documents from China’s Communist Party organs show that the regime continues to consider suppressing Falun Gong a top priority. In interviews, many Falun Gong practitioners have described police pressuring their relatives in China to pry for their U.S. information or to coerce them into renouncing their beliefs.
The prosecutors outlined five trips that Mr. Li had made to China to meet with the intelligence officer.
Over the past decade, he allegedly shared information regarding the electronic surveillance capabilities of the U.S. government and operations of U.S. nonprofits. He also created a training instruction plan for the officer in 2017 that he uploaded to a Chinese email account, telling the officer to delete the file after reading it, according to the indictment.
Twice, under request, he allegedly gave details about his employers—a newly opened branch office of a “major U.S. telecommunications company” in China that the indictment didn’t name, in March 2015, and cybersecurity training materials from his new employer, an international information technology company, in March 2022.
In May 2021, the Chinese officer requested information about hacking events targeting U.S. firms, including a highly publicized Chinese state-directed hacking of a major U.S. company. According to the complaint, Mr. Li responded by sending information about the U.S. government response.
In June 2022, the officer sought help from Mr. Li in locating a Chinese individual who had fled to the United States, for whom Chinese intelligence had a suspected U.S. residential address. Mr. Li allegedly replied on the same day with details about the owners of the address.
The Epoch Times has reached out to Mr. Li’s attorney, Daniel Fernandez, for comment regarding the charges.
From The Epoch Times