U.S. authorities have charged a Florida telecommunications worker with years-long spying on the persecuted Falun Gong community and other Chinese dissidents on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a newly unsealed federal indictment shows.
The man, Ping Li, is a U.S. citizen who immigrated from China. For over 13 years, from around January 2012 through to July this year, Mr. Li allegedly worked as a cooperative agent for the Ministry of State Security—China’s top intelligence gathering agency.
Under the requests of an officer from the ministry in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the 59-year-old collected 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 on July 22 arrested Mr. Li. He made his first court appearance on Monday before being released. If convicted, Mr. Li faces up to 15 years in prison.
The case marks the latest U.S. government action against Beijing’s long arm attempt in the United States to suppress Falun Gong, a self-improvement meditation discipline based on the values of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
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, the court document said.
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 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.
The prosecutors outlined five trips that Mr. Li had made to China to meet with the 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” 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 back the same day with details on the owners of the address.
The Epoch Times has reached out to Mr. Li’s attorney Daniel Fernandez for comment regarding the charges.
