Litang Liang was charged with “acting within the United States as an agent of the government of the People’s Republic of China.”Supplied
A Boston man with ties to Chinese diplomats has been arrested for an alleged conspiracy to inform Beijing about its potential allies and enemies inside the United States.
Litang Liang, an American citizen in his 60s who co-founded a group promoting Taiwan merging with China, has been charged with “acting within the United States as an agent of the government of the People’s Republic of China.”
According to a U.S. criminal complaint filed in a Boston court, Mr. Liang was communicating with several Chinese diplomats posted to the United States. The names of specific Chinese diplomats and government officials were withheld as they are not themselves accused of any wrongdoing.
Mr. Liang was arrested on Tuesday, after the Canadian government this week expelled a Chinese diplomat posted to Toronto in connection with political interference allegations.
Canada has no parallels to the kinds of criminal charges that Mr. Liang faces. In the United States, he is accused of acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government and conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government. Decades ago, U.S. lawmakers passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act to punish people who work for foreign governments without first declaring their aims and intents to Washington.
The Canadian government, which has been under fire for failing to pass similar laws, says it is on the cusp of creating a Canadian Foreign Influence Transparency Registry.
Alexander Cohen, a spokesman for Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, recently said in an e-mail that the government is concluding a round of consultations with members of the Chinese-Canadian community. The government intends “to act quickly on the input we receive,” he said.
The U.S. registration law has proven to be a useful tool for American prosecutors wanting to crack down on foreign governments that meddle in immigrant communities. Such cases remain harder to prosecute in Canada and its criminal courts, even though the underlying problems are the same.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service last week released a public report highlighting the threat of interference by “foreign state actors [who] monitor, intimidate and harass diaspora communities.” The CSIS report did not identify any specific countries but it said such interference campaigns often involve foreign governments “cultivating witting or unwitting individuals to assist them, which enables them to operate with plausible deniability.”
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In the Boston case, the conspiracy allegedly started five years ago. The charging documents say that in 2018 Mr. Liang reported to the New York Chinese consulate the name of a “former student activist” who he held responsible for the destruction of Chinese government flags in Boston’s Chinatown. Later that year he is alleged to have also helped relay a “black name list” to diplomats and shared with them “photographs and videos of the individual he claimed has ‘sabotaged’ the PRC flags.”
In 2019, Mr. Liang co-founded a group called the New England Alliance for the Peaceful Unification of China. That same year he is alleged to have helped organize counterprotests that intended to shout down a rally in Boston, where people were rallying against a new Hong Kong law facilitating the extradition of its residents to China.
“During the Boston Hong Kong rally, Liang took numerous photographs and videos of both counterprotesters and the antiextradition pro-democracy dissidents,” the U.S. criminal complaint says. It says he was often in communication with Chinese diplomats at this time, including by sending videos to “one of the highest-ranking PRC diplomats in the United States.”
The criminal complaint alleges Mr. Liang was in contact with Chinese officials overseas, including a Shanghai-based Ministry of Public Security official to whom he provided names of Boston residents who “would be the best candidates” to recruit and train.
All this amounts to a criminal scheme, according to U.S. prosecutors. “The object and purpose of the conspiracy was to act at the direction or control of the PRC government in order to covertly advance the PRC government’s goals and agenda,” the charging documents say.
The Globe and Mail reported May 1 that Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei in China’s Toronto consulate was part of efforts to target Conservative MP Michael Chong and his family after the politician’s work in spearheading a parliamentary motion that declared Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs constituted genocide.
The federal government expelled Mr. Zhao from Canada this week. China immediately followed by announcing it would be expelling a Canadian diplomat posted to China.