Ping Li is a naturalized U.S. citizen “who spied on Falun Gong practitioners and Chinese dissidents in the United States on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.” The Justice Department is seeking to revoke his citizenship (Falun Dafa Infocenter, October 8, 2026).
According to the complaint filed Oct. 1 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Li worked at the direction of officers of the CCP’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) from at least 2012. His task was to obtain information of interest to Beijing—including on Falun Gong practitioners, Chinese dissidents and pro-democracy advocates, and U.S.-based nongovernmental organizations—and report it back to the MSS….
Court filings from Li’s 2024 criminal case show that Falun Gong was among his targets from the start. One of his earliest assignments, in 2012, was to collect information on lawsuits that Falun Gong practitioners planned to bring against Chinese officials. In April 2013, at his handler’s request, he sent the social media handles of two Israeli authors who had written books about Falun Gong.
In September 2014, the MSS officer sent Li details on a Falun Gong practitioner from Hubei Province who had protested outside a Chinese consulate in California, including the man’s home address, phone number, and the make and model of his car. Li replied the same day with information on the person he believed the officer was seeking. He used anonymous online accounts to communicate with the MSS, traveled to China to meet his handlers, and typically answered their requests within days, often the same day.
And so on. For years, from 2015 to 2022, Li also gave the CCP confidential information about his employer, a telecommunications company, “including cybersecurity training plans and details of hacking incidents targeting U.S. companies.”
The Falun Dafa Information Center’s executive director, Levi Browde, makes peculiar use of the words “even if all they do.” The FDIC report quotes him as saying that the case “sets a clear precedent. Anyone in the United States who works for the CCP to target Falun Gong or other groups persecuted in China, even if all they do is gather intelligence, can be convicted, stripped of their citizenship, and deported.”
Even if all they do is…spy for the Chinese Communist Party? That’s better than spying and also harassing on behalf of the CCP. Or spying, harassing, kidnapping, and committing murder. But the spying by itself is plenty bad enough. This is a guy who knew exactly what he was doing over a period of many years.
On October 5, 2026, the Justice Department reported that it was seeking the denaturalization of 40 criminals, including 61-year-old Ping Li, who had “conspired to act as an agent of a foreign government without prior notification to the Attorney General….” Among the forty being pursued in the sweep is another U.S. citizen who spied for China, Jinchao Wei, convicted in August 2025 and sentenced on January 12, 2026 to over 16 years in prison. Wei had used his access as a sailor to the U.S. Navy to sell military secrets to the Chinese government.
The October 5 press release mentions Wei’s sentence but not that of Ping Li, who was sentenced on November 25, 2024 to four years in prison for spying for the PRC (aka “conspiring to act as an agent of the People’s Republic of China without notification to the Attorney General”).
Also see:
Falun Dafa Infocenter: “Falun Gong Practitioners Harassed and Assaulted Near US–China Summit in Washington, D.C. (September 24, 2026” (October 7, 2026)
Falun Dafa Infocenter: “Falun Gong Practitioners and Allies Call for an End to the Persecution as Xi Visits Washington” (October 8, 2026)
