All Xiong Yan wanted to do was run for Congress. The problem was that he is a naturalized U.S. citizen whom the Chinese Communist Party has been keeping track of perhaps since his protest-organizing days as a student in Beijing. And the CCP did not want this guy to become a U.S. congressman.
So in 2022, the Party enlisted the aid of Chinese agents present in the United States, like Yuanjun Tang, to stop Yan. Manhattan federal prosecutors have just arrested Tang.
Xiong Yan—a former student organizer back in China—ran in a Democratic primary for Congress in Brooklyn in 2022, but a network of his former country’s spies went to great lengths to stop him, according to the investigation, which has led to charges against at least two people.
Communications intercepted by the feds showed one agent attempting to set Yan—a 59-year-old pastor and father of eight—up with a prostitute to smear his name, or hiring a thug to break his legs…
Last week, Manhattan federal prosecutors charged Yuanjun Tang, a one-time pro-democracy activist, with spying on fellow dissidents, including Yan, for the Chinese government.
Tang, 67, is accused of secretly working for the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), who allegedly equipped him with a spy camera phone to report on Yan’s activities during the Democratic primary.
Yan believes that the Chinese ran another candidate against him to split the vote. He says that “at speaking events with other candidates, the community leaders wouldn’t give me the microphone.” Various smears against him were spread on Chinese social media.
None of this deterred him from running for the seat, but his showing in the Democratic primary was pitiful; he got only about 700 votes.
It’s hard to say whether the CCP-authorized election interference reduced the count. Plenty of American political aspirants do lousy without any assistance from China. The Post notes that in the same primary, Yan finished ahead of a better-known political figure, a former mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, who “received just 519 votes in the primary.”
Back in the late 1980s, Yan was one of the student organizers of protests in Tiananmen Square. He spent 19 months in prison for his involvement before he was able to seek political asylum in the United States.
“I really feel sad that 35 years later, the Chinese Communist Party is still going after us, and have sent their people to every corner of the U.S. and the world to find us.”
