“60 Minutes” is reprising a story from May 2025 about what Red China’s spies are up to in the United States and the fate of some who have been caught (CBS News, August 31, 2025).
“Xi Jinping probably remembers that a lot of revolutions start outside the home country, and he doesn’t want that to happen to China,” say Jim Lewis, a former U.S. diplomat with more than thirty years of experience with the PRC’s intelligence agencies. “So there’s a huge effort to pay attention to the expatriate population.”
In total, over the last five years, the Department of Justice has indicted more than 140 people for felonies related to harassment, hacking, and spying for China within the U.S.
And one of the accused worked for the governor of New York. Federal prosecutors allege a former top aide to Kathy Hochul, named Linda Sun, accepted millions of dollars to influence who the governor met with, and what she said about China. Sun and her husband, who have pled not guilty, owned a multi-million dollar home on Long Island and a condo in Hawaii.
Interviewees include Shujun Wang, “a trusted member of the Chinese dissident community” who for almost twenty years was also spying for China’s Ministry of State Security; Anna Yeung-Cheung, pro-democracy activist whose “name and contact information, along with [that of] 63 others, was found in Mr. Wang’s luggage when he returned to New York from a trip to China in 2019”; and Anna Kwok, who has a $130,000 bounty on her head, offered by a government that regards “fighting for democracy, wanting a say in our own future” as a crime.
Shujan Wang’s many years of spying for the Ministry of State Security did not incur much of a cost. Despite noting that Wang had committed serious crimes against the United States, a judge imposed only supervised release, no jail time, in deference to the defendant’s cognitive decline and other health problems.
Asked whether she feels safe in the U.S., Kwok (shown above) says that “with China’s long arm repression, it’s difficult to feel free anywhere in the world. The thing about the Chinese government is that you can leave the country, you can leave the territory, but you can never actually leave their governance.”
