Florida Engineer Pleads Guilty to Acting as an Agent of the CCP, Including Targeting Falun Gong

A Florida engineer has pleaded guilty to acting as a Chinese agent to collect intelligence on dissidents, including Falun Gong practitioners,  as well as U.S. nonprofits and firms.

Li Ping, a 59-year-old U.S. citizen born in China, on Aug. 23 admitted to conspiring to act as a Chinese agent since at least 2012. He served as a cooperative contact working at the direction of officers of the PRC’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) to obtain information of interest to the PRC government. 

The MSS handles civilian intelligence and often employs “cooperative contacts” in other countries to gather information on foreign corporations, politicians, intelligence officers, and Chinese political dissidents abroad. These contacts assist the MSS by conducting research that supports its intelligence objectives.

Li obtained a wide variety of information at the request of the MSS, including information concerning Chinese dissidents and pro-democracy advocates, practitioners of Falun Gong and U.S.-based non-governmental organizations, and reported that information to the MSS. Li also provided the MSS with information obtained from his employer. Li used a variety of anonymous online accounts for the purpose of communicating with the MSS, and traveled to the PRC to meet with the MSS.

One of Li’s earliest assignments in 2012 was to collect information regarding lawsuits that Falun Gong practitioners planned to bring against Chinese state government officials, according to court filings.

Asked by the Chinese officer in April 2013, Li sent public information and the social media handles of two Israeli authors who had penned books concerning Falun Gong. In September 2014, the officer again asked him to hunt for information about Falun Gong, providing him with biographical information about a Falun Gong practitioner from Hubei, China, including his California home address, phone number, and the make and model of his car. He said the man had protested in front of a Chinese consulate in California. He responded the same day with information about an individual he believed the officer was looking for.

Sherwood Liu, a Falun Gong practitioner from St. Petersburg, reported that he had experienced harassment from Chinese people in the United States after a Chinese security official took photos of him doing Falun Gong exercises in a local Florida park.

Between 2015 and 2022, Li, an employee of U.S. telecommunications and IT companies, also provided sensitive information to an MSS officer including details about his employers’ operations in China, cybersecurity training plans, and information related to hacking events targeting U.S. companies. Li also assisted the officer in gathering personal information about a Chinese individual who had fled to the United States. In each instance, Li promptly complied with the MSS officer’s requests, often within days or the same day, and even uploaded materials to a shared online account, instructing the officer to delete them after being used.

The MSS officer also made various efforts to disguise their communications from U.S. law enforcement, including by routinely deleting emails and materials that Li had provided and creating multiple fake accounts. Li, lacking a Chinese phone number, asked the officer to help set up a shared account on the Chinese social networking platform “Sina”, which they used to transmit documents. He had asked Li about the new Chinese branch offices of his then employer, Verizon, in 2015, to understand whether “the company was engaging in any data collection in China.”

When asked by The Epoch Times whether he regretted his actions or not, he said “no.”

Li faces up to five years in prison along with a maximum $250,000 fine, as well as up to three years of supervised release. He would also be asked to make restitution to any victims of the offenses, according to the plea agreement.

The sentencing hearing is expected to take place in 70 to 90 days. The case is the latest in a series of prosecutions that highlight Beijing’s long-arm reach against its targets of interest, such as Falun Gong. The regime has attempted to eradicate Falun Gong from China and elsewhere around the world over the past 25 years, using torture, propaganda, detention, and forced organ harvesting.