The United States government has charged certain individuals, including some companies, with spying for the United States while working for Chinese intelligence groups, people, or other organizations. In some cases, these individuals were found guilty, while in others, they were found not guilty. From March 2008 to July 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice convicted 44 people in 26 cases where they were accused of spying for China.
Accused of espionage
Xudong Yao, also known as "William Yao," was 57 years old when he became a U.S. citizen who was born in another country. He is a software engineer who was accused of stealing secret information from a train company in Chicago, Illinois. It is believed he is now living in China. On November 18, 2015, he traveled from China to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. According to a legal document called an indictment, he had stolen nine copies of a Chicago company's control system code and information about how the code worked. He was charged with nine crimes related to stealing electronic files. U.S. officials said he took the stolen information with him to China.
On January 28, 2020, the FBI issued an arrest order for Yanqing Ye for being an agent of a foreign government, lying on a visa application, making false statements, and working with others to commit crimes. Ye was a military officer in the People's Liberation Army (PLA), the armed forces of the People's Republic of China (PRC), and a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). While studying at Boston University's Department of Physics, Chemistry, and Biomedical Engineering from October 2017 to April 2019, Ye is accused of continuing to work as a PLA officer. He allegedly completed tasks such as researching, evaluating U.S. military websites, and sending information to China. It is believed he is now in China.
On July 21, 2020, Li Xiaoyu and Dong Jiazhi were charged in a legal document with hacking into the computer systems of hundreds of companies, governments, organizations, and individuals in the United States and other countries. The defendants are accused of searching for weaknesses in the networks of companies working on technologies related to the COVID-19 vaccine, testing, and treatments.
On September 16, 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) charged Chinese hackers Zhang Haoran, Tan Dailin, Jiang Lizhi, Qian Chuan, and Fu Qiang with breaking into more than 100 companies, think tanks, universities, and government agencies worldwide. The DOJ linked them to hacking activities known as APT 41.
In February 2024, Chenguang Gong, 57, of San Jose, California, was arrested for federal crimes accusing him of stealing secret technologies used by the U.S. government to detect nuclear missile launches and track missiles. Gong was a former engineer at a company in Southern California.
On March 6, 2024, a federal grand jury indicted Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, for four crimes related to stealing secret information from Google LLC (Google) about artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Ding, 38, a citizen of the People's Republic of China and resident of Newark, California, is accused of sending Google's confidential information to his personal account while secretly working with companies in China's AI industry. In February 2025, a federal grand jury issued a new indictment charging Ding with seven crimes related to economic espionage and stealing trade secrets, replacing the previous charges.
Linda Sun (Chinese: 孙雯; pinyin: Sūn Wén; born 1983) is a Chinese-American former public servant in New York State. She worked as the deputy chief diversity officer in the administration of New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo from 2018 to 2020 and as the deputy chief of staff to Governor Kathy Hochul from 2021 to 2022.
In September 2024, Sun was arrested and charged with eight federal crimes for allegedly working as an unreported agent for the government of the People's Republic of China. Additional charges were added in February and June 2025. Her trial took place in late 2025, but the jury could not reach a decision, leading to a mistrial. Prosecutors are seeking a retrial.
In January 2025, John Harold Rogers was indicted and arrested for allegedly planning to steal trade secrets from the Federal Reserve for the Chinese government. Rogers worked as a senior advisor to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors' division of international finance from 2010 to 2021. He is accused of sharing confidential information with Chinese co-conspirators and was charged with conspiracy to commit economic espionage and making false statements.
On February 3, 2026, a federal jury found Rogers not guilty of espionage charges.
On March 6, 2025, Jian Zhao and Li Tian, both active-duty U.S. Army soldiers, and Ruoyu Duan, a former U.S. Army soldier, were arrested. Tian and Duan were charged with conspiring to commit bribery and stealing U.S. military information. Zhao was charged with conspiring to share national defense information with individuals in China, as well as bribery and stealing government property.
On March 7, 2025, Michael Charles Schena, 42, of Alexandria, Virginia, was arrested for allegedly participating in a criminal plan to gather, transmit, or lose national defense information to the People's Republic of China. Schena works for the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., and had a Top Secret security clearance. The FBI mentioned an invoice for an iPhone he allegedly used to share information. Schena was sentenced to four years in prison in September 2025.
In March 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed indictments against Chinese nationals Yin Kecheng (尹可成), also known as “YKC” or “YIN,” and Zhou Shuai (周帅), also known as “Coldface” or “ZHOU,” for participating in a long-term cyber espionage campaign linked to the hacking group APT27. The indictment states that between 2011 and 2024, Yin and Zhou hacked into U.S. defense contractors, technology companies, government agencies, and other organizations to steal data for profit and on behalf of Chinese state security services, including the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the Ministry of Public Security (MPS). Their methods involved exploiting network weaknesses, using malware, and stealing data through virtual private servers and fake websites. Zhou is also accused of collecting information on telecommunications, border activity, and individuals in media, civil service, and religious sectors
Accused of related crimes
On April 21, 2021, Mingqing Xiao, who is 59 years old and works as a mathematics professor and researcher at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, was charged with two charges of wire fraud and one charge of making a false statement. It is claimed that Xiao obtained $151,099 in federal grant money from the National Science Foundation (NSF) by hiding other funding sources from Shenzhen University and a government science foundation in Guandong province of China.
Pled guilty or convicted (espionage)
In February 1986, Larry Wu-tai Chin was found guilty of 17 crimes, including espionage, conspiracy, and tax evasion. He received two life sentences but died before being sentenced.
Chin worked for the U.S. intelligence community for nearly 35 years while secretly sharing classified information with China. He became a spy in 1944 when he started as a translator for the U.S. in Fuzhou, China. In 1948, he worked as an interpreter at the U.S. consulate in Shanghai and later in Korea. In 1952, he joined the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service and moved to California in 1961. After becoming a U.S. citizen in 1965, he worked in Arlington, Virginia, where he had access to secret reports and translations from China. He met his case officer, Ou Qiming, during trips to Hong Kong starting in the 1950s. In the 1970s, he had a contact in
Pled guilty or convicted (other crimes)
John Reece Roth, a retired professor of electrical and computer engineering, was found guilty on September 3, 2008, of one charge related to working with Atmospheric Glow Technology Inc., a technology company in Knoxville, to illegally export 15 different "defense articles" to a citizen of the People's Republic of China in 2005 and 2006. This action violated the Arms Export Control Act. He was also found guilty of 15 charges related to breaking the Arms Export Control Act and one charge of wire fraud for sharing sensitive military information linked to an Air Force contract and for not providing honest services to the university. On July 9, 2009, when he was 72 years old, Roth was sentenced to four years in prison and two years of supervised release after completing his prison term. Between 2005 and 2006, Roth, who was an electrical engineering professor at the University of Tennessee (UT) and an employee of Atmospheric Glow Technologies (AGT), Inc., intentionally shared export-controlled defense information with a Chinese graduate student on his research team. Roth also traveled to China with export-controlled documents. At one point, Roth asked the Chinese graduate student to send export-controlled material to a Chinese professor he visited.
It was claimed that Roth shared technical data, including 15 different defense articles, with a citizen of the People's Republic of China, which broke the Arms Export Control Act. The defense articles contained specific military technical data that was restricted and was part of an Air Force project to develop plasma technology for use in weapons system drones.
Hua Jun Zhao, 42, was accused of stealing a cancer-research compound from a Medical College of Wisconsin office in Milwaukee in an attempt to deliver it to Zhejiang University, according to an FBI agent's March 29, 2013, statement. Presiding judge Charles N. Clevert found no evidence that Zhao intended to defraud or cause harm to the Medical College of Wisconsin or to make money for himself. Zhao was convicted for "accessing a computer without authorization and obtaining information worth more than $5,000" for accessing his research on university-owned computers after school officials took his laptop, portable memory devices, and papers.
Szuhsiung Ho, also known as Allen Ho, 66, a naturalized U.S. citizen, admitted to being part of a plan to produce or develop special nuclear material outside the U.S. without the required approval from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which violates the Atomic Energy Act. In April 2016, a federal grand jury charged Ho with two counts, along with China General Nuclear Power Company (CGNPC), the largest nuclear power company in China, and Energy Technology International (ETI), a Delaware-based company. At the time of the charges, Ho was a nuclear engineer working as a consultant for CGNPC and also owned ETI. CGNPC specialized in creating and manufacturing nuclear reactors and was controlled by China's State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. Born in China, Ho is a naturalized U.S. citizen who lived in both Delaware and China.
Bo Jiang, a researcher working on "source code for high technology imaging" at NASA's Langley Research Center, was arrested on March 16, 2013, at Washington Dulles International Airport before returning to China. Jiang allegedly told the FBI he was carrying fewer computer storage devices than he actually was. He was accused of espionage by Representative Frank Wolf and investigated for possible violations of the Arms Export Control Act. An affidavit stated that Jiang had previously taken a NASA laptop with sensitive information to China. U.S. Magistrate Judge Lawrence Leonard ordered Jiang released after a federal prosecutor said there was no evidence he had sensitive, secret, or classified material. According to Jiang's lawyer, Fernando Groene, a former federal prosecutor, Representative Wolf unfairly targeted Jiang. On May 2, Jiang was cleared in federal court of the felony charge of lying to federal investigators. Jiang was still convicted for downloading copyrighted movies, television shows, and sexually explicit images on the NASA-owned laptop.
In January 2017, Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Mary B. McCord, Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security, and William F. Sweeney Jr., Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Field Office of the FBI, announced that Kun Shan Chun, also known as "Joey Chun," was sentenced to 24 months in prison and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine for acting as an agent of the People's Republic of China in the U.S. without informing the Attorney General. Chun admitted guilt on August 1, 2016. U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero imposed the sentence. Kun Shan Chun, a native of China and naturalized U.S. citizen, worked as an FBI technician since 1997 and had top secret clearance.
On September 16, 2019, Zhongsan Liu was arrested in Fort Lee, New Jersey, by federal agents and charged with conspiracy to commit visa fraud for helping Chinese government employees fraudulently obtain U.S. visas. U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman stated that Liu conspired to get research scholar visas for people whose real purpose was not research but to recruit U.S. experts to China. Liu was released on bail and did not enter a formal plea. In March 2022, Liu was convicted for his role in a visa fraud conspiracy, which could result in a maximum sentence of five years.
In December 2019, Zaosong Zheng, a medical student from China, was arrested at Boston Logan Airport for stealing 21 vials of biological research and trying to smuggle them to China on a flight. Zheng said he planned to use the vials in his own laboratory and publish the results under his name. Zheng was charged with making false statements, visa fraud, acting as an agent of a foreign government, conspiracy, and smuggling goods from the U.S. In March 2020, Zheng was released on a $100,000 bond. He pleaded guilty in December 2020 to one charge of making false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements. On January 6, 2021, Zheng was sentenced to time served, three years of supervised release, and ordered to leave the United States. According to his attorney, Zheng had tickets to leave for China on January 7, 2021, and agreed not to return to the U.S. for at least 10 years.
Charles M. Lieber, the former Chair of Harvard University's Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department, was arrested on January 28, 2020, for lying to federal authorities about his involvement in China's Thousand Talents Program, which aims to recruit individuals with access to foreign technology and intellectual property. He was formally indicted in June 2020. On July 28, 2020, he was also charged with tax offenses for not reporting income he received from Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in Wuhan, China. In April 2023, Lieber was sentenced for lying to the U.S. government and for failing to declare large sums of money he received as part of a contract.
Exonerated
On September 21, 2020, U.S. government officials accused New York City police officer Baimadajie Angwang of acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government. They said he shared information about Tibetans in the United States with two officials from China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) at the Chinese consulate. Angwang was born in Tibet, China, and became a U.S. citizen later. He also works for the U.S. Army Reserve. His father was a retired member of China’s army and part of the Communist Party of China (CCP). His mother is also a CCP member and a former government worker. Angwang allegedly gave the Chinese consulate access to senior New York Police Department (NYPD) officials through invitations to official events.
In January 2023, all charges against Angwang were dropped. He told the Associated Press that he spoke with Chinese officials to get a visa to return to Tibet so he could meet his parents and introduce his daughter to them. The NYPD asked him to answer questions about the case, but Angwang refused after his lawyers said the department would not share documents needed to prepare for the questioning. In 2024, Angwang was fired from his job. An NYPD judge and his lawyer said this was an unusually harsh punishment. In a letter, NYPD commissioner Edward Caban wrote that the department, which functions like a military group, could not complete its work if employees refused to answer questions. Angwang plans to sue the NYPD.
On August 28, 2020, Chinese national Guan Lei, 29, of Alhambra, was charged with destroying a hard drive during an FBI investigation into the possible transfer of sensitive software to China. The court dismissed the case against Guan on July 26, 2021.
On May 14, 2020, Dr. Qing Wang, a former employee of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, was arrested and charged with lying about receiving over $3.6 million in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He was also accused of being part of China’s Thousand Talents Program. On July 15, 2021, federal prosecutors dropped the case after a review.
Three Chinese nationals were charged with visa fraud. On June 7, 2020, Xin Wang was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport and charged with lying on his U.S. visa application. Wang, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and a member of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), was accused of stealing secrets from medical researchers and sending them to a military lab in China. Chen Song and Kaikai Zhao were arrested in July 2020 for hiding their PLA ties on visa applications. The court dismissed the case against all three on July 26, 2021.
In January 2021, Gang Chen, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was charged with failing to report contracts, appointments, and awards from Chinese organizations to the U.S. Department of Energy. He was also charged with wire fraud, failing to report a foreign bank account, and lying on a tax return. Chen, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in China, has worked with Chinese groups since 2012 to support China’s technological and scientific goals. On January 14, 2022, prosecutors said charges against Chen should be dropped based on “new information.” On January 20, 2022, all charges were dismissed. Officials from the Department of Energy said they likely would have given Chen grants even if he had reported his ties to China.
Juan Tang, 37, was charged with visa fraud and lying to the FBI about her ties to China’s PLA on a visa application for work at the University of California, Davis. The FBI sought to arrest Tang after an arrest warrant was filed on June 26, 2020, and unsealed on July 20, 2020. Tang sought shelter at the Chinese consulate in San Francisco for several weeks before leaving to attend a medical appointment and being arrested. The court dismissed the case against Tang on July 23, 2021.
Xiafen “Sherry” Chen, 59, was a hydrologist for the U.S. government in Ohio. She was falsely accused of spying and arrested in October 2014. She was charged with four felonies, including illegally downloading data about national infrastructure and lying about when she last saw a Chinese official. In March 2015, prosecutors dropped all charges after a lawyer persuaded them to do so. In April 2018, a judge ordered the U.S. Department of Commerce to reinstate Chen’s job, calling her case “grossly unjust.”
In October 2013, two former employees of Eli Lilly and Co., Guoqing Cao and Shuyu Li, were arrested for stealing drug information worth $55 million and sending it to a Chinese competitor. U.S. officials called the case “a crime against the nation” and called the defendants “traitors.” In December 2014, charges were dropped “in the interests of justice.”
Anming Hu, a Chinese-Canadian professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, was arrested on February 27, 2020. He was charged with fraud and lying about his ties to a Chinese university while receiving funding from NASA. After 21 months of FBI surveillance found no evidence of espionage, federal prosecutors accused Hu of hiding his relationship with a Chinese university. In June 2021, an FBI agent admitted he falsely accused Hu of being a spy, wrongly labeled him a Chinese military agent, and put him on a no-fly list. The trial ended in a mistrial, and a juror called the case “ridiculous.” U.S. lawmakers later asked for an investigation into FBI actions.
In September 2021, a judge cleared Hu of all charges, stating no jury could reasonably believe Hu had a plan to defraud NASA.
In 2007, two Silicon Valley engineers, Lan Lee and Yuefei Ge, were charged with stealing microchip designs from NetLogic Microsystems for the benefit of China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army. Their indictment said they created a company to help the Chinese military.