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Dickson Yeo/Facebook
Jun Wei Yeo, an enthusiastic and freshly enrolled Singaporean PhD trainee, was no doubt happy when he was invited to give a presentation to Chinese academics in Beijing in 2015.
His doctorate research study had to do with Chinese foreign policy and he was about to discover direct how the rising superpower seeks to attain influence.
After his discussion, Jun Wei, also called Dickson, was, according to US court documents, approached by a number of people who said they worked for Chinese think tanks. They stated they wanted to pay him to offer “political reports and information”. They would later on specify precisely what they desired: “scuttlebutt” – rumours and insider understanding.
He soon understood they were Chinese intelligence agents but stayed in contact with them, a sworn declaration states. He was very first asked to focus on countries in South East Asia however later, their interest relied on the US government.
That was how Dickson Yeo triggered on a course to becoming a Chinese agent – one who would end up using the expert networking site LinkedIn, a fake consulting company and cover as a curious academic to tempt in American targets.
Five years later on, on Friday, in the middle of deep stress in between the US and China and an identified crackdown from Washington on Beijing’s spies, Yeo pleaded guilty in an US court to being an “unlawful representative of a foreign power” The 39- year-old confront 10 years in jail.
Alumni at Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP), which trains some of Asia’s leading civil servants and government authorities, were left stunned by the news that their former peer had actually confessed to being a Chinese agent.
” He was a very active student in class. I always saw him as a really intelligent individual,” said one previous postgraduate trainee who did not wish to be called
She said he typically talked about social inequality – and that his household struggled economically when he was a child. She stated she discovered it challenging to fix up the individual she understood with his guilty plea.
A previous member of personnel at the institution painted a different photo, saying Yeo seemed to have “an inflated sense of his own importance”.
Yeo’s PhD manager had actually been Huang Jing, a prominent Chinese-American professor who was expelled from Singapore in 2017 for being an “representative of influence of a foreign nation” that was not determined.
Huang Jing constantly denied those accusations. After leaving Singapore, he initially operated in Washington DC, and now Beijing.
According to the court documents released with Yeo’s guilty plea, the student fulfilled his Chinese handlers on dozens of occasions in various areas in China.
Throughout one meeting he was asked to particularly acquire info about the US Department of Commerce, expert system and the Sino-US trade war.
Bilahari Kausikan, the previous permanent secretary at Singapore’s foreign minist