Wang Liqiang was a Chinese fraudster who defected to Australia in November 2019 under the pretense of being a spy. Less than a week after he defected, Australian security guards deduced that he had been lying about his past, as he was unable to name the military institution which he worked for (four times) and falsely claimed to have been involved with the Causeway Bay bookseller abductions in Hong Kong.
Biography[]
Wang Liqiang was born in China, and he claimed to have become a top-level espionage operative. In November 2019, he came to Australia and claimed to have been involved in subversive activities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, although Shanghai police revealed that he was a convicted fraudster who left mainland China for Hong Kong on bogus travel documents, and the Australian security guards who apprehended him took less than a week to deduce that Wang was a liar; he failed four times to correctly name the military institution he was working for. Among his claims were that the Chinese government backed pro-Beijing media outlets and political candidates during the 2018 Taiwanese local elections, that he had taken part in the abductions of the Causeway Bay booksellers in Hong Kong, that the Communist Party was infiltrating the Chinese diaspora through the Tongs (which The Epoch Times reporter Joshua Philipp claimed was the unofficial governing body of every "Chinatown" worldwide) and spying on dissenters, that China controlled overseas Chinese student groups which they could groom into spies and get them into major US businesses or government jobs (or silence them if they spoke out for human rights), and that China had taken US politicians and businesspeople on propaganda trips to influence US politics and business.