Not long after we first met, the man said that if Australia were looking for Chinese spies, he was just the type of man they would be looking at — but the authorities would never dare say I was Chinese intelligence.
Given the anti-Chinese fervor in Australia, he acknowledged he could be viewed as suspect. So why not mess with the authorities? He believed it would be embarrassing for Australia to charge him with espionage because he was an active member of a major political party.
His trust was absolute and completely misplaced. Less than two years later, in 2020, he became the first person charged under Australia’s broad foreign interference laws. He was accused of acting on behalf of Beijing.
Who was the suspect?
Di Sanh “Sunny” Duong, 68, was born and raised in Vietnam. He was among the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese who left this country in the 1970s. He settled in Australia and set up a business making tombstones, secured a middle-class life and became involved in local Chinese community groups.
I interviewed him for the first time in 2019 and quickly realized that Mr. Duong had a tendency to brag — about his travels, his family, and his status in society, so much so that it was hard to take him seriously.
What did he do?
The case against Mr. Duong was not about what he did, but what he planned to do. Mr. Duong had ties to the Chinese Communist Party, prosecutors said. He had invited an Australian government minister to a charity event, they added, with the intention of one day trying to influence him on behalf of Beijing.
During the trial, jurors were presented with two versions of Mr Duong: Was he a skilled manipulator pushing China’s agenda in Australia, as the prosecution would say, or was he, as the defense claimed, a bombastic braggart?
What was the verdict?
Mr. Duong did not testify in court. But while the trial was going on, he met me, in a pub a stone’s throw from the courthouse, to share his story.
He gave strange and convoluted reasons for the actions on which prosecutors built their case. One wandering episode involved how Mr. Duong thought he was interacting with a Chinese intelligence officer, but later concluded, thanks to a TV show, that the official was not a spy. One thing was clear: Mr Duong remained adamant that he had never done anything against Australian interests.
The jury disagreed. In December, he was found guilty of preparing or planning an act of foreign interference. Late last month, a judge sentenced him to two years and nine months in prison. Mr. Duong is expected to serve a year behind bars.
