08/31/2025: China Spies, St. Mary’s, Sounds of Cajun Country

0:07What has this 76-year-old retired historian been doing in the United States? Were you spying for the Chinese government? According to U.S. intelligence, he was part of a massive network of covert agents recruited by China to spy for its Ministry of State Security. This is, in scale and in scope and in brazenness, the biggest espionage operation against the U.S. in its history. So, are you math geniuses? Not at all. How did these high school students prove an ancient mathematical equation that was thought to be impossible for 2 ,000 years? We start with just a regular right triangle where the angle in the corner is 90 degrees.

0:54Then we start creating similar but smaller right triangles. And then it continues for infinity. Am I going a little too? You've been beyond me since the beginning.

1:08You need no passport to enter Cajun country, but it's an exotic land like nowhere else. Home to a cuisine, a language, a landscape, even a pacing all its own. And then there's the singular sound. What defines the Cajun sound? Typically, Cajun music has a Cajun accordion, fiddle sung in Cajun French. They play two-step and waltzes. It's got a very unique rhythm, a very syncopated rhythm that you don't hear in a lot of other kinds of music. It's a syncopation that drives the music. And it has a hauntingness about it, the music. And it's just got soul, you know? I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker.

1:48I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. Fonzie. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Nora O'Donnell. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes.

2:06According to the latest assessment from America's intelligence agencies, China remains the most active and persistent cyber threat to the U.S. Its hackers have infiltrated the U.S. government, the private sector, and critical infrastructure, like water systems and power grids. Hacking, however, has not replaced Beijing's pursuit of old-fashioned human intelligence. As we first reported in May, China's Communist Party remains intent on leveraging a worldwide network of covert agents to monitor and influence events outside its own borders and to surveil and intimidate Chinese dissidents right here in America.

2:51Tonight, you'll hear about why China spies are on the rise and what happens when one gets caught. This is, in scale and in scope and in brazenness, the biggest espionage operation against the U.S. in its history. Jim Lewis is a former U.S. diplomat whose direct experience with China's intelligence agencies spans more than 30 years. He says since President Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, China's spies no longer seem to fear the U.S. Why do China's espionage efforts appear to be growing so big, so fast under Xi Jinping? Xi Jinping thinks it's China's time to move to the center of the world stage.

3:40Xi Jinping looks at the West and at the U.S. and says, these people are feeble-minded, and I'm going to be able to beat them. It may not be a household name in the U.S., but according to Lewis, China's Ministry of State Security, or MSS, is now the largest and most active spy agency in the world. In a propaganda video the spy agency posted last year on China's largest social network, a voiceover boasts that the MSS senses things before they happen and fights against evil. The slick production is a public message to both foreign adversaries and China's own citizens about the ministry's growing power.

4:26It's sort of the equivalent of the CIA, but it has much greater powers. One estimate says the MSS might have 600 ,000 employees, and they are committed to going after the United States. We are target number two for them. Who's target number one? Target number one is China's own people. when Xi Jinping wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. He's really worried that the Chinese Communist Party was on the path that the Soviet Communist Party was on. Lewis says to maintain absolute power at home, President Xi looks abroad. Xi Jinping probably remembers that a lot of revolutions start outside the home country, and he doesn't want that to happen to China.

5:07So there's a huge effort to pay attention to the expatriate population. One way Beijing paid attention, according to the FBI, was to secretly open an overseas Chinese police station right in the middle of New York City. It was discovered in 2022, hidden among businesses in a commercial building in Manhattan's Chinatown. While Chinese expats could renew government documents there like driver's licenses, federal prosecutors said the main purpose of the outpost was to target and harass Chinese dissidents. They've done it in the Netherlands, they've done it in Canada, but the idea that you'd open a police station in another country, that's a signal disrespect of the sovereignty of that nation.

5:55After the station was shut down, two Chinese Americans who allegedly opened it were charged with conspiracy to act as unregistered foreign agents of China. In total, over the last five years, the Department of Justice has indicted more than 140 people for felonies related to harassment, hacking, and spying for China within the U.S. And one of the accused worked for the governor of New York. Federal prosecutors allege a former top aide to Kathy Hochul, named Linda Sun, accepted millions of dollars to influence who the governor met with and what she said about China. Sun and her husband, who have pled not guilty, owned a multi-million dollar home on Long Island and a condo in Hawaii.

6:46Having a Ferrari and two multi-million dollar houses is a bad idea. For a government employee. Everyone leaves a record. Some records are more flamboyant than others. Flamboyant is not a word that comes to mind when you meet Xu Jun Wang. The 76-year-old retired historian came to the U.S. from China in 1994 as a visiting scholar at Columbia University. In New York, home to more exiled Chinese activists than any other city in the world, Wang helped found a group that met regularly and was dedicated to democracy in China.

7:27In the 2010s, the overseas democracy movement was gaining momentum, and I was eager to be a part of it and promote democracy. What was your specific role in the pro-democracy community in Flushing, Queens? I was assigned the role of vice president, secretary general for publicity and events. all kinds of events. While Xu Junwang became a trusted member of the Chinese dissident community here in New York, he kept another role secret. For almost 20 years, he was spying for China's Ministry of State Security. Did you take notes about who attended these meetings and what they said? Yes. When did you start sharing that information with China's largest intelligence group?

8:19That is a very big misunderstanding. In 2022, Xu Junwang was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for sharing dissidents' names, contact information, and private conversations at the direction of the MSS for 17 years. When we spoke with him in February through an interpreter, he was at times combative and disputed basic facts of his case. So we eventually asked Mr. Wang point blank. Were you spying for the Chinese government? No. Throughout the entire trial, they were very careful. They never used the word spy. Just look at the record, and you'll see that. We did. And while lying to 60 Minutes may not be a crime, lying to the FBI is.

9:09Mr. Wong repeatedly told federal agents he had no contact with the Ministry of State Security. But according to federal prosecutors, he met with these MSS officers in China and they offered him plane tickets and helped his family with a business dispute. In 2021, someone claiming to be from the MSS showed up at Mr. Wong's door to help delete communications from his computer that might incriminate him. Video from the encounter showed he welcomed the man's help. Unfortunately for Mr. Wong, the Chinese operative was actually an undercover FBI agent. Mr. Wong had pled not guilty. Last August, he was convicted of making false statements, illegally possessing democracy activist identification and acting as an unregistered foreign agent of China.

10:06Our position has always been that he never had the intent to be an agent of the Chinese government. Mr. Wong's lawyers, Zachary Margulis Onema and Kevin Tong, admit their client was in touch with Chinese intelligence. But they argue he didn't break the law and claim FBI agents went after him once they were unable to recruit him for the U.S. They were hoping he would roll over and identify handlers higher up the food chain, though he did not do so. And they felt a little vindictive and angry and frustrated about their inability to stop higher-up actual espionage, and they turned him into this fall guy.

10:46But when you look at the reality, he didn't have any access to top-secret information. All he passed over is the attendance sheet, of the democracy movement, those information are available in public. People's names that attend a private event are not public. They're only made public. Can we hone in on that? There's no evidence of any harm to the United States' interests, or to democracy movement interests, from anything that he did. Democracy! Democracy! Anna Young-Cheng disagrees. She testified against Mr. Wang in court. The pro-democracy activist's name and contact information, along with 63 others, was found in Mr.

11:31Wong's luggage when he returned to New York from a trip to China in 2019. Did you ever imagine that Mr. Wong was one of the people who was reporting what you were doing and others back to China? Not at all. Did you lose sleep over it? Yeah, and I also made sure my door chain was on. All the time at night. Because you never know. Born in Hong Kong, Ms. Yong Chong is now a U.S. citizen and professor of biology. She organizes demonstrations for the Hong Kong democracy movement in the U.S., where she's become increasingly wary of who might be watching. I believe they are collecting information. What kind of information?

12:18Like what are we doing? What exactly what we are saying in the protests? and how many people are showing up there, things like that. And collecting that information for whom? For Beijing. Why do you think China goes to such lengths to spy on pro-democracy activists here in the U.S.? This is their tactics, right? They try to silence you, harass you, or intimidate you so that you stop what you're doing. They want to cripple me and cripple my ability to advocate for Hong Kong. Anna Kwok now runs the pro-democracy organization that Anna Young Chung co-founded. Because of her outspoken activism, the Hong Kong government has placed a$130 ,000 bounty on her head.

13:05So every single day I wake up, I open my social media, and then I would see people talking about how if I keep talking here in the United States, they will come kidnap me and take my body to the Chinese consulate so that they can send me back to China. How are you viewed by the Chinese government? If I do go back to Hong Kong, it's going to be life imprisonment. So basically they see me as a traitor, as someone who betrays the Chinese government and the Hong Kong government. And what's the crime you've committed? They think that fighting for democracy, wanting a say in our own future is a crime.

13:41The United States is known as the land of the free. Do you feel free here? Honestly, with China's long-arm repression, it's difficult to feel free anywhere in the world. The thing about the Chinese government is that you can leave the country, you can leave the territory, but you can never actually leave their governance. After we met her, Anna Kwok's father and brother were arrested in Hong Kong. She is currently seeking political asylum in the U.S.

14:10officials in Hong Kong who have targeted her and 18 other prominent activists living abroad. As for Xu Jun Wang, on April 14th, a federal judge sentenced him to three years supervised release. He spared Mr. Wang prison time because of health problems, including cognitive decline. But the judge reiterated he had committed serious crimes against the U.S. He was an agent. He worked with the Chinese government to identify targets for them to surveil and compromise. According to China analyst Jim Lewis, there's still no substitute for on-the-ground human intelligence, even if Mr. Wong was an expendable asset for China's top spy agency.

14:57Not exactly James Bond. Definitely not James Bond. Definitely not. But that's the scary part, though, is that the Chinese are very good. And so he was not number one on the list of assets to protect. That means there are other assets who are being protected.

15:22For many of the high school students returning to class, it may seem like geometry and trigonometry were created by the Greeks as a form of torture. So imagine our amazement when we heard two high school seniors had proved a mathematical puzzle that was thought to be impossible for 2 ,000 years. We met Kelsey Johnson and Nakia Jackson at their all-girls Catholic high school in New Orleans. And as we first reported last year, we expected to find two mathematical prodigies. Instead, we found at St. Mary's Academy, all students are told their possibilities are boundless.

16:08Come Mardi Gras season, New Orleans is alive with colorful parades, replete with floats and beads and high school marching bands. In a city where uniqueness is celebrated, St. Mary's stands out, with young African-American women playing trombones and tubas, twirling batons and dancing, doing it all. Which defines St. Mary's, students told us. Junior Christina Blasio says the school instills in them they have the ability to accomplish anything. That is kind of a standard here, so we aim very high. Our aim is excellence for all students. The private Catholic elementary and high school sits behind the Sisters of the Holy Family Convent in New Orleans East.

16:56The academy was started by an African-American nun for young black women just after the Civil War. The convent still supports the school with the help of alumni. In December 2022, seniors Nakia Jackson and Kelsey Johnson were working on a school-wide math contest that came with a cash prize. I was motivated because there was a monetary incentive, because I was like,$500 is a lot of money, so I would like to at least try. Both were staring down the thorny bonus question. So tell me, what was this bonus question? It was to create a new proof of the Pythagorean theorem, and it kind of gave you a few guidelines on how would you start a proof.

17:42The seniors were familiar with the Pythagorean Theorem, a fundamental principle of geometry. You may remember it from high school. A squared plus B squared equals C squared. In plain English, when you know the lengths of two sides of a right triangle, you can figure out the length of the third. Both had studied geometry and some trigonometry, and both told us math was not easy. What no one told them was there'd been more than 300 documented proofs of the Pythagorean theorem using algebra and geometry. But for 2 ,000 years, a proof using trigonometry was thought to be impossible. And that was the bonus question facing them.

18:26When you looked at the question, did you think, boy, this is hard? Yeah. What motivated you to say, well, I'm going to try this? I think I was like, I started something, I need to finish it. So you just kept on going? Yeah. For two months that winter, they spent almost all their free time working on the proof. She was like, Mom, this is a little bit too much. Cece and Cal Johnson are Kelsey's parents. So then I started looking at what she really was doing, and it was pages and pages and pages of like over 20 or 30 pages for this one problem. Yeah, the garbage can was full of papers where she would, you know, work out the problems.

19:09And if that didn't work, she would ball it up, throw it in the trash. Did you look at the problem? Neliska Jackson is Nakia's mother. Personally, I did not, because most of the time I don't understand what she's doing. What if we did this? What if I write this? Does this help AX squared? Their math teacher, Michelle Bluein-Williams, initiated the math contest. And did you think anyone would solve it? Well, I wasn't necessarily looking for a solve, so no idea. What were you looking for? I was just looking for some ingenuity, you know. Calci and Nakaya delivered on that. They tried to explain their groundbreaking work to 60 Minutes.

19:50Calci's proof is appropriately titled the waffle cone. So, to start the proof, we start with just a regular right triangle where the angle in the corner is 90 degrees, and the two angles are alpha and beta. So then what we do next is we draw a second congruent, which means they're equal in size. But then we start creating similar, but smaller right triangles going in a pattern like this. And then it continues for infinity and eventually it creates this larger waffle cone shape. Am I going a little too? You've been beyond me since the beginning. So how did you figure out the proof? Okay, so we have a right triangle, 90 degree angle, alpha and beta.

20:35Then what did you do? Okay, I have a right triangle inside of the circle, and I have a perpendicular bisector at OP to divide the triangle to make that small right triangle. And that's basically what I use for the proof. That's the proof. That's what I call amazing. Well, thank you. There had been one other documented proof of the theorem using trigonometry by mathematician Jason Zimba in 2009, one in 2 ,000 years. Now, it seems, Nakia and Kelsey have joined perhaps the most exclusive club in mathematics. So you both independently came up with proof that only used trigonometry. Yes. So, are you math geniuses?

21:28I think that's a stretch. If not genius, you're really smart at math. Not at all. To document Kelsey and Nakaya's work, math teachers at St. Mary's submitted their proofs to an American Mathematical Society conference in Atlanta in March 2023. Our teacher approached us and was like, hey, you might be able to actually present this. I was like, are you joking? but she wasn't. So we went, I got up there, we presented, and it went well, and it blew up. It blew up. Yeah. What was the blow up like? Insane, unexpected, crazy, honestly. Today's story features two high school students, Kelsey Johnson and Nakia Jackson.

22:15It took millennia to prove, but just a minute for word of their accomplishment to go around the world. They got a write-up in South Korea and a shout-out from former First Lady Michelle Obama, a commendation from the governor, and keys to the city of New Orleans. Why do you think so many people found what you did to be so impressive? Probably because we're African American, one, and we're also women. So I think, oh, and our age. Of course, our age has probably played a big part. So you think people were surprised that young African American women could do such a thing? Yeah, definitely. I'd like to actually be celebrated for what it is.

22:54Like, it's a great mathematical achievement. Achievement. That's a word you hear often around St. Mary's Academy. Kelsey and Nakaya follow a long line of barrier-breaking graduates. The late queen of Creole cooking, Leah Chase, was an alum. So was the first African-American female New Orleans police chief, Michelle Woodfork. and judge for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Dana Douglas. Math teacher Michelle Bluen-Williams told us Kelsey and Nakaya are typical St. Mary's students. They're not unicorns. Oh, no. If they are unicorns, then every single lady that has matriculated through this school is a beautiful black unicorn.

23:42Pamela Rogers, St. Mary's president and interim principal, told us the students hear that message from the moment they walk in the door. We believe all students can succeed. All students can learn. It does not matter the environment that you live in. So when word went out that two of your students had solved this almost impossible math problem, were they universally applauded? In this community, they were greatly applauded. Across the country, there were many naysayers. What were they saying? They were saying, oh, they could not have done it. African Americans don't have the brains to do it. Of course, we sheltered our girls from that, but we absolutely did not expect it to come in the volume that it came.

24:30And after such a wonderful achievement. People have a vision of who can be successful. and to some people it is not always an African-American female and to us it's always an African-American female. What we know is when teachers lay out some expectations that say you can do this, kids will work as hard as they can to do it. Gloria Ladson-Billings, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, has studied how best to teach African American students. She told us an encouraging teacher can change a life. And what's the difference, say, between having a teacher like that and a whole school dedicated to the excellence of these students?

25:28So a whole school is almost like being in heaven. What do you mean by that? Many of our young people have their ceilings lowered. that somewhere around fourth or fifth grade, their thoughts are, I'm not going to be anything special. What I think is probably happening at St. Mary's is young women come in as perhaps ninth graders and are told, here's what we expect to happen, and here's how we're going to help you get there. Who is the author of this story? At St. Mary's, half the students get scholarships subsidized by fundraising to defray the$9 ,000 a year tuition. Here, there's no test to get in, but expectations are high and rules are strict.

26:14No cell phones, modest skirts, hair must be its natural color. Students Raya Sadiq, Summer Ford, Carissa Washington, Tatum Williams, and Christina Blasio told us they appreciate the rules and rigor. Especially the standards that they set for us, they're very high, and I don't think that's ever going to change. So is there a heart, a philosophy, an essence to St. Mary's? The sisterhood. The sisterhood. The sisterhood. Yes. And you don't mean the nuns, you mean you. So when you're here, there's just no question that you're going to go on to college. College is all they talk about. And Arizona State University.

26:58Principal Rogers announces to her 615 students the colleges where every senior has been accepted. So for 17 years, you've had a 100 % graduation rate and a 100 % college acceptance rate. That's correct. Nakia Jackson. When Nakia and Kelsey graduated, all their classmates went to college and got scholarships. Nakia got a full ride to the pharmacy school at Xavier University in New Orleans. Kelsey, the class valedictorian, is studying environmental engineering at Louisiana State University. So wait a minute. Neither one of you is going to pursue a career in math? No, no. I may take up a minor in math, but I don't want that to be my job job.

27:49Yeah. People might expect too much out of me if I become a mathematician. But math is not completely in their rearview mirrors. Last fall, their high school proofs were published after final peer review. They've now submitted further proofs of the Pythagorean theorem. Since their first two... We found five, and then we found a general format that could potentially produce at least five additional proofs. And you're not math geniuses? No. I'm not buying it.

28:33The idea that this country has become one big, bland, conformist culture, the United States of Generica? Well, if you're in search of a counterpoint, hang out as we did in the marshy interior of southern Louisiana. You need no passport to enter Cajun country, but it's an exotic land like nowhere else, home to a cuisine, a language, a landscape, even a pacing all its own. And then there's the singular sound. Cajun music and its cousin from across the way, Zydeco, resists easy description. But it is intoxicatingly catchy, often sung in French, and as we first reported earlier this year, enjoying a most unlikely renaissance.