Nowadays, a lot of younger Chinese netizens probably have no idea who “Little Deng” actually is.

He is Ruoyu Duan — 段若宇 — better known on old Weibo as 段小鱼, and later as 段小丑鱼, Duan Dogfish, Duan XX Fish, and other recycled handles after bans. In the mid-2010s he was a fixture in the Chinese military-geek circle: a retired U.S. soldier who posted constantly, liked to drop erotic pictures until accounts got taken down, and then came back under a new fish name.

He was extremely pro-Beijing, anti-Ukraine, and sympathetic to Hamas. When critics called him a fake, his stock reply was some version of: “I really was U.S. military. Come at me if you dare.” He was a MAVNI product — the old shortcut of enrolling in a weak U.S. school, then joining the Army to get citizenship.

After he put down the American bowl and started cursing the country that had just given him status, a lot of people wrote him off as a crank. American GIs are allowed not to love America, and he had in fact been wounded on deployment in Iraq (Alaska/Fort Wainwright service, medical discharge around 2017, VA disability afterward).

What came next is no longer rumor. He decided to flip all the way. He recruited other Chinese who were still serving — or had served — in the U.S. Army and used them to pull technical manuals, training material, intelligence reports, and classified hard drives.

The haul included material on Bradley and Stryker vehicles, HIMARS, encrypted military computers, and U.S. Army Pacific communications and China-related battle plans.

He paid active-duty soldiers, including Capt. Li Tian (an old schoolmate who also came in through MAVNI) and Sgt. Jian Zhao at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and passed the product to buyers in China.

It blew up in March 2025. Neighbors said the FBI rammed an armored vehicle through his Hillsboro, Oregon garage, threw flash-bangs into the bedroom, and stormed the house while he was there with his wife and young daughter. Court filings list his aliases as Duan Xiao Yu, D.X.Y., Lao Duan, and Little Fish. On 16 September 2026 he pleaded guilty in Portland to conspiracy to gather and transmit national defense information. Sentencing is set for 10 December 2026; the count carries up to 10 years.

Online he was famously anti-LGBT and carried a classic imperial-Han chip on his shoulder. Karma, as the original comment put it, finally arrived.

He did not fall alone. One woman who had taken the same MAVNI path used to interact with him daily on Weibo and played the same patriotic line. After she posted feminist and pro-LGBT views — including criticism of women’s rights in China — Duan branded it CIA behavior and cut her off. Because her entry route matched his, people are now waiting to see whether she gets pulled into the same investigation. That part, the original poster said, is the punchline.