US Report Highlights Covert Chinese Operations to Silence, Punish Critics Abroad

Secretary of State Antony Blinken holds a press conference at the end of the G7 foreign ministers meeting on Capri island, Italy, on April 19, 2024. Ciro De Luca/Reuters

The State Department highlighted the Chinese regime’s extensive operations to silence its targets in the United States and elsewhere, deploying tactics such as stalking, forced disappearances, and projecting police power overseas.

The groups the regime goes after include persecuted minority groups, dissidents, Chinese students abroad, and adherents of spiritual faiths, according to the department’s April 22 human rights report.

The tactic, known as transnational repression, received worldwide attention after a human rights group revealed a network of extralegal Chinese police stations in countries around the world, including several in the United States.

The Justice Department in April 2023 charged two men with operating such a station in New York. The men allegedly organized counterprotesters to undermine demonstrations from the persecuted faith group Falun Gong, stalked democracy activists, and harassed dissidents on behalf of China’s communist authorities.

In May last year, prosecutors also accused two individuals of attempting to bribe the Internal Revenue Service. The same month, Boston-based Liang Litang was arrested for allegedly providing Chinese authorities photos and other details of democracy activists under Chinese officials’ instruction.

The State Department report acknowledged both the Boston and New York cases, but omitted the fact they occurred on U.S. soil, saying only that a “foreign government” had brought forward charges against certain Chinese citizens residing in that “foreign country.” In another case noted in the report, three men were convicted for acting as foreign agents on behalf of China in a certain country. The crimes were committed in New Jersey.

Three men were convicted in Brooklyn federal court on June 20 for stalking a family in New Jersey and pressuring them to return to China on behalf of China’s communist regime.

“The report shows that governments are extending their abuses beyond their own borders,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a press conference announcing the report’s release. In two days, he will be flying to China to meet with senior officials in Shanghai and Beijing.

Pointing to the Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang, whom he called “victims of genocide and crimes against humanity,” Mr. Blinken said the 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices “documents atrocities reminiscent of humanity’s darkest moments.”

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials and police officers have directly participated in the transnational repression efforts, often through the aid of front groups embedded in overseas Chinese communities.

Mr. Liang, for one, leads a local group called the New England Alliance for Peaceful Unification of China.

Litang Liang attended an event in the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association in November 2017. Jianyu Huang/The Epoch Times

The group in 2019, working with Chinese overseas students in Boston, “organized over a thousand patriots” to gather in front of the Massachusetts state capital building and in Boston Chinatown to “denounce people who supported Hong Kong independence, Taiwan independence, Tibet independence, and Xinjiang independence,” according to an indictment that quotes a document from the group that Mr. Liang sent to a Chinese official in charge of spreading Beijing’s overseas influence.

The China Student and Scholar Association has also served as “an overseas monitoring mechanism” helping Beijing suppress dissident views, and tracking and reporting on pre-democracy students, which fosters intimidation and bullying, the State Department report noted.

As the regime strengthened its sweeping anti-espionage law requiring Chinese citizens to assist with intelligence work as it deemed fit, Chinese students studying abroad have expressed fears about returning home, the report said.

A balloon is held at a press conference and rally in front of the America ChangLe Association highlighting Beijing's transnational repression, in New York City on Feb. 25, 2023. A now-closed overseas Chinese police station was located inside the association's building. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

It cited a Swedish report describing Chinese doctoral students being forced to sign secret agreements that require them to “pledge loyalty to the CCP, ‘serve the interests of the regime,’ and never participate in activities against the will of PRC authorities.”

Breaching the agreement could result in fines for their China-based families, the report said.

Multiple universities, including Germany’s Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg as well as those in Denmark and the Netherlands, suspended collaboration with scholars funded by the state-directed Chinese Scholarship Council over such contracts.

The report also noted the regime’s campaign to pressure other countries “for politically motivated purposes,” with a goal of “forcing those countries to take adverse action against specific individuals or groups,” although it left the details vague.

The Epoch Times has obtained documents and on-the-record admissions from Chinese officials showing that Beijing has exerted political and economic pressure on local officials and theaters worldwide to interfere with the performances of Shen Yun Performing Arts, a New York-based group that presents artistic portrayal of traditional Chinese culture and carries pieces shedding light on the regime’s human rights abuses.

The CCP’s expansive operations mean that even dissidents who have fled China cannot escape the reach of its influence.

The political prisoners the State Department cited include Zhou Deyong, a Falun Gong practitioner and father of two U.S. residents, who received an eight-year jail term in April 2023.

Inside China, adherents of the spiritual practice Falun Gong, which teaches the values of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, face arrests, forced labor, and even crimes of forced organ harvesting for persisting in their faith.

Zheng Zhi during an interview in Toronto, Canada, on July 31, 2023. Yi Ling/The Epoch Times

The State Department report cited an Epoch Times interview with a former Chinese doctor who participated in the harvesting of organs inside a van guarded by armed soldiers.

The doctor, Zheng Zhi, has testified of hearing a Chinese military officer telling a Chinese military official they would pick a “top quality” kidney from a Falun Gong practitioner to replace the official’s own ailing kidney.