According to the Report, to effect the return of a target person to China, the authorities may use any of three types of coercion: harass or punish the target person’s loved ones in China, harass or threaten the target person directly either online or through undercover agents, or kidnap the person from foreign soil.
Many people remember how Xi Jinping brought about the 2015 kidnapping of Gui Minhai. Gui, writer-publisher and Swedish citizen of Chinese origin, was kidnapped in Thailand and spirited back to China, alongside his book company colleagues in Hong Kong who were coerced to return to China “voluntarily” to stand trial. All three types of coercive methods were used in the incident. So China’s transnational policing is not new, and often surpasses mere policing. But if people have been amazed by the excesses of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) bad actions and wish that the incident was the worst of Chinese intransigence, the Report reminds us that the communist regime in China has “gone wild.”
The 1984 Assassination of Writer Liu Yiliang
Liu Yiliang (aka Jiang Nan) had been blacklisted by the then Kuomintang government in Taiwan for writing books disparaging the image of the Chiang Kai-shek family. His murder was masterminded by the government’s Intelligence Unit and carried out in Liu’s home in the United States by three gangsters of the Taiwan-based Bamboo Union, a group that had close ties to the Kuomintang. One of the assassins was later murdered by Chinese gangster inmates in a Pennsylvania prison, and the other two were given life sentences in Taiwan, but only served six years and were then paroled by the Kuomintang.The 1952 Assassination of Chen Hanbo in Hong Kong
Chen Hanbo was a former CCP spy who defected after 1949 to Hong Kong where he wrote books revealing the CCP spying operations. An agent, sent from China and assisted by local gangsters, killed Chen with a single bullet to his chest.The 1896 London Kidnapping of Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-sen was exiled in Japan, the United States, and Britain. Three Chinese men approached him on the street in October 1896 and manhandled him into the office of the Chinese Legation in London. He would likely have been killed, like other captured revolutionaries at the time, if the news of his kidnapping had not broken and caught the attention of the British media. Incidentally, Sun himself belonged to a gang known as the Triads, sometimes known as the Hong Men, as did many of his revolutionary comrades. In China, ever since the Han Dynasty (202 BC–220 AD), one simply could not win an armed rebellion without using the secret societies and gangsters. He was a leader in the 1911 bid to overthrow the Ching Dynasty government.The most ruthless of all Chinese transnational policing was done by the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty, Chengzu, who ruled from 1402 to 1424. Chengzu sent the famous eunuch Zheng He to lead an armada to explore Southeast Asian waters and the Indian Ocean on seven voyages, purportedly to seek treasure and trade opportunities. However, many historians say the true purpose was ferreting out and killing Chengzu’s nephew.
So we see that historically, Chinese transnational policing has been quite common, and was intimately tied to secret societies. They were either initiated by regimes set up by gangsters or relied on gangsters for successful operation. Chinese Secret societies are highly nimble and mobile, and they carry different names as they evolve through centuries, integrating, disintegrating, and regrouping. They can lie dormant or operate in a low-key manner during better times and resurface when times are bad. Together with the outward migration of people from China that went into high gear during the Ming Dynasty, these secret societies set roots in the Western world, and can now provide the CCP with thugs on demand.
This long tradition of transnational policing by Chinese regimes has been shaped by the fact that China never had the concept of a hard and fast national boundary, unlike among Western countries after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. In theory, Chinese emperors ruled the entire domain known as Under The Heaven; that is, as far as its rulers could project their power and influence. Sound familiar? In recent centuries, the stronger and more unscrupulous rulers in China have sought to expand that domain through the Chinese diaspora, whose members they unfairly regard as a natural extension of their subject people, which also includes the thugs it employs.
Among Chinese ultra-nationalists today, one slogan is especially popular: “Those who dare to offend our China, we will kill them no matter how far away!” The line was adapted from an almost identical one contained in an anecdote recorded in the “Records of the Grand Historian” in which an ethnic Han general had just killed 1,518 “barbarians” in a northwest conquest and displayed their severed heads “for people to see from ten thousand li away ... for ten days.” Admittedly, the CCP is not quite there yet. It is only trying to ensnare some of its own people by using transnational policing—but its rhetoric is equally strident.
The term “transnational police station” is not an accurate moniker. In Chinese, the physical premises of a local chapter of a secret society is where important closed-door events are held and such disciplinary tasks as torturing a member who has broken its rules. It is often a normal-looking home or shop. Each of those police stations referred to in the Safeguard Defenders Report is a cross between a transnational police station and a tangkou, as most of the people in them are likely local Chinese secret society members, working under the supervision of an undercover Chinese security agent and his team from China.
As Professor Ong pointed out, outsourcing acts of state repression to thugs-for-hire can be efficient, especially when those acts are to be performed through the tangkou-police stations abroad. Overseas thugs know their local situation best and can effectively perform their activities while avoiding surveillance by the local governments. Also, when some of the illegal acts are discovered and reported in the media, it doesn’t cause a diplomatic crisis for China they were done by local citizens.
The Safeguard Defenders Report interestingly notes that all the known Chinese tangkou-police stations are found in developed countries. China finds it easy to get developing countries to sign agreements to let Chinese police operate legally in them, so that there is no need to resort to using the more clandestine tangkou-police stations. Chinese government sources have quite openly admitted that they could pull their target people back from places like Vanuatu and even New Caledonia without much difficulty. To date, Italy is the only developed country to allow joint Italian-Chinese co-policing of Chinese communities, beginning in May 2016, with Chinese police officers wearing their Chinese uniform.
Far too many people in the West think that the ill winds blowing from China are because of Xi Jinping, and so they imagine that once Xi is gone, and a “reformist” holds sway again, then it will be back to business as usual. An example is Stephen Roach of Yale University, former chief economist at Morgan Stanley and long a fan of the CCP, who recently blamed himself for discovering too late that Xi’s bad policies had tanked the Chinese GDP growth rate and made it difficult for Wall Street to do business with China. People fail to see that most of the serious, dangerous infiltrations by communist China into the West well preceded Xi’s tenure. Many invasive acts were started by the buffoonish Jiang Zemin whom Wall Street loved—Xi only made them worse.
A familiarity with the deeper cultural-historical context of China’s transnational policing will make it clear that it did not begin with Xi and neither will it end with his departure from the center of CCP power.
