In what Michael Driscoll, the head of the FBI’s New York field office called a “blatant violation of our national sovereignty,” two Chinese men allegedly set up a secret police station in the city.
The station apparently performed public services such as helping Chinese renew their Chinese driver’s license. It also helped the Chinese government locate a rights advocate of Chinese descent, among other services to Beijing.
Driscoll is right: Such activities are a violation of US sovereignty. New York is not the only city to have these overseas “police stations” set up, either. Offices have been reported in many countries, including in North America and Europe. Operatives working out of them have reportedly sought to identify, intimidate and silence dissidents living overseas, and to spread pro-China propaganda.
Responding to news of the New York arrests, Ghulam Yaghma, president of the government-in-exile of East Turkestan — the Uighurs’ name for China’s Xinjiang region — called on the US government to address not only Chinese espionage and transnational repression in the US, but of all Uighurs and other East Turkestanis.
Despite the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) repeated criticism of other countries infringing on or interfering in China’s sovereignty and national jurisdiction, it is guilty of sanctioning, orchestrating or being directly involved in these very things, in what is known as transnational suppression.
It does this on two levels: by setting up physical “police stations” overseas without authorization, and by recruiting or sending operatives overseas to intimidate what the CCP considers dissidents and their families to “persuade” them to return to China.
Research conducted by the University of Sheffield in the UK for a report, titled We know you better than you know yourself: China’s transnational repression of the Uyghur diaspora, shows that the Uighurs who participated said they had experienced some form of Chinese surveillance, apart from those whose families had already been imprisoned, and almost all had been asked to conduct surveillance of other Uighurs on behalf of the Chinese police. They reported pressure to inform on other members of the community, under threat of harm to family members living in Xinjiang.
About two-thirds of Uighurs surveyed “have been directly threatened and experienced threats to their family while living in the UK,” and this was the case for about 80 percent of Uighur respondents living in Turkey, the report said.
China considers “all citizens, former citizens and their family members, regardless of location, to be under its legal and moral jurisdiction,” and that its “transnational repression globally exports its domestic model of governance and genocidal oppression,” it said.
The persecution of Uighurs is nothing new; the CCP has been repressing Uighur rights advocates globally since the 1990s, but the scale has grown significantly under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), and especially in the past five years.
What is it about the CCP that drives it to assume ahistorical — in the sense that if it believes it ever had a claim, that claim exists “in perpetuity,” irrespective of the historical circumstances — territorial rights and feels the best way to assimilate reluctant populations is to terrorize them? What makes it feel it is within its rights to repress its own population and its diaspora?
Taiwanese implicitly understand the connection between the experience of Hong Kongers and their own possible future. They should look at what is happening to the Uighur population of Xinjiang and the Uighur diaspora, too.
Whoever wins next year’s election in Taiwan needs to bear that in mind, and candidates should not spread the false narrative that the CCP can be negotiated with on Taiwan’s future.
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