In recent years, as China’s domestic speech and political space has tightened, the Communist Party’s “long arm” has also extended its tentacles overseas, exercising increasingly tight control over the speech of overseas Chinese, from politics to academia to social networks, almost pervasively, resulting in recent convictions of overseas Chinese citizens for speech crimes, as well as kidnappings. There has been a surge in the number of Chinese citizens or former citizens returning to China for sentencing. Observers point out that the situation is linked to Xi Jinping’s centralized rule and his political ambitions in the world.
Twitter has been the hardest hit in recent years
On October 23, 2020, U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Bomin said in his Chinese speech, “Honesty: On China’s Relations with the World,” that in the age of information networks, democracies are experiencing a challenge from authoritarian states. Chinese people living abroad are the first to feel uneasy about this challenge.
This “unease” is reflected in the case of Wang Zhan, an expatriate imprisoned by the Chinese authorities, who was arrested in October 2019 while entering China as an environmental scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, and has since lost contact with the outside world. It took his friends more than a month to find out about him. Wang was arrested on October 15 on “suspicion of subversion of state power” and detained at Shenyang No. 1 Detention Center, with a detention notice issued on November 19, 2019.
In December 2019, his friends opened the “Save Citizen Wang Zhan” account on Twitter and organized “Freedom Fridays,” calling on people to protest in front of Chinese embassies around the world every Friday, holding signs to appeal for Wang Zhan. Only recently, however, did the outside world learn of his detention. During his more than a year in detention, Wang Zhan’s family has been controlled and his lawyers have been unable to meet with him.
“Humanity China President Zhou Fenglock, who has been following Wang’s case, told VOA that Wang’s case is the most serious of its kind, charged with “subversion of state power” and will receive a heavy sentence.
He told the Voice of America that in the most serious case of its kind, Wang was charged with “subversion of state power,” and that the sentence would be very severe. Zhou Fenglock said Twitter was the hardest hit, as it is the most active place for Chinese public opinion overseas, and it is common to see accounts disappear, change their names or suddenly change their style from “rebel” to “pink.
In January 2019, The New York Times reported that Chinese Twitter users had been interrogated or detained by the Chinese government, and even forced to cancel their accounts. “The crackdown is another example of President Xi Jinping extending his government’s Internet crackdown beyond national borders. In effect, authorities are extending their control over the online lives of Chinese citizens wherever they post.”
Overseas postings Domestic arrests
Luo Daiqing, an international student at the University of Minnesota, was arrested by police on his return to China in July 2019 and later sentenced to six months in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” A criminal verdict from the Wuchang District Court in Wuhan, Hubei Province, said that in September and October 2018, Luo Daiqing posted “more than 40 comments and indecent puzzles that scandalized the image of the country’s leaders” on Twitter, and that on July 12, 2019, Luo Daiqing was summoned by Wuhan police when he returned to China and was placed in administrative detention for 10 days the following day. After his detention expired, he was detained on suspicion of “provoking and provoking trouble” and placed in Wuchang District Detention Centre; on 29 August of the same year, he was arrested on the same charge; on 5 November, Luo Daiqing was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. At present, Luo Daiqing has completed his sentence and was released.
The tweets in which Luo Daiqing was charged include his release of a cartoon image of the arch-villain Lawrence Limburger from the animated Biker Mice From Mars, accompanied by a speech by Xi Jinping. Luo Daiqing was released from prison on January 11, 2020, after completing his sentence.
On July 19, 2020, the Chinese Academy of Sciences University (CASU) released a statement that Ji Ziyue, a master’s student from the University’s Class of 2019, was expelled for making inappropriate comments on a foreign social media platform. The statement said that Ji Ziyue left the country for the United States on January 13 this year (during winter break) for a private trip, and has not returned due to epidemics and other reasons.Between March and June, Ji Ziyue repeatedly made “erroneous comments” on foreign social media platforms involving the Nanjing Massacre.
In May 2019, after returning from Japan on a tourist visa, female cartoonist Zhang Dongning was soon arrested and detained by police in Huainan, Anhui Province’s Tianjia’an District; on July 28, she was formally arrested by the local prosecutor’s office on the grounds that her cartoons involved “insulting China” and accused of creating a “pig-headed body “The series of cartoons is a deliberate attempt to distort Chinese history, misinterpret hot social news events and violate relevant Chinese laws. She is currently detained at the Huainan City Detention Center. Her collaborator, Lu Shining, was arrested almost simultaneously with her.
In May 2019, shortly after her collaborator Zhang Dongning was arrested upon her return to China, Lu Shining was also arrested by Dalian City, Liaoning Province, while visiting her family in China. The police arrested him. He is currently detained at a detention center in Dalian City.
On Sept. 1, 2016, Quan Ping wore a white T-shirt with “XITLER,” “Xi baozi” and “big coin scattering” on it to work. After graduating from Iowa State University, he returned to his hometown of Jilin to run his family business. On Sept. 30 of that year, Quan Ping told friends overseas that he planned to take to the streets on Oct. 1 wearing clothes that approved the slogan. That night, he sent a text message to his friend Yi Gu in the U.S. saying “something’s wrong,” and then disappeared. It was later learned that he was arrested by Chinese authorities on charges of “inciting subversion of state power” and is currently being held at the Yanji Detention Center.
Observers noted that most of these individuals’ Twitter accounts are anonymous. How did the Chinese authorities know the true identity of the account holders? Analysis by iyouPort, a website that focuses on online technology and social resistance, shows that it is unlikely that Twitter leaked account information, and that the most likely way remains the oldest way of being a whistleblower: being watched and reported by people close to you, such as Confucius Institutes, student union organizations and Pinky.
From academic research to the American classroom
In 1998, Yongyi Song, a Chinese-American professor at California State University, Los Angeles, applied for a research grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange to formally launch the construction of the Database of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.In August 1999, Song Yongyi returned to China to collect Red Guard tabloids as part of the database project and was cited by China’s National Security Agency for illegally acquiring ” Song was imprisoned for six months on charges of “state secrets” and “providing information to foreign entities. In February 2000, Song was acquitted and returned to the U.S. Song told the Voice of America that he bought some Red Guards tabloids in an old book market in Panjiayuan, Beijing.
Song told the Voice of America that he bought some Red Guards tabloids at a used book market in Panjiayuan, Beijing. These were public publications during the Cultural Revolution. However, the Ministry of State Security accused him of stealing “state secrets,” a charge that was dismissed by the Beijing prosecutor’s office on the grounds that if the tabloids were classified as state secrets, basically everyone in the country would be imprisoned, and the charge was later changed to “gathering intelligence information.
Professor Song Yongyi believes that the CPC arrested him because of his Cultural Revolution database project. Song Yongyi said: “The most effective way to destroy this project is to lock up an editor-in-chief, isn’t it?”
In addition, famous scholars Lin Peirui and Li Anyou were also blacklisted and denied visas to China because of their critical views of the Chinese government. Both Lin Pei-rui and Li Anyou are famous sinologists who have harshly criticized the Chinese government, especially the human rights situation in China. In fact, scholars overseas who do research on the Cultural Revolution, the June Fourth Movement, land reform and other sensitive historical issues have encountered some degree of obstruction from the Chinese government.
Hu Ping, a New York scholar, told Voice of America that the Chinese government does not dare to mess with authentic American citizens, but will do nothing to Chinese people, even if they have been delisted. He noted that the threshold for freedom of speech has become lower in recent years, especially with the implementation of the National Security Law, which provides a legal basis for the Chinese Communist Party to arrest people.
A month after the passage of Hong Kong’s version of the National Security Law, the Wall Street Journal reported on August 19 that courses at some of the nation’s top universities were allowing students to attend classes and participate in discussions anonymously in order to avoid prosecution by the Chinese government under the National Security Law. Courses such as those taught by Rory Truex, an assistant professor of political science at Princeton University, Meg Rithmire, a professor of political science at Harvard Business School, and Avery Goldstein, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, are particularly popular because they cover sensitive topics such as the Xinjiang re-education camps, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Note that the course “covers content that the Chinese government considers to be politically sensitive issues” and allow students to submit assignments and participate in discussions anonymously.
In March 2019, Human Rights Watch published the report “China: Government Threats to Academic Freedom Abroad,” which notes that pressure from the Chinese government has resulted in a number of different threats to academic freedom. Chinese authorities have long overseen and enforced surveillance against Chinese students, scholars, and Chinese researchers around the world. Chinese diplomats have also frequently protested against schools’ invitations to speak to individuals whom the Government considers “sensitive,” such as the Dalai Lama.
According to Human Rights Watch, some Chinese students have been threatened by their families in their home countries as a result of speaking in class, while others remain silent in class for fear that other Chinese students will record their remarks and report them to Chinese authorities. One Chinese student studying in the United States summed up his concerns about classroom surveillance by saying, “It’s not a free space.” In addition, some scholars have been directly threatened by Chinese officials abroad, deterring them from criticizing the Chinese government in the classroom or elsewhere.
Abduction of “Political Prisoners” Explodes Abroad
Human rights observers have noted that the Communist Party of China (CPC) has been among the most aggressive in hunting down and persecuting political prisoners, both at home and abroad, and has even resorted to entrapment or kidnapping of pro-democracy activists it views as a serious threat to its regime.
Chen Chongchuang, a member of the China Democratic Party who lives in New York, has been following the plight of political protesters for years. He said that reliable estimates put the number of pro-democracy activists abroad who have engaged in acts against the Chinese government and who have fled China for one reason or another at no less than one million over the 40 years since the early 1980s, as well as religious and ethnic minorities such as Tibetans and Uyghurs.
Generally speaking, the methods used by the CCP include: blacklisting people from returning to China, buying off infiltrators and dividers, stigmatizing people, threatening family members and associates in China as hostages to silence them, and even forcing them to return to China voluntarily, although there are others who are suspected of being assassinated, such as Li Zhisui and Zhang Hongbao.
Given the influence of Wang and Peng, especially their advocacy of an armed revolutionary line, the CCP considered it too dangerous and difficult to control to keep them abroad, so it preferred to kidnap them at great cost.
Currently, Wang Bingzhang is serving a life sentence for espionage and terrorism, and has been held in solitary confinement in Guangdong for 18 years (with no commutation of sentence). Peng Ming was sentenced to life on terror charges and died violently in Hubei prison 12 years later. According to fellow inmates, he had maintained a fitness regime and was in good health, raising questions about the cause of his death. In fact, after Peng fled China in 2000, the Chinese Communist Party had been trying to trick him into returning to China, arresting many people and coercing them into cooperating with the authorities to arrest him.
In addition, in 2006, a Canadian citizen, Huseyin Cellier, was arrested by the Chinese authorities. In addition, in 2006, Canadian citizen Huseyin Celil (known as Yushanjiang, a Uighur) was extradited to China by the Chinese Communist Party while in Uzbekistan and then sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of secession.
Chen Chongbong said the cases of kidnapping and extradition all suddenly skyrocketed after Xi Jinping came to power, such as the Chinese Communist Party’s kidnapping of Swedish citizen Gui Minhai in Thailand in October 2015; the seizure of former national security informant Li Xin in Thailand in January 2016; the kidnapping of bookseller Li Bo from Hong Kong in December 2015; the kidnapping of Lucky Ching-Hsien, Tang Zhi-Shun and Bao Mengmeng in Myanmar in October 2015; the kidnapping of Canada in Hong Kong in January 2017 Xiao Jianhua, a citizen; Chen Guiqiu, wife of human rights lawyer Xie Yang, who was imprisoned in a Thai immigration prison in March 2017 and almost brought back to China by Hunan police, among others. These cases can be broadly divided into two categories, one related to the Skynet graft hunt launched by Xi Jinping, and the other involving other highly sensitive individuals, Chen Chongbong said.
Observers have pointed out that the Communist Party’s crackdown on overseas speech and political space is linked to Xi’s rule. On the one hand, he has strengthened centralized power and created a cult of personality at home; on the other hand, he has demonstrated his aggressive political ambitions in the world, and the public security, national security, and foreign affairs departments that answer to the CCP have been very active in “long-arm jurisdiction” to show their loyalty to Xi, either by directly pressuring foreign governments or by coercing them to take over. The tactic is to keep people living overseas from openly challenging Xi’s authority.
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