The U.S. Department of Justice announced charges Friday (Dec. 18) against Jin Xinjiang, also known as Julien Jin, a Chinese executive at a U.S. telecommunication company. The Justice Department said Jin is guilty of conspiracy to commit interstate harassment and unlawful conspiracy to transfer identifying information for his alleged involvement in blocking a series of video conferences held on the U.S. company’s video platform to commemorate June 4.
According to the indictment, Jin was the primary liaison between the U.S. company and Chinese law enforcement and intelligence agencies. His duties included providing the Chinese government with information about users and meetings on the company’s video platform, sometimes involving users outside of China. Jin was also responsible for monitoring meetings on the video platform where political and religious topics were discussed that the Chinese government deemed “illegal.
The indictment says that from 2019 to the present, Jin and others, under the control and direction of Chinese government officials, conspired to use the U.S.-based company’s systems to censor the political and religious speech of people in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Their actions at the direction of the Chinese government included cutting off at least four online meetings held on the U.S. company’s video platform to commemorate the 31st anniversary of June 4, mostly organized and attended by people living in the United States, such as dissidents and June 4 survivors.
The indictment says Jin Xinjiang, Chinese government officials and others allegedly worked together to identify participants and disrupt the meetings, sometimes by creating pretexts to justify their actions. The indictment says that in May and June 2020, Jin Xinjiang and others infiltrated the meetings in an attempt to gather evidence of alleged misconduct, but without misconduct, they falsified evidence of service agreement violations as a reason to interrupt the videoconferences and close the accounts of certain participants. Jin then had a senior company employee in the United States perform the disruption and blocking.
The indictment alleges that Jin’s co-conspirators created fake email accounts and video platform accounts in the names of others, including Chinese dissidents, and in this way falsified evidence that organizers and participants of the June 4 commemoration supported terrorist organizations, incited violence, or disseminated child pornography. The indictment said the falsified evidence claimed that the discussions at the meeting included child abuse, terrorism, racism or incitement to violence, and that the user avatars of the participants showed people wearing masks and holding what looked like Islamic State flags. Jin Xinjiang later used the complaints to convince company executives in the United States to discontinue the meetings and suspend or shut down the accounts of the meeting organizers.
In a statement Friday, the Justice Department said Chinese authorities used information provided by Jin to retaliate and threaten participants living in China or family members of attendees in China. The Justice Department said Chinese authorities briefly detained at least one person who had planned to speak at the memorial event. In another incident, Chinese authorities interviewed the family of a participant and asked them to convey to the participants to stop speaking out against the Chinese government and instead support socialism and the Communist Party.
A statement from the Justice Department said Jin Xinjiang has not yet been returned to justice, and a federal court in Brooklyn, New York, unsealed the indictment and arrest warrant on Friday. Jin Xinjiang, 39, is a software engineer, according to the FBI’s wanted information, and a federal court issued a warrant for his arrest on Nov. 19.
No company with significant business interests in China is immune from coercion by China’s Communist government,” said John Demers, assistant attorney general for national security. The Chinese Communist Party will use those companies it can reach to clamp down on freedom and suppress free speech in China, the United States and elsewhere about the Communist Party’s oppression of the Chinese people.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray said, “The FBI continues to work to protect the right of all Americans to exercise their freedom of speech. As the indictment alleges, this freedom was directly trampled by the malicious activities of communist Chinese intelligence agencies in support of a regime that neither reflects nor respects our democratic values. The American public needs to know that the Chinese government will not hesitate to use businesses in China to advance its international agenda, including suppressing free speech.”
Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Seth DuCharme said the case exposes the Faustian bargain that the Chinese government demands of U.S. technology companies in China and the internal risks these companies face. The allegations announced today make clear that U.S. technology companies’ employees in China make those companies and their users vulnerable to the malicious influence of the Chinese government,” he said. This office will continue to work tirelessly to protect the free expression of political views and religious beliefs from threats, whether those threats come from within or outside the United States.”
The Justice Department’s statement and indictment do not disclose the names of the U.S. companies involved in the case, but instead refer to them as Company-1 (Company-1). The statement said Ducharme and Demers expressed appreciation for the company’s cooperation with the government’s investigation.
In June, a number of June 4 participants and human rights activists living in the U.S. reported that their June 4 31st anniversary events through Zoom were disrupted or that the organizers’ accounts were closed after the events.
Zhou Fenglock, founder of the NGO Humane China, said at the time that his organization had organized a Zoom meeting to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre on May 31, but that its account was closed on June 7. The web conference was attended by more than 250 people from around the world, many from China. June 4 student leader Wang Dan also said that the June 4 commemoration event he organized on Zoom on June 3 saw his account briefly blocked, causing the event to be interrupted twice.
Zoom later acknowledged that the closure of user accounts interfered with the June 4 commemoration, but did not explain exactly what laws were used to close user accounts and whether there was any contact with Chinese authorities prior to the closure.
Zhou Fenglock told Voice of America that he believes the case announced by the Justice Department on Friday refers to this Zoom incident. He said it is the first time the U.S. government has enforced the law against the Chinese Communist Party in terms of infringing on online freedom.
This is the first time we’ve seen freedom of speech protected by law enforcement in the United States,” he said. This is very significant, and hopefully it will serve as a wake-up call to both U.S. companies and those who help do evil, and hopefully change U.S. companies in that regard.”
He said this case is just the tip of the iceberg and hopes that in the future the U.S. Congress can hold hearings on related topics and conduct a broader review and investigation of U.S. technology companies’ cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party.
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