By Tsering Dhundup
DHARAMSHALA, Apr. 18: Two Chinese nationals Liu Jianwang, 61 and Chen Jingping, 59, were arrested on allegations of running a secret police outpost in New York, the US Justice Department said Monday.
Breon Peace, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said the men had engaged in “transnational repression targeting members of the Chinese diaspora community in New York City and elsewhere in the United States” at the behest of Beijing. Both the accused are charged with conspiring to act as Chinese government agents on US soil without informing the authorities and obstruction of justice. The two admitted they deleted evidence of correspondence with an official from China’s Ministry of Public Security when they discovered that they were being investigated.
China described the foreign outposts as service stations for Chinese people who are abroad and need help with bureaucratic tasks, such as renewing their Chinese driver’s license. But a report published in September by the nongovernmental organization Safeguard Defenders revealed that these stations also serve more sinister purposes, such as tracking down, arresting, and extraditing people wanted by the CCP, including dissidents against the regime and its leader Xi Jinping.
Spanish human rights organisation Safeguard Defenders said China has dozens of such covert police stations across the globe, including in the United Kingdom and the US. Dutch foreign ministry said it is investigating reports the Chinese government had set up illegal police stations to intimidate dissidents. China called those reports “absolutely false”. Canadian federal police announced that they are investigating an alleged Chinese police station in the country last month.
According to Freedom House, China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world. China’s use of transnational repression is not new. Uighurs, Tibetans, Falun Gong practitioners, and political dissidents have long faced systematic reprisals outside the country.
Experts say that these appalling cases are only the tip of the iceberg of a much broader system of surveillance, intimidation and harassment that leaves the overseas exiled minorities feeling that the CCP is watching them and restraining them from exercising basic rights even in democratic countries.
