The Chinese government conducts the most sophisticated and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression, targeting religious minorities like the Uighurs, political dissidents and former Communist party members who have fled abroad, a new report said on Thursday.
Applying tactics ranging from co-opting foreign governments to detain them to digital threats and coercion by proxy, the Chinese government’s transnational repression is “unparalleled”, the Freedom House report said.
“Freedom House’s conservative catalogue of direct, physical attacks since 2014 covers 214 cases originating from China, far more than any other country,” the report titled Out of Sight, Not out of Reach, said.
Freedom House is a US government-funded and Washington-based advocacy group for democracy and human rights.
“Members of ethnic and religious minorities, former insiders of the Chinese Communist Party, human rights defenders, and increasingly, people from Hong Kong—all have been subjected to serious forms of transnational repression, including assassination attempts and renditions,” the report said.
The group pointed out that the Chinese authorities’ 2015 kidnapping of Gui Minhai, a Swedish citizen who was later forced to renounce his citizenship while in Chinese custody, was a striking example of Beijing’s “…disregard for nationality, sovereignty, and human rights”.
The Chinese foreign ministry is yet to react to the report but it has earlier dismissed the group’s findings, saying the US NGO looks at China through “coloured glasses”.
Freedom House was among US NGOs sanctioned by China in December, 2019, over what Beijing said were efforts to interfere in its internal affairs.
China, however, continues to be a major focus in Freedom House’s global reports on democratic, human and media rights.
“These egregious and high-profile cases are only the tip of the iceberg of a much broader system of surveillance, harassment, and intimidation that leaves many overseas Chinese and exile minorities feeling that the CCP is watching them and constraining their ability to exercise basic rights even when living in a foreign democracy,” the report said.
The new report also focused on China’s global “anti-corruption” campaign.
The campaign has escalated since 2014, when the CCP announced a global anti-corruption drive under the banner of “Fox Hunt”, and later, 2015, under “Operation Skynet.”
“Despite its cultivation of an image of legality and careful references to international law, at its core the CCP’s anti-corruption campaign reflects its domestic context, in which the preferences of the party-state stand above all other considerations.”
The other key findings of the report said: “At least 31 origin states on every inhabited continent have carried out such acts against victims in 79 host countries, for a total of 160 unique pairings between origin and host countries. The latter include the United States, the United Kingdom, and other established democracies.”
An estimated 3.5 million people have been affected by either direct attacks or secondary tactics of intimidation and coercion that ripple through communities around the world.
The report added Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and Turkey and Iran have also carried out transnational repression.
February 04, 2021 at 01:57PM
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China conducts most sophisticated repression abroad: Report - Hindustan Times
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