Su Yutong, a journalist for Radio Free Asia who lives in Germany, often cannot sleep more than two hours a night. She is a victim of China’s transnational repression.
Safeguard Defenders has issued a new report on this phenomenon—the Chinese state’s hunting down, harassment, and often coercive repatriation of Chinese nationals who have left China to live under the jurisdiction of another country. A mission that has gone into high gear over the last decade.
Published in April 2024, Chasing Fox Hunt: Tracing the PRC’s Forced Return Operations around the Globe includes sections on “PRC accounts of individual extrajudicial returns per country”; extraditions, repatriation, “persuasion” to return, and irregular measures (“luring and entrapment” and “kidnapping”); and “international complicity.”
The United Nations is the main perpetrator of international complicity discussed in the report.
Harassment
Su Yutong told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that she moved to Germany “in 2010 after being detained and placed under house arrest in Beijing for publishing a banned journal about the government’s handling of the Tiananmen Square protests.”
Soon after starting her job at a German news outlet, she recalled receiving a phone call from a Chinese agent. When she asked how he had gotten her number, Su said, the agent responded: “If I want, I can know everything about you.”
In the last two years, Su says her name and email address were used to call false bomb threats and book expensive hotel rooms in multiple cities. Someone also published her phone number in an online channel for people seeking prostitutes. She has received videos showing decapitation and torture. After moving to a new residence, strangers have knocked at her door multiple times at odd hours.
So far, German police have not made any arrests. The police did not reply to ICIJ’s questions.
Su says she doesn’t fear for her life, but she often can’t sleep more than two hours per night because of anxiety.
“They want to kill my mind, my spirit,” Su said.
She has so far escaped being kidnapped. But the Safeguard Defenders observe that kidnapping is among the “range of illicit means in violation of the sovereignty of third nations and the fundamental human rights of the targeted individuals” that China often resorts to.
The Defenders estimate that the Chinese government has achieved “well over 12,000 successful returns from over 120 countries and regions between 2014 and 2023….”
The UN’s enabling
The report also documents how a UN agency, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), is cooperating with China’s Foxhunt operations. The authors suggest that “either UNODC did not conduct its mandatory assessment, or it chose to ignore its results…maybe in its rush for ‘mutually beneficial’ cooperation around the Belt and Road Initiative ‘that charts a more equitable and prosperous world for all,’ as UNODC’s Director General Ghada Waly reiterated on December 14, 2023.”
The pattern is familiar: cooperation with evil for the sake of the alleged benefits of doing so. Chinese propagandists provide the clichés that help the enablers to rationalize what they are doing.
