CHINESE MAN STRIKES AT A BANNER saying “Chinese Communist Party Step Down!” in New York City. He is challenged briefly, then disappears in the crowd at a Columbia University protest against China’s “Zero COVID” policy. Another man pummels a female student after she shouts that Chinese authorities must be held accountable for the deaths of 10 people in a fire in an apartment complex under lockdown in Urumqi, sparking a rare wave of demonstrations in China. In Berkeley, California, a suspected Communist Party supporter sets ablaze a memorial placed by protesters mourning the dead in Urumqi.
In Flushing, Queens, home to a flourishing Chinese community in the U.S., a lawyer who fled corruption in China holds a sign on a street calling for the end of the party. But the party is watching, his family in China are promptly harassed by the police and he begs friends who posted the image on American social media to remove it.
As the totalitarian state tries to suppress the biggest protests to roil China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement, Beijing’s long arm is also trying to choke shows of sympathy in America and silence voices in the U.S. opposing the Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, democracy activists and protesters say.
The pushback to the protests is one facet of an apparatus that Beijing has been building for years inside the United States to spread its influence and enforce its will in what has become an increasing source of fear for U.S.-based opponents of the Chinese Communist Party—many U.S. citizens among them—who spoke to Newsweek of confirmed instances and constant anxiety over surveillance, intimidation, attempts to force repatriation and even physical attacks.
Recent cases brought by U.S. law enforcement authorities have highlighted the brazenness of some of the suspected clandestine efforts to intimidate critics of China or force Beijing’s enemies to return home.
Newsweek’s reporting points to a growing Chinese police and security presence in the United States and to a still bigger Communist Party operational network than has previously been reported by a European human rights group focused on Chinese overseas “police stations” and acknowledged by FBI Director Christopher Wray. The rights group, Safeguard Defenders, released a report in early December that revealed more than 100 Chinese police stations globally, with some—unlike those in the U.S.—operating with the assistance of host nations.
Newsweek has identified nine confirmed or suspected Chinese proxy police stations and courts operating in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. It also found a further nine “Chinese Support Centers” that are part of the United Front—the Communist Party’s domestic and international influence apparatus—that offer unspecified support to Chinese living overseas.
These structures are feeding into the intimidation in the United States just as Xi is facing the biggest challenge of his rule at home, protesters say.
Jiemin Bai, a U.S.
