She had almost forgotten about the petition, a critique of the Chinese government that she had posted online months earlier. The woman, a Chinese citizen living in the United States, had been careful to register on the site anonymously, and the petition drew little notice.
Except, that is, from the Chinese government.
Early one morning last year, she said, she got a call from her father in China, as police officers in his office dictated questions about the petition and demanded she log into her social media accounts.
“It’s kind of unbelievable. How did they find out? My only reaction was to think about how to fool them, how to protect my parents,” said the woman, a scientist based on the East Coast who asked not to be identified by her real name and to withhold her exact location for fear of reprisals from the Chinese government.
Rights groups say that of all authoritarian governments, China is one of the most aggressive in pursuing dissidents abroad, often by threatening and harassing their relatives back home, and sometimes using sophisticated technology to track critics online.
Two prominent Chinese bloggers in exile said this week that Chinese police were interrogating their hundreds of thousands of followers on X and other international social media platforms, urging fans to unsubscribe from their accounts.
Some of the hacking tools that Chinese police use to investigate social media users around the world were revealed in a recent leak of documents from I-Soon, a private security contractor linked to the Chinese government.
Such allegations of transnational repression are “groundless and malicious defamation,” the Chinese Embassy in London said in a statement in January. “The Chinese government fully protects Chinese citizens’ legal rights and freedoms in accordance with the law and is fully committed to protecting the safety and lawful rights and interests of overseas Chinese citizens.”
The U.S. and other governments have raised the issue at the United Nations and elsewhere. At a regular U.N. review of China’s human rights record in January, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Michèle Taylor, listed “transnational repression to silence individuals abroad” among Washington’s issues of concern.
In some cases, however, China’s tactics have emboldened, not cowed, overseas critics of its ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“After that, I felt so angry,” the scientist said. “I think maybe I’m not quite a typical Chinese. If you offend me, I will take my revenge. So when they try to harass me, I’m thinking, ‘So my family and I are in trouble. Let’s get everyone in trouble.’”
She responded to the demands by going public, describing her family’s experience with the Chinese police in posts on X seen by NBC News that have since been deleted.
The idea was to “expose them to the whole world,” said the woman, whose experience with the Chinese police NBC News was not able to independently verify.
Though her interrogators appear to have relented for the moment, she said she expects to be questioned again if she returns to China.
“After the interrogation, they told my parents to warn me not to mention this to anyone, and to tell me that protests and petitions are useless: ‘The West won’t listen to you.’”
‘Determined to speak out’
A chemical engineer living in California has a similar story.
Like the scientist, he had spent some of his youth in China under the leadership of Xi Jinping, and had jumped at a job opportunity in the U.S. after studying at an American college.
“Under Xi Jinping, things got worse and worse,” said the engineer, who like the scientist requested anonymity because of safety concerns for himself and his family.
The Chinese leader has concentrated power in his own hands since taking office in 2012, tightening control over civil society, the media and the internet. Rights groups also accuse Xi’s government of abuses against Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang region, allegations that Beijing denies.
The engineer said he had posted critical videos online while concealing his identity, but that was well before authorities first contacted his family last March.
“My father called me. He asked me, ‘What are you doing? Did you say something against our government and the CCP?’ So he wouldn’t worry, I told him ‘no.’ I lied.”
He said he was then contacted by a police officer on the Chinese messaging service WeChat.
“He asked me to provide my personal accounts for YouTube and Twitter,” the engineer said. “I said no, you can’t ask me that, because I’m in the United States,” where unlike in China he can access such services freely.
“He said even if you’re in the…
Read More: The Chinese government tried to silence them. It backfired.