Wednesday, August 19, 2015

China after Dissidents in the US

It should not surprise anyone that China has come after dissidents in the U.S. and were, last week, accused of trying to influence Chinese expats to return home -mostly by intimidating them.  They put pressure on their relatives and on the expats to make the switch and come home.  This is hardly news to anyone following the Chinese for more than a few weeks.

Both the Russians and Chinese have never been content to allow dissidents to sit in another country communicating with people via the Internet about events and policies that disrupt their governments.  I have used Christopher Andrew's book, The Sword and the Shield, as a reference in my books.  He outlines the methods used to influence relatives of Russians emigres long before anyone ever heard of the Internet.  They did that, and interfered with US elections more than once.

In October 2006, an editorial by Fred Hiatt in the Washington Post, described the case of Rebiya Kadeer, a dissident who lived not far from me in Fairfax, Virginia.  She had a mysterious car accident, her children in China had been beaten, and she had spent 6 years in prison before leaving a bad neighborhood for the US.  They tried to influence the Norwegian officials who issued the Nobel Prize to prevent her from winning.  Her main crime was being Uighur and expressing the rights of her people in terms of Chinese law as it existed then.  She gave newspaper articles to some of her friends and those were called "state secrets" after the fact, something the Chinese still do to businesses that don't fix prices the way they want them to be.  Ask Rio Tinto about that.

What is unusual about what they are doing this time is the lack of coverage of any of these incidents by the press, which seems focused on Donald Trump to the exclusion of any other news.  We don't have an election for a year and a half, but the Chinese are whacking away at people in this country right now.  I wonder what the Donald says about that?

No comments:

Post a Comment