"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 42

In this episode: China is Stalking its Dissidents — Even on U.S. Soil

February 19, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 42

Episode 42: China is Stalking its Dissidents — Even on U.S. Soil

The United States is home to countless dissidents from around the world who have fled repression in places like Iran, India, Russia and, increasingly, China. But U.S. soil — even U.S. citizenship — isn’t a guarantee they’ll be left alone. Why are foreign governments daring to harass, hurt, or even kill their foes in the U.S. — and what's being done to stop them?

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Peter Bergen: What did you feel like when you landed in Los Angeles?

Yan Xiong: The first day I got here, I know nothing. I don't know how to speak English.

This is Yan Xiong. Today, he’s a U.S. citizen. But when he first arrived in the United States in 1992, he was fleeing his native China after serving jail time for his leadership role in the historic pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Just a few weeks after he arrived in LA, he experienced his first 4th of July celebration.

[SOUNDS OF FOURTH OF JULY CELEBRATIONS, FIREWORKS, CHATTING]

Yan Xiong: One of my friend's family accompanied me to the little park to celebrate my first 4th of July party. Oh, you know, was a beautiful park, green grass, sunshine, popcorn, firework, countryside music, children laughing, dancing, colorful clothing — totally different from the Chinese society at that time!

Peter Bergen: How, how did you feel about all this?

Yan Xiong: Was like whoa, this is the freedom.

Xiong risked his life in Tiananmen Square demanding freedom, but as a young college student in China in 1989, he says freedom was just a hopeful idea that he'd never personally experienced.

Yan Xiong: Before I know, “Ah, we want freedom.” We know the words. When I see that 4th of July park celebration, the first time I personally experienced feeling, touching, smelling the freedom.

I live in Washington, D.C. and you hear the word freedom here a lot. It's a central theme in speeches, marches, even landmarks like Freedom Plaza. But when I heard Xiong explain freedom as a sensation, it was moving.

And that’s why the next part of Xiong’s story is so unsettling. Almost 30 years after he arrived on American soil, and despite becoming a U.S. citizen, Xiong became the victim of China’s campaign of repression once again. It started when he decided to mount a modest campaign for a Congressional seat to represent New York City, and an agent of the Chinese government began stalking him, plotting a car accident to permanently silence his voice.

[MUSIC SHIFTS, THEME MUSIC BEGINS]

Xiong isn’t alone. Dissidents from countries like India and Iran are being targeted with online harassment, stalking, and even assassination on American soil. It’s a troubling — and growing — phenomenon. But it’s a perplexing one, too. Take Xiong’s story: it’s hard to imagine why a superpower like China, with 1.4 billion people and the second largest economy in the world, would go after such a small target — and so aggressively. Why are foreign governments willing to risk international humiliation and diplomatic rifts with these attacks? To try and unravel the answer, we’re going to go back to one of the most iconic moments of the 20th century and learn how a protest and a massacre set the stage for China’s wide-ranging campaign of repression that spans continents.

Today: What’s being done to protect U.S. citizens like Xiong from attacks by foreign governments on U.S. soil? And why are countries daring to cross borders to exact punishment — harassment, injury, and even death?

I'm Peter Bergen. Welcome to In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES. NEW MUSIC PICKS UP]

The FBI has a term for the targeting Xiong experienced. And it admittedly doesn’t roll off the tongue. They call it “transnational repression.”

Emily Morales: Transnational repression is when foreign governments reach outside their borders — whether physically or digitally — to intimidate, harass, coerce, or harm members of diaspora communities.

That's Emily Morales, an FBI section chief and an expert on transnational repression.

Emily Morales: We have seen not only an increase in the types of activity, but also the brazenness of the activity. A willingness to act in really bold ways in the United States, on U.S. soil, in a way that we see as particularly troubling.

[MUSIC FADES]

Peter Bergen: You use the word brazen, which is interesting, that countries sort of feel like they can maybe get away with it, or they don't care if they don't get away with it. What changed, and when you use the word brazen, what do you mean?

Emily Morales: I would say there isn't a particular triggering event. It was rather a tipping point in our understanding of seeing that these activities weren't one-offs, but rather part of a willingness to act against opponents and minority groups in a way that just seemed to have a larger intent globally.

Roman Rozhavsky: The battle between democracy and authoritarian regimes has escalated recently.

FBI Section Chief Roman Rozhavsky works with Morales to root out this kind of harassment. He points out that it’s hard to find a section of the globe that’s immune to this battle between freedom and control.

[EERIE MUSIC PICKS UP]

Roman Rozhavsky: A lot of these nations, they see these dissidents as an existential threat to them. For us in the United States, we're used to everyone criticizing the government, criticizing the FBI. It's not a big deal here, right? Like, no one goes to prison for that. But in these countries, if you criticize the government, you go to prison or worse. And they see it as an attack on the stability of their regime, so it makes sense that they're investing all these resources and, you know, being so brazen.

This kind of harassment is happening all the time, and the big players include India, Iran, Russia, and Turkey; countries that are willing to intimidate their perceived rivals anywhere, including in the West. And sometimes, it even reaches the kind of violent dimensions that make the TV news.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: An assassination plot by Iranian intelligence to kill a defector living in Maryland near Washington…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: …murder for hire plot of a Brooklyn-based journalist, a hit that investigators say was backed by Iran.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: The human rights activist is critical of the Iranian government, and that is why she says top officials want her killed.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 4: …U.S. prosecutors have charged an Indian national in an alleged Indian assassination plot against a Sikh activist in New York City.

[EERIE MUSIC FADES]

President Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, a well-known hawk on Iran, was also targeted by the Iranian government, which planned to assassinate him. He’s now accompanied by a U.S. Secret Service detail 24/7. We talked with Bolton about this on an earlier episode of In the Room.

John Bolton: The Justice Department filed criminal charges against an officer of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps that laid out not chatter on the internet but the hard intelligence they had, including conversations with this defendant and an FBI confidential informant, that they were trying to assassinate me…

Peter Bergen: That must be pretty difficult for you?

John Bolton: Well I’m still here, so it’s better than the alternative. [PETER LAUGHS]

But of all the governments committing these acts, Rozhavsky of the FBI says the People’s Republic of China, or PRC, stands out for the sheer breadth and quantity of incidents in the U.S.

Roman Rozhavsky: The PRC is definitely the most prolific.

And China has come up with a creative range of ways to harass its targets.

Roman Rozhavsky: Using private investigators as proxies on U.S. soil to harass, intimidate dissidents, to try to force them to return to China against their will. We've seen cyberstalking. We've seen online harassment. You know, we've seen physical threats of violence.

The Chinese government has done everything from threatening family members of their targets to putting moles inside of pro-democracy groups. But maybe the most brazen thing they’ve done?

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The FBI busting what they say was a secret police station here in New York, run by the Chinese government.

ARCHIVAL Reporter: The station was a hub of Chinese counterintelligence operations used to harass and intimidate dissidents who dared to defy China.

I must say I was pretty surprised to find out that the Chinese government actually had a police station in Manhattan that it used for targeting dissidents like Yan Xiong, the Tiananmen Square protest leader who had his first taste of freedom on the Fourth of July. When Xiong arrived in the U.S. he worked hard to make a good life: he didn’t just learn English, he earned a degree in English literature. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen. He went to divinity school and became a pastor, and enlisted in the U.S. Army. During the U.S.-led war in Iraq, he served as an active-duty chaplain. When Xiong finally retired from the military, he was living in New York, and he decided to run for Congress in 2022.

Yan Xiong: I try to be a congressman in New York City. So we can do something good for the city, for the nation, for the international relationship.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The 57-year-old political novice is relying on Chinese Americans to pull off an upset.

ARCHIVAL Yan Xiong: Thank you so much. Nice to meet you…

But the People’s Republic of China evidently saw the political aspirations of this veteran, U.S. citizen, and pastor as an unacceptable threat. As Xiong began his campaign for a congressional seat in New York's 10th district, an agent of the Chinese government began a campaign of his own: to end Xiong's congressional hopes by any means necessary. He hired a private investigator to go after Xiong. Rozhavsky oversaw the FBI’s investigation of that case.

Roman Rozhavsky: At first, the conversation started with, ‘We need you to get derogatory information on the candidate, so set him up with an escort, take photos, and send them to us, and we'll ruin his campaign.’

It's a method known as a honey trap.

Yan Xiong: Honey trap, that's ridiculous.

Peter Bergen: Honey trap, yeah, so.

Yan Xiong: Honey trap!

Peter Bergen: They were trying to set you up with a prostitute in order to entrap you.

Yan Xiong: That's their plan, but, uh.

Peter Bergen: Well, you're a, you're a chaplain, a pastor, so it seems that, uh, it didn't work out.

Yan Xiong: I'm not that kind of person. [PETER LAUGHS] I’m a chaplain. I wear uniform. I'm 27 years in the army. That's ridiculous.

The Chinese agent, named Lin Qiming, asked the private investigator to set up this honey trap. But fortunately for Xiong, the private investigator had the good sense to tip off the FBI. Rozhavsky says they quickly warned Xiong that he was being targeted by China. And then they were able to record a conversation between the private investigator and the Chinese agent.

[SOUNDS OF A TAPE RECORDER ROLLING]

Roman Rozhavsky: We controlled the conversation. We had the private investigator reply, "I can't do that for you because," we gave some reasons, then Lin Qiming immediately escalated to violence and said, maybe we can set up a car accident or just beat him.

In fact, according to the FBI, in a conversation, the Chinese agent tells the private investigator that, quote, [SPEAKING WITH TAPE RECORDER EFFECT] “...in the end, violence would be fine too. Huh? Beat him, beat him until he cannot run for election." The Chinese agent chuckles. The last resort, the Chinese agent says, will be “car accident, will be completely wrecked, right?” And then he chuckles again.

[SOUNDS OF A TAPE RECORDER ROLLING TO A STOP]

This chat seems kinda diabolical, but also kind of amateurish — not the careful spycraft you might expect of an authoritarian superpower. So, I wanted to know, why are Chinese agents even using private investigators to carry out these schemes in the United States? Shouldn’t it be more highly-trained-assassin, less…

[PINK PANTHER THEME MUSIC BEGINS]

…Inspector Clouseau?

[PINK PANTHER THEME MUSIC PLAYS THEN FADES]

Roman Rozhavsky: So the people involved may not be sophisticated, but overall the approach is very nuanced and using private investigators, while it seems amateur, it's actually a clever way to exploit the gray areas in our laws, right, because as a private investigator, you can surveil someone on a public street and that's not illegal. A lot of the private investigators are former law enforcement themselves, so they know the line. So you can effectively intimidate someone without breaking the law. Imagine you're a vocal dissident, and someone is following you on a public street. It's not illegal, but it's disturbing, right? So it is amateur in terms of, you know, versus like a James Bond movie, but it is effective in terms of, they get what they want. It's cheap, and they're not risking their own people doing this.

Peter Bergen: So how does that work? I mean, I'm just curious. I mean, so, you know, I'm working for the Minister of State Security in China and I want to get this dissident. Let's say, he or she is living in Queens, New York. I go online and I try and find a private investigator in the United States who might be cooperative? What are the mechanics of this?

Roman Rozhavsky: Sometimes it's exactly that. They're not going to go to a big company that's going to do a lot of due diligence. They're going to go to like the mom and pop, you know, two-person or one-person operation. They'll try to make the story sound like something the private investigator already does. We've seen them say, “Hey, we think this person is cheating on their spouse. We want you to follow them around and give us their pattern of life,” something like that, right? So ideally no one even knows they're involved. And then we've also seen where they'll go to, like, private investigator conferences which are big. You know, there are some conferences that are like thousands of private investigators, and then they'll just look for someone who's willing to work with them. Some private investigators know what they're doing, and we've charged those people, and some are unwitting, and we try to work with them, and usually they'll help us out.

Peter Bergen: We first got interested in this story in a big way when we read about the secret police station run by the Chinese in New York City’s Chinatown.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: U.S. officials claim the Chinese government has set up more than 100 secret police stations around the world, including one in lower Manhattan, using Chinese MPS police officers to monitor, harass and even repatriate Chinese citizens living in exile,

Roman Rozhavsky: Ostensibly, they present these as a service center that’s designed to help citizens of the PRC obtain, like driver’s licenses and things like that. So the way they describe them is very benign. However, as we saw in that case, they have the potential and they are used for other purposes, such as transnational repression. And they’re in general a massive violation of sovereignty, imagine if, you know, if the FBI decided to set up a station in Beijing, right? Like, that would not be looked at kindly.

Peter Bergen: Why would the Chinese government pay attention to a guy who at the end of the day only got 1 percent in a congressional election in New York?

Roman Rozhavsky: So, I'm speculating here, right? Because I don't know for sure. But what we've seen is a consistent pattern of going after anyone who's a former Tiananmen Square protester. They're very, very high on the PRC's list.

Josh Chin: The Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 were the most existential threat that the party has faced, since coming to power.

This is Josh Chin, deputy China bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

Josh Chin: I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the country's entire security apparatus now and huge swaths of its political system in general are built around preventing another Tiananmen Square. The many, many thousands of security officials running around China, that is their ultimate aim, is to make sure that that never happens again.

To understand why — and why the government is still going after student leaders like Xiong all these many years later — you first have to understand how deeply those protests shook China and how violently the Communist Party reacted to that threat. The protests began almost by accident: Mourners gathered in Tiananmen Square in April of 1989 to honor the legacy of a political reformist who had just died.

ARCHIVAL 1980s Newscaster 1: Students marched through the streets of Beijing. [CROWD CHANTING IN CHINESE] Their destination: Tiananmen Square in the city center. It was here…

One of those mourners-turned-protesters was Yan Xiong, then a law student.

Yan Xiong: I was one of a student leader, initiate that movement.

[ARCHIVAL AMBIENT SOUNDS OF THE CHANTS, CHEERING OF PROTESTORS]

The last decade had been tumultuous: economic reforms were shaking the country, while political freedoms hadn’t materialized. The mourners who came to the square stuck around, including students like Xiong, who were angry at a government that seemed to be enriching itself at the expense of the people.

ARCHIVAL 1980s Newscaster 2: Down with the dictatorship, chanted the students. [CROWD CHANTING IN CHINESE] They demanded democracy and freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and an investigation into charges of corruption among Communist Party officials.

[ARCHIVAL AMBIENT SOUNDS OF THE CHANTS, CHEERING OF PROTESTORS]

As the movement grew, the square accommodated up to a million protesters as workers joined the students. Days of mass protest turned into weeks. In the middle of May, thousands of students went on hunger strike, including Yan Xiong.

Yan Xiong: We have a big message to the world. We don't need to, uh, agree or not, but history will recognize this is the patriotic democratic movement.

A “patriotic democratic movement.” This really was a moment when the entire world was rapt by what was going on in Tiananmen Square; it looked like the world's most populous country might turn into the world's largest democracy. The protesters in the square were so inspiring. They even built a 30-foot-high statue in the square known as the “Goddess of Democracy” which was loosely modeled after the Statue of Liberty. And the government seemed to be just letting them protest peacefully for weeks on end.

Josh Chin: I watched them on television like a lot of people, but if you talk to participants who were there, they were for a long time extremely optimistic, full of this energy, the sense that they could change China.

Yan Xiong: We feel happy, we get excited, we hope the government can be changed a little bit. We can change them.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF SHOUTING]

But on the night of June 3rd, Xiong's hopes, and the hopes of millions of others across China, were crushed as tens of thousands of armed soldiers moved into the square and started firing.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF SHOUTING, GUNFIRE]

ARCHIVAL 1980s Newscaster 3: A bloody seven-hour assault came to a climax at dawn, as armored troops crashed into the square.

Xiong rushed into the fray.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF GUNSHOTS, AMBULANCES, SHOUTING]

Yan Xiong: I still can recognize the do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do, this kind of a machine gun, and the rifle shooting, and the screaming. The ambulance screaming. The people screaming.

ARCHIVAL 1980s Newscaster 4: The protesting students, exhausted and looking resigned to probable death. This has been a terrifying and unbelievably brutal night. The students asked for democracy, they got their answer.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

We’ll never know the exact death toll — and that points to another one of the horrors of June 3rd and 4th: Chinese soldiers ran over protesters in armored vehicles and incinerated bodies to obscure the casualties.

ARCHIVAL 1980s Newscaster 5: There has been no official announcement of casualties. Student leaders claim they are staggering, and that the government is attempting to cremate the bodies as quickly as possible so the true number of fatalities will never be known.

Over the years, different entities have guessed at how many people died — from a few hundred to a few thousand. One diplomatic cable from the time put the estimate as high as 10,000. A week after the crackdown, the government released the names of 21 student leaders: China’s “Most Wanted.” Yan Xiong was one of them. He was quickly caught and taken to prison for 19 months.

Yan Xiong: In that period, in that jail, we just get out maybe one month, one time. 20, uh, 30 minutes. That’s it.

Peter Bergen: Once a month you got 20 minutes of getting outside to have exercise?

Yan Xiong: Yes.

After his release, Xiong escaped to Hong Kong before receiving political asylum in the United States. In the 35 years since Tiananmen Square, he became a U.S. citizen, had eight American-born children, and served for 27 years in the U.S. military. He’s spent more of his life in the U.S. than in China.

Yan Xiong: My life is really like American life.

And yet, when the Chinese government was going after Xiong’s Congressional campaign in New York, and seemed to take the view that they had jurisdiction over him, it wasn’t particularly surprising to Josh Chin.

Josh Chin: You often see the Communist Party portray itself as the champion, not just of Chinese citizens, but of ethnically Chinese people everywhere. That dynamic is especially strong with, with Chinese nationals who leave China and then acquire citizenship elsewhere. I think the Chinese government just doesn't regard them as actually the citizens of their adopted countries. They just view them as Chinese and as subject to Chinese authority.

And Chin says that when he learned about the tactics used by the PRC to target Xiong in New York, including the honey trap, they sounded eerily familiar.

Josh Chin: They're the exact same tactics that you see deployed against critics of the communist party inside China. So there was a period of time, for example, when social media had sort of first come to China and had become extremely popular, and there was a, there still is a social media platform called Weibo, which is sort of like a cross between Twitter and Facebook. And it became very quickly this public square where a number of liberal-minded Chinese entrepreneurs and intellectuals that sort of amassed these very large followings and were using them to sort of gently criticize the Communist Party but often in ways that actually forced the party to sort of respond and was putting quite a bit of pressure on them. And then lo and behold, after a year or two of this, a lot of these intellectuals and business people started to be detained on charges of soliciting prostitutes and sort of being paraded on television to confess, not just to having solicited prostitutes, but also to have behaved inappropriately on social media. So it was a very familiar playbook.

Peter Bergen: Which is really shame and humiliation as much as anything else.

Josh Chin: Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Part of the idea is to tarnish someone so much publicly that they no longer can have a public life.

When social media exploded in China, the government understood that this was a new venue for dissent, a digital version of Tiananmen Square. Since then, they’ve gotten really good at policing dissent online. Xi Jinping’s government has also gone after the foreign media. Josh Chin experienced this firsthand when he was one of more than a dozen reporters kicked out of the country in 2020. He spoke to us from Seoul, where he now reports on China remotely.

Josh Chin: Unfortunately, the best way to do that is on WeChat, which is an app that the Chinese government has almost perfect visibility into. [PETER LAUGHS] It is a real challenge now to try to sort of get a sense of uh, what's happening in the country, talk to, to regular Chinese people because the risks are just extremely high. The most crushing thing about it was, I had to leave behind a life that I'd been building for a decade in China.

Josh Chin: It was made more difficult by the fact that you know, I'd become sort of politically toxic by being expelled. I remember at one point during the pandemic, I was, I was just sending messages to friends in China just to see how they were doing, there'd been a wave of COVID infections and I was just asking people and all of the responses I got were, were just sort of suspiciously positive and upbeat, and curt, right? And it was just became clear to me that my friends in China sort of didn't really feel comfortable engaging with me, at least not on WeChat.

Josh Chin’s book, Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control deals mostly with the ways China’s vast surveillance apparatus operates inside of the country. But I think that the project of domestic surveillance in China actually reveals quite a lot about why the Chinese government goes after targets abroad. To begin with, Chin says surveillance isn’t a dirty word in China. When he first started reporting his book, he didn’t understand why companies and members of the government were so eager to share their technology and tactics with him.

Josh Chin: And I just, I couldn't get it. I didn't understand it for a while until what I realized later was that… they want people to know that they're watching. Right? And that's, that's the point. Whether or not you're actually being surveilled, if you feel that you are being surveilled, if you feel that the government has the ability to know everything about you, that will affect your behavior. And it's that's much more effective than actually... you know, I mean, even the Communist Party can't track all 1.4 billion people inside China's borders and outside of it. But if it makes everyone feel like it has that ability, then the effect is the same.

[SOUNDS OF TYPING]

In Surveillance State, Chin explains the mechanics of this all-seeing, all-knowing government: for one, the Chinese government collects data on all its citizens through their online shopping habits. That concept might sound familiar: surely Amazon knows your favorite brand of shampoo, Zillow knows you’re in the market for a new house, and Instagram knows that you're a dog-lover. But there’s a crucial difference when it comes to the U.S. version.

Josh Chin: Those are all separate companies. In China, there's one company that has all of that data. And as a result, the Communist Party can access that and very easily and quickly sort of form a picture of not just individual behavior but also group behavior, and sort of head off, neutralize, any signs it sees of future dissent.

Peter Bergen: Could you just give a sort of high-level account of what technologies the Chinese deploy to maintain control? How does this work?

Josh Chin: The most obvious technology you'll see on the streets of China are surveillance cameras. They've almost at this point become sort of symbolic of modern Chinese governance. There's probably more than 500 million of them around the country.

Approximately one camera for every three people.

Josh Chin: And what's particularly notable about them is a lot of these are really cutting edge cameras, meaning they're equipped with artificial intelligence technologies, such as facial recognition, that can basically pick a face out of a crowd, and run it against a database of suspicious individuals in a matter of seconds. But it's not just faces. The cameras can, can track people by the way that they walk. Because everyone has a unique gait. So if you're too far away to be identified by your face, you can still be identified by the way that you walk.

Peter Bergen: Wow.

Josh Chin: Yeah, it's, it…

Peter Bergen: I mean, that's impressive.

Josh Chin: It's quite impressive. They also have microphones that can identify people by their voice. In China, the level of data they have is really just astronomical. And that's partly because they have these super apps, one called WeChat that is basically indispensable to life in China and people use it to obviously chat with their friends, but they use it to order food delivery, to book vacations, buy auto insurance, invest money, basically everything.

Peter Bergen: Are you familiar with the phrase panopticon?

Josh Chin: I am, I am. This circular prison, invented by the Bentham brothers.

Peter Bergen: This seems like a perfect panopticon.

Josh Chin: It really is. The idea is that there's a circular prison with a control tower in the middle, where the prison guards sit, and the control tower can theoretically see into every cell. But of course there's no way for the security guards to be watching every cell at any time, but all the prisoners are aware that they could be watched at any time, and that affects their behavior. And so the Communist Party's surveillance system works the same way. I mean, it is expansive. It does see a huge amount, but it can't see everything. There are lots of blind spots, but that doesn't matter to a certain degree, because the sense inside of China is that no matter what you're doing, where you are, you can always be watched.

[PULSING ELECTRONIC MUSIC BEGINS]

In fact, even before Xiong had confirmation from the FBI that he was being targeted, he had his suspicions, even in the United States. One day, he had to leave for a road trip at 3:00 a.m., and another driver started following him. When he tried to get a look at her, she ducked behind the wheel.

Yan Xiong: I wonder, who is she? But I have no time, so I drove away. But I don't know what's going on.

[PULSING ELECTRONIC MUSIC FADES]

Peter Bergen: What does it say about Xi and, or Xi's government that they're reaching out thousands of miles away to basically harass this person who's no longer involved in any kind of formal dissident movement. Seems like thin-skinned is almost too generous a term for this kind of thing where you're trying to just extinguish any kind of potential threat no matter how innocuous.

Josh Chin: Right. I mean, I think there is a very, very strong strain of paranoia running through everything that the Communist Party is doing when it comes to this sort of thing. The Communist Party began as an underground organization. There's always been a level of paranoia sort of built into its DNA. You know, it's always seen itself as being under siege, but, but that's really intensified under Xi Jinping. Partly that's because, you know, Xi, like any leader in his position, who is sort of unchallenged, and has amassed a huge amount of power, you know, he surrounded himself with yes men. There's a real question around how much information he's getting, how much he knows. You know, Xi himself, I think understands that. You know, he knows that he is somewhat blind to things and that kind of just feeds the paranoia even more.

Peter Bergen: We're talking about transnational repression, which is reaching out in the United States and harassing dissidents. An action like the one that we've been discussing about Yan Xiong — is that something that would be approved at a high level in the Chinese government? Does Xi, you know, approve in general this kind of activity?

Josh Chin: The Communist Party is extremely opaque. So it's hard to know really with, with any precision, exactly who is making what decisions. Something like Yan Xiong's case feels like it's probably beneath Xi Jinping. Like any kind of CEO or leader he sets the general direction, very rarely kind of gets involved in individual cases, but he certainly, he has made it clear to everyone in the Chinese government that the priority is security and stifling of criticism.

Peter Bergen: But when a case like Yan's, or when the Chinese police station becomes public, is that embarrassing for the Chinese government, or they just don't, it's just the price of doing business?

Josh Chin: It certainly doesn't make them look good, but I think the, the calculation now in China seems to be that they've lost the soft power war to a certain degree. A lot of the goodwill that China had sort of, if you remember back during the Olympics when everyone was really impressed with the opening ceremony and, and the economy was roaring, and Chinese film and television and music was all around, that era is over, I think in the minds of the Communist Party. They see that public opinion has turned against China and so I think they're less concerned with how that looks.

When we logged onto Zoom for this interview, Josh and my production team told me they heard a little sound in the background. Some interference we'd never heard in more than a year of recording interviews.

Peter Bergen: I don’t know what it is. Well, I don’t know what it is…

We performed a magic trick — known as rebooting Zoom — and then it was gone.

Josh Chin: Yeah, I don’t hear that noise anymore either so that’s uh…yeah.

Was it overly paranoid to wonder if we were being surveilled?

Josh Chin: No, not, it's not at all, not at all extreme. There's constantly glitches in the matrix in China and sounds on the phone, strange things happening with your apps. And the whole point is you just don't know. You never know. Living in China, you kind of have a hair trigger for those sorts of things. But the torture of it is that like, even when you notice them, there's no way to sort of figure out whether it was real or not.

Peter Bergen: That seems kind of exhausting.

Josh Chin: It is. It's, I mean, it's totally exhausting. Although you know, human beings are also very resilient and so you do find a way to live with it. I imagine it's sort of like, living on a planet with, with heavier gravity, eventually you develop the, the strength to deal with it. But it is tiring. And you really do feel it when you escape it.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

When you escape it. Like on that first day that Xiong landed in Los Angeles.

Yan Xiong: Finally, I come into the free society and get my freedom. Oh, it's, uh, unbelievable feel good.

It's only when you understand the logic of Chinese surveillance — the panopticon that may not literally see everything but shapes behavior by threatening to see everything — that the extraordinary risk of going after a former dissident on U.S. soil begins to make sense.

Josh Chin: I think they want to a certain degree for people to be afraid. They're certainly not upset at the idea that Chinese communities around the world are worried about crossing the Communist Party.

Roman Rozhavsky and Emily Morales of the FBI told me that this seems to be working. The victims they speak with assume they're being surveilled, even in the supposed safety of the U.S.

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Roman Rozhavsky: They'll say, “We go about every day assuming that they're hearing everything we're saying and know everything we're doing." That's a sad state of affairs in the United States, right? It's kind of like an Orwellian environment that the PRC has created where people in a community are afraid that other members of that community are going to report on them back to the PRC.

Emily Morales: We often say we may have dozens of cases, but we believe we should have hundreds. While some of the examples might be quite shocking and sound surprising to occur inside the United States, it's also true that repression can be quite subtle, and I don't want to discount what some communities and individuals may be feeling because it may not sound like the surprising and very eye-catching assassination plot, but subtle messages, subtle activities can also silence someone and prevent them from fully exercising their rights and freedoms here in the U.S. And that's no less something that we would take really seriously.

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Members of the U.S. Congress, like Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, have tried to pass legislation that would strengthen protections against this kind of thing.

ARCHIVAL Jeff Merkley: All of this requires that the United States and as many other governments as possible make it a priority to address this issue.

But so far, none of these proposed bills have become law. And analysts say there aren't real consequences for foreign governments who engage in this kind of behavior. The FBI is working to educate communities on transnational repression so that victims come forward, but it’s not easy.

Emily Morales: We understand that victims of repression often have very low trust in government with really good reason. And so their willingness to come forward to share their story with us is really challenging and can put them at risk. And so we have taken a great deal of effort to build trust across a lot of different communities so that they feel like they can come to us. That includes our Threat Intimidation Guide. We translated this guide into almost 70 languages of a lot of the communities we see impacted by repression so that they can see in their native language how to contact the FBI, what to expect when they speak with us, and then what may happen next and how their information can not only help us protect them but also their entire community.

Roman Rozhavsky: The biggest thing to overcome is not always cultural differences. It's more the perception of the community like, for example, with the PRC, they put out a lot of propaganda saying the FBI works with us. And, you know, if you go and complain to the FBI, they're just going to take you and turn you over to us. And so we have a lot to overcome when we go talk to these communities. We'll ask like, “Hey, why didn't you come to us sooner if this was happening for such a long time?” and a lot of the victims will say, you know, “I didn't know the FBI even worked this,” or “I thought you would turn me over and that's why I didn't.”

In the end, Yan Xiong got lucky. The private investigator hired by a Chinese agent quickly went to the FBI. And they were able to step in and help. But when I talked to Xiong, this episode doesn't even rate as the most painful of his post-Tiananmen Square years. Instead, it was the moment in 2015 when his mother was dying. The Chinese government wouldn’t let him in the country to say goodbye.

Yan Xiong: And then in July, my mother was passed away. That is a real sad story, uh, still bothering me.

He flew all the way to Hong Kong in the hopes he might be able to get to her in mainland China. But he wasn't allowed in.

Yan Xiong: My mother understand me. My mother supported me. She was really proud of what we do in the Tiananmen Square.

And while the PRC might have a death grip on online communication, Xiong says that words of encouragement still made their way to his mother over the years.

Yan Xiong: After the Tiananmen Square, almost the whole country know my name, the people know my name. So, occasionally, my mother could get a letter from a different city, "Ah, you got a good son. We proud of you. You're a great mother." My mother was encouraged by thousands letters. The people respect her more. Oh yeah, that's the, the Chinese people.

That's the Chinese people, Xiong says. And it's worth noting this critique of Chinese repression isn’t a commentary on the Chinese people but rather the government.

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But Xiong’s story also made me think about the United States’ own record of helping repressive regimes to crack down on their dissidents. Like when, after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. kidnapped, effectively, Islamists who were often dissidents in their own countries and delivered them to countries in the Middle East like Egypt, Libya, Sudan, and Syria, where they were likely to be tortured. In a 2008 study I co-authored for Mother Jones magazine, we found dozens of such cases where U.S. officials sent Islamists and suspected terrorists to countries that practiced torture. This tactic seems to have petered out over time, but the fact remains that Americans should take a good look in the mirror when they complain that other countries are trying to eliminate or intimidate their dissidents on American soil.

The more I came to learn about the Chinese government’s brand of repression, the more I came to appreciate Xiong’s vision of the Fourth of July and the freedom of living your life without having to look over your shoulder.

[SOUNDS OF FIREWORKS]

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If you’d like to learn some more about the issues discussed in this episode, we recommend Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control by Josh Chin and Liza Lin and The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited by Louisa Lim. Both of those titles are available on Audible.

If you enjoyed the show, please rate, review and tell some friends.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

This episode was produced by Laura Tillman and Luke Cregan.

Special thanks to Yana Gorokhovskaia and Yaqui Wang of Freedom House.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.