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…
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