The Chinese Communist Party
Is hunting down dissidents
On American soil
Welcome to China Uncensored. I’m Chris Chappell.
This episode is sponsored by Brilliant.
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The Chinese Communist Party intimidates, harasses, and undermines people who speak out against it.
And it’s doing this more and more outside its own borders. Including here in America.
Last week, the US Department of Justice charged five people with stalking, harassing,
and spying on US residents on behalf of the Chinese secret police.
Three of the people have been arrested in the US.
The other two are in China.
Where they better hope they don’t get in trouble for being incompetent enough to get caught.
These five people are charged in three separate cases. What links
them all is that these Chinese agents specifically targeted Chinese Americans.
And the US government doesn’t like that.
“Members of the Chinese diaspora community both in New York City and around the rest of the country
must be free to express themselves on politically sensitive issues without fear of reprisal from
the PRC government. Our office will not permit efforts by the defendants and co-conspirators to
erode the civil rights of US residents on account of their Chinese ethnicity and their beliefs.”
According to US officials, these cases show the Chinese regime
is exporting its repression onto US soil.
Great. Not only are we getting cheap Made in China products,
we have to deal with cheap Made in China repression too?!
I’m going to get into the details of some of these cases a little later,
because you would not believe some of the things these Chinese agents got up to.
But first, how the US government is framing these cases is significant.
They say this isn’t just about targeting Chinese Americans. It’s also about undermining America.
“Transnational repression is part of the range of tactics that our adversaries employ to try
to undermine our democracy, our economy, and our institutions and it is a threat
not only to people in the United States but also to people around the world
who seek to exercise their basic rights to freedom of expression
and to stand up to authoritarianism. This activity is antithetical to fundamental American values.”
Expect to hear the term transnational repression a lot.
The FBI even has a page on their website telling people it’s illegal and how to report it.
So what does transnational repression look like?
In the first case, good old-fashioned spying.
Wang Shujun is a prominent Chinese democracy activist in New York City.
Who has just been charged with spying for Communist China.
Wang moved to the US in the ‘90s and became an American citizen in 2003.
According to the FBI, by 2005 he was spying for the Ministry of State Security, or MSS.
In other words, Wang was working for China’s secret police.
Wang had four different MSS handlers, who asked
him to spy on various pro-democracy activists in the US and Hong Kong.
That was easy because Wang helped co-found a Chinese pro-democracy nonprofit.
Wang met with his handlers in person when he traveled to China. He also communicated with
them through email “diaries” he would write about the activists he was asked to spy on.
And Wang didn’t just spy on Chinese pro-democracy activists. He was also asked to spy on Tibetans,
Mongolians, and Uyghurs in the US, as well as Hong Kong activists.
The most prominent person Wang spied on was Albert Ho , a former Hong Kong pro-democracy lawmaker.
Ho is now in prison for organizing protests in 2019.
Although it doesn’t look like Wang got a lot of dirt on Albert Ho, it shows the
effort the Chinese Communist Party makes to monitor people they consider a threat.
“WANG’s reporting to the MSS about [Albert Ho] likely represented only a portion
of a multifaceted effort by the PRC government to track [Ho].”
So how did Wang get caught? It’s clear from the court documents
that the FBI was building a case against Wang for years.
And then they sent an undercover FBI agent
in to pretend he was sent by the MSS to give Wang a message.
What was the message? That Wang was being investigated by the FBI.
So what did Wang do? He
asked the undercover FBI agent to help him destroy the incriminating evidence.
Which is pretty hilarious. Well, not for Wang.
The MSS is not sending their best. Something that will be even clearer in the next two cases.
Welcome back. Last week, the US government charged
5 people with acting as agents of the Chinese Communist Party in the US.
One of them was Lin Qiming, a supposedly “retired” MSS agent living in China.
Last year, Lin contacted a private investigator in the US to dig up dirt on this guy, Yan Xiong.
Yan was a Tiananmen Square protester who moved to the US,
became a US citizen, and served in the US Army.
Then Yan decided to run for Congress.
I don’t know how good his chances actually are. But the MSS decided
he needed to be squashed, just in case.
So Lin contacted a private investigator,
and asked him to either find or create dirt on Yan to undermine his candidacy.
Here’s an idea that Lin threw out there. What about a honey trap?
Just hire a prostitute and take some photos.
But if all else fails, how about some violence.
You know, beat him until he can’t run for election. That one’s a classic.
Or if that doesn’t work, how about a car accident?
Something to make sure that on the day of the election, he can’t physically get there.
I guess MSS agents don’t know how elections work.
Unfortunately for Lin Qiming, the private investigator he “hired”
immediately contacted the FBI.
And then spent the next few months recording all of their conversations and giving them to the FBI.
But as thuggish and ham-fisted as Lin’s actions were,
US officials point out that there’s something bigger going on here.
“For decades the Chinese Communist Party has targeted, harassed, and threatened
US-based Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong members, and pro-democracy activists. And now as if that
weren't offensive enough the government of china has targeted the campaign of a candidate
for Congress. This is clear evidence of their efforts to undermine our electoral process.”
I guess according to the Chinese Communist Party,
if you can’t buy a politician off, you can always kneecap them.
More after the break.
Welcome back. Sometimes, when you’re trying to undermine America,
you can’t do it on your own. Sometimes you need a team.
Let’s call them the…D minus team.
Frank Liu and Matthew Ziburis live in Long Island, New York. Sun Qiang was their handler in China.
Sun worked for a Chinese company that was acting as an intermediary for the MSS.
He hired Liu and Ziburis to spy on and harass Chinese dissidents.
For example, he had Liu try to bribe an IRS agent to get the tax returns of a dissident.
That was to create a scandal if there was something wrong with his taxes.
Really? A tax scandal? At least the other MSS guy thought of setting up a honey trap.
Ziburis and Liu also spied on Chen Weimin,
a dissident artist who created this statue of Xi Jinping as a coronavirus.
I can see why the MSS was upset about this. Where’s Winnie-the-Pooh?
Ziburis spied on Chen, including bugging Chen’s office and car.
And Chen’s CCP Virus statue was repeatedly vandalized, and
then burned down. After Ziburis, Sun, and Liu discussed destroying it. What a coincidence.
The group also targeted Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu
and her father, who was a Chinese dissident.
“Ziburis was hired to perform surveillance on the family and pose as a member of an
international sports committee to ask Arthur Liu for a copy of his and Alysa
Liu’s passports by claiming it was a travel ‘preparedness check’ related to COVID-19.”
I know you can blame everything on Covid these days,
but this is the first time I’ve heard it used for spying.
Liu refused to give Ziburis the information.
But if that wasn’t creepy enough, the FBI investigation found that the Chinese regime
knew about an Instagram message Alysa Liu had posted about the Uyghurs.
And while Liu was in Beijing for the Winter Olympics,
a man approached her and tried to lure her to his apartment.
That’s terrifying. And clearly in violation of Beijing’s Olympic Covid bubble.
But while Sun hired Liu and Ziburis to spy on and intimidate Chinese Americans,
it doesn’t look like they accomplished much. But if nothing else, the arrangement was lucrative.
Ziburis made over a hundred grand. While Liu made more than 3 million.
Maybe that will pay for some good lawyers.
These are only the cases that we know about,
because the FBI investigated and found these Chinese agents clearly broke US laws.
But the FBI believes this is happening on a much larger scale.
“We have dozens of transnational repression cases. However, we believe we should have hundreds.”
That’s why the US government is asking for victims of transnational repression
to contact the FBI. And I hope they do.
We need to expose what the Chinese Communist Party is doing
in America. Plus, the incompetence of these MSS agents is always good for a laugh.
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Once again, I’m Chris Chappell. Thanks for watching China Uncensored.