The scene takes place in the city of Manchester, UK, last month. About 40 demonstrators protest in front of the Chinese consulate against the brutal crackdown on Hong Kong democrats.
The demonstration coincides with the congress of the Chinese Communist Party where Xi Jinping is being reappointed as chief dictator for life. In front of the consulate, a large caricature of Xi is exhibited, on the theme of the naked emperor. He wears a crown and an undergarment, honor is safe.
Not for consular henchmen who, some wearing motorcycle helmets, come out of consular grounds, snatch the sign, grab by the hair a demonstrator who tries to hold it back, drag him inside the consular perimeter and beat him up. . The police manage to rescue the poor man and take him to the hospital. We learn shortly after that one of the people involved in the attack is the … Chinese consul general himself.
The official reaction from Chinese officials is surreal. In their version, the protester “illegally entered the territory of the consulate”. Police protection, they conclude, was lacking. Moreover, they add, the demonstrators had “hung an insulting portrait of the Chinese president at the main entrance”, which “would be intolerable and unacceptable for any diplomatic mission in any country”.
The incident is symptomatic of a practice increasingly used by the Chinese regime: extraterritoriality. Admittedly, since always and like the other great powers, it is generally from the diplomatic or commercial missions that the networks of spies working in the host country are directed. The presumed Chinese spy flushed out these days at Hydro-Québec thus certainly related to a “processing agent”, either from the Montreal consulate, or from the diplomatic delegation to the ICAO, or from the embassy in Ottawa. It is also from there that the influence of a dozen candidates for the 2019 federal elections was coordinated, according to a recent report by Canadian spies which is the subject of the much-anticipated work of a federal parliamentary committee.
But the activity tends to come out of the diplomatic walls. Saudi Arabia is suspected of kidnapping dissidents on North American soil to bring them back to its jails. The Turkish autocrat Erdogan had his services kidnap opponents who had taken refuge in Sudan or Kosovo. Mainly, but not only under George W. Bush, the Americans did not do otherwise with at least 150 terrorism suspects – they had a word for it: ” surrender “.
The Chinese regime is distinguished by the more systematic nature of its action, especially towards its own diaspora, its foreign students, dissidents who have taken refuge abroad. A human rights group, Safeguard Defenders, recently revealed the existence of more than 50 Chinese “police stations” overseas, including three in the Toronto area. The regime admits the existence of these non-diplomatic premises and assures that they only help members of the diaspora to renew, for example, their driving licenses. The RCMP has opened an investigation. A claim disputed by the group Safeguard Defenders, claiming that these stations are used to persuade Chinese nationals to return to the country for trial.
Especially since President Xi launched “Operation Fox Hunt” in 2014, which officially aims to track down corrupt Chinese who have gone into exile and bring them back to the country. But it covers much more. A Chinese daily newspaper, GlobalTimes, boasted this year that 230,000 overseas Chinese were “persuaded to return to China to confess their crimes between April 2021 and July 2022”. If true, it would be the largest voluntary repentance movement in human history!
In a rather terrifying speech on Chinese activity on American soil, the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, rather estimated in January at 9,000 the number of Chinese nationals thus repatriated over the past eight years. He summed up the Chinese techniques thus: “We see the Chinese government resorting to blackmail, threats of violence, harassment and abductions. They actually hired criminal organizations in the United States, offering them bounties in hopes of successfully bringing targets back to China. »
Wray says several hundred people, including Chinese with US citizenship, are on the Operation Foxhunting list. Some, unaware of being targeted, learn of it during a visit to their country of origin. They are arrested as soon as they get off the plane. For those who know how to be targeted, the method is worse, Wray explains: “In these cases, the Chinese government has arrested their family members and imprisoned them, effectively holding the loved ones hostage until the victim returns to China. »
Creative, the Chinese services even hire, sometimes under false reasons, private detectives to track down their prey, as has recently been seen in the United States. A practice also used by Iran.
But the regime does not always wish to repatriate the unruly, simply to tame them. A good way to silence them or convince them to participate in information gathering is what the Chinese call the invitation to “have tea”. A family member of the target is summoned to the premises of the police services under the pretext of taking news of the expatriate. The message gets through.
The Chinese power has therefore succeeded, better than anyone else, in projecting its autocracy beyond its borders and beyond the walls of its diplomatic missions. Succeeded in also making Mao lie, who affirmed that “power is at the end of the gun”. His successors demonstrate rather that power is at the end of a revolutionary and misguided use of diplomacy.
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