The Long Arm of China’s Security Services

TOPSHOT – Demonstrators burn a Chinese flag as they protest the meeting between US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping on November 15, 2023, in Woodside, California, during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders’ Week. (Photo by Gilles CLARENNE / AFP) (Photo by GILLES CLARENNE/AFP via Getty Images)

By Peter Green

Peter S. Green is a veteran foreign correspondent who has covered wars, revolutions and the evolution of democracy, capitalism and authoritarianism in Eastern Europe and the Balkans for The Times of London, the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times. He’s now based in New York, where he writes on both business and international affairs.

SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — When Chinese President Xi Jinping came to San Francisco last November to meet with President Joe Biden, Chinese pro-democracy activists in the U.S. turned out in force to protest Xi’s authoritarian rule. They were met by other ethnically Chinese people wielding metal rods and pepper spray – a pro-regime presence that several protesters said was orchestrated by the Chinese government.

For Jinrui Zhong, a third-year law student at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, the pressure from Beijing has been more subtle. Zhong told The Cipher Brief that when Chinese security services suspected he was speaking out against Xi’s regime, they detained his father in China and told him to tell his son to “love his country more and love the Party more.” The message came with a warning, Zhong said: the family could lose its home and his father could lose his job as a low-level bureaucrat.

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