Oct. 6, 2006 – 6:32 p.m.
The white van gunned into a busy Fairfax County, Va., intersection last January, turned right and sped at the line of cars across the yellow line, seeming to aim at the Hyundai Elantra waiting for the light to change.
In the car was Rebiya Kadeer, a prominent political refugee from China who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and her assistant. The truck careened off her door, then backed up. Its engine revved and then the van rammed hard into the Hyundai again, throwing the women back in their seats, shaking them like rag dolls.
To Kadeer, 60, a former businesswoman who spent five years in a political prison for advocating civil rights in her native Uyghar Province, a mostly Muslim enclave in the far western part of the country, the January incident was just one example of a brazen Chinese campaign of harassment and intimidation against her and many other exiled human rights advocates in the United States.
Previously her daughter had confronted “Chinese-looking men” videotaping her ground-floor Fairfax apartment from the parking lot, she said. Before they sped off, she wrote down a license number, which was traced to a local car rental agency, and from there to China’s embassy, according to aides to Rep.
Activists who visit her get anonymous phone calls from Chinese men who threaten to harm their relatives back home — or try to entice them into spying against her and other activists, she and others said. What appear to be Chinese agents park ominously near their homes and trail them around.
“They seem to watch me closely,” Kadeer said. “They follow me wherever I go.”
Including to a restaurant recently in suburban Virginia, she said. A couple of Chinese men who had been sitting at a nearby table followed her when she went to the rest room and pressed their ears to the door. She surprised them when she walked out.
Chinese authorities keep the pressure on her back home, too. Authorities have imprisoned three of her sons, and put a daughter under house arrest, in a failed effort to get her to give up her campaign for Uyghar (pronounced “wee-gar”) autonomy.
Alim Seytoff, general secretary of the Uyghar American Association, says he and other rights advocates get constant telephone calls from China threatening them and smearing Kadeer.
Uyghars traveling to the United States are offered inducements such as houses and cars to spy on activists in the U.S., he and others say.
And then there are the automated phone calls from China, which ping their phones at night like unsolicited pre-recorded sales pitches Americans have come to detest.
Erping Zhang, a former employee of a Chinese government travel agency, says he has “personally received numerous, numerous recorded messages” denouncing human rights leaders, as well as “two death threats from people who speak Chinese.” Radio Free Asia recently broadcast one that he recorded.
Zhang, a human rights activist who just graduated from Harvard at age 45, was warned not to testify to a congressional committee last week. But he went ahead anyway.
Not that he didn’t take the threats seriously.
Zhang thinks Rebiya Kadeer’s life could be in danger, especially now, with the heightened credibility conferred by her nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, which will be awarded Oct. 13.
“It could be,” he said, “It could be, because she has the courage to step forward. “They could create an accident.”
The Beijing regime’s main concern here, however, appears to be Falun Gong, the quasi-religious spiritual movement with a high profile in the United States that advocates freedom of religion and speech.
“Hundreds, perhaps thousands” of its practitioners have been jailed and tortured to death in China, which regards the Buddhist-like movement as a serious political threat, said Rep.
Citing a 2004 State Department report, Smith said “tens of thousands are jailed without trial, held in labor camps, prisons and mental hospitals where they are forced to endure torture and brainwashing sessions.”
But the long arms of China’s secret police have reached into the United States, according to witnesses at the hearing, who recounted physical intimidation, beatings and even death threats against Falun Gong practitioners in Atlanta, New York and Chicago, where assault charges were filed against a Chinese consulate official.
In upstate New York, according to a congressional staffer, Chinese agents took pictures of license plates at a Falun Gong event, and then apparently traced them through their owners back to relatives in China, who started getting threats.
In Providence, R.I., activists took pictures of a Chinese man who regularly emptied newspaper boxes selling periodicals critical of the regime.
Anywhere in the U.S. that Falun Gong activists apply for protest permits or sponsor human rights-oriented events, Chinese diplomats or their agents can be counted on to pressure local officials, according to news reports and independent sources.
In a heretofore unreported incident in Austin, Texas, last year, a senior manager at a major Internet technology company with extensive business in China was pressured into resigning after getting involved in a pro-human rights art exhibit, according to two sources. With legal action pending, the persons involved were reluctant to discuss the issue further.
China may have sent more than a thousand secret agents to the U.S. to neutralize human rights activity here, a former official in China’s Department of External Security Affairs suggested at last year’s hearing. That number would be in addition to thousands of Chinese spies working to steal secrets in U.S. government defense agencies and industries.
The FBI is “keeping tabs on more than 3,000 companies in the U.S. suspected of collecting information for China,” BNN reported on Feb. 14, 2005.
Yonglin Chen, whose official title was first secretary and consul for political affairs in China’s consulate in Sydney, Australia, from April 2001 to May 2005, said his real job was running a special unit whose “sole task is to monitor and persecute” Falun Gong.
“To my knowledge, similar groups have been established in the Chinese missions in the United States and other countries where the Falun Gong is active,” Chen testified.
“Besides the diplomatic system, there is an intelligence collection system working against the Falun Gong as well,” he said. “I am aware there are over 1,000 Chinese secret agents and informants in Australia, and the number in the United States should not be less.”
A spokesman at China’s embassy in Washington did not return a call asking for comment.
“It never ceases to amaze me how paranoid they are,” says Rudy Guerin, who ran FBI counterintelligence operations against Chinese agents for three decades until his recent retirement. “They see Falun Gong as a real threat.”
“It’s amazing to me how much time and effort they put into it,” he added. The heavy-handed skullduggery is “like driving a nail with a power drill.”
Guerin says the FBI urges the activists to report harassment to local law enforcement agencies, but most have an ingrained distrust of police.
The FBI has also asked the U.S. State Department, which is in charge of diplomatic relations, “to rein [China] in on a number of occasions,” Guerin says. And from time to time, State “has called in the [Chinese] ambassador or DCM [deputy chief of mission, the number two official] and told them to knock it off.”
The State Department did not respond to an inquiry on the subject.
The last time a Chinese official was declared persona non grata for inappropriate activity and sent packing was 1987, Guerin said. It was an espionage case.
Guerin, who began tracking Chinese agents here in 1979, said he could not recall any official booted out of the U.S. for harassing or threatening human rights activists.
But the law is clear, Guerin said: “You cannot use your intelligence apparatus to infiltrate a group or stop [activists] from exercising their Constitutional rights.”
Privately, senior FBI officials say they don’t want the U.S. to take any steps that would provoke a tit-for-tat reaction from Beijing: the expulsion of CIA or FBI agents from China.
“Outing” the secret agents in China’s embassy and five consulates here — providing the media with their true names, pictures and assignments — would have the same effect, they say.
Over the past 10 years, China’s portion of the U.S. global trade deficit has grown to 26 percent, or $19.1 billion. Economic experts say that if China, which holds $262.6 billion worth of the U.S. national debt, were to stop buying U.S. treasury bonds, Washington would face a deep financial crisis.
Such a predicament checks the hands of U.S. officials, experts say, but some officials responsible for Chinese affairs say their behind-the-scenes efforts have paid off, too.
Kadeer agrees, crediting State Department officials by name for successfully exerting pressure on Beijing to gain her release from prison in 2005.
On the other hand, she says, “Yes, it would help in many ways” if U.S. officials met openly with human rights activists in China. “Not just meet, but pressure China to abandon the death penalty for Uyghar activists.”
China has also effectively insinuated itself into the Bush administration’s “global war on terror,” she says. By branding the Uyghar autonomy movement Islamic extremists connected to al Qaeda, she says China creates doubt about their legitimacy.
“We are a victim of 9/11 also,” Kadeer said quietly, but firmly, during an interview in her tiny Washington office. Dressed in black and looking frail, she said Uyghar’s Muslims — ethnically Turkmen, far more Central Asian than Chinese — have little in common with their Arab co-religionists.
“We have nothing to do with al Qaeda,” she said. “We are only interested in human rights.”
The Bush administration’s soft-peddling of human rights concerns enrages some members of Congress.
Last summer Rep. Wolf complained to Bush administration officials that “while we engage China on trade issues the plight of Chinese dissidents [is] often ignored.” He implored officials to meet publicly with dissidents, and practicing Christians, when they visit China.
“Members of the Reagan administration often met with dissidents when visiting Russia and other communist countries,” he said in his July 12 letter to every cabinet secretary and their deputies. “Few, if any, in this administration do this when they visit China.”
Wolf and other members of Congress have pressed the FBI about Chinese activities here, with little effect.
“I called FBI a couple weeks ago to follow up, and they never got back to me,” a congressional aide said, reflecting a common experience.
The first Bush administration, in the late 1980s, “de-coupled” trade from human rights issues, a tilt that continued through the Clinton years, experts agree.
Rep.
Expectations that China’s behavior could be moderated through trade and quiet diplomacy have created “a Frankenstein’s monster,” Rohrabacher maintains. “There has been not one inch of reform. . . . We’ve lost ground in the last 10 years.”
Rarely moderate himself on the subject, Rohrabacher says he “wouldn’t be surprised” to learn that Chinese secret agents have even “killed people here, but we just can’t know for sure because they covered it up.”
“We’re dealing with guys here who have zero respect for human rights. I was theorizing, but I would not be surprised at all,” he said.
Even human rights activists haven’t gone that far, and if one of their leaders disappeared here under mysterious circumstances, it’s certain the world would quickly know about it.
There’s a grisly precedent.
Years ago, in the depths of the Cold War, few U.S. officials thought that Chile’s military dictatorship, a close anti-communist ally of the Nixon and Ford administrations, would dare send secret agents into the U.S. to kill one of its leading dissidents abroad.
But it did. On Sept. 21, 1976, a Chilean agent set off a massive car bomb less than a mile from the White House, killing a dissident former official, Orlando Letelier.
The assassination was preceded by death threats.
Rebiya Kadeer sounds fatalistic about the death threats she gets.
“I gave myself to the care of God,” she says.
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
First posted Oct. 6, 2006 6:32 p.m.
Corrects spelling of Yonglin Chen's name.