In September 2020, the FBI arrived at the house of a New York City police officer. They were arresting the officer, a Tibetan asylum-seeker who had arrived in the US at 17 years old, on charges of spying for the Chinese community party. He may have been spying, but he wasn’t a great spy. The police officer made calls from his personal mobile phone, which the FBI were tapping, and, as far as the FBI could tell, he had no real intelligence to share. However, the meaning of this case wasn’t lost on the Chinese expat community.
A Tibetan refugee, in the US since 2005, a former marine who served one tour of Afghanistan, now a New York City police officer. If the CCP could recruit him, then how far could they reach? Who else had they recruited?
Under the past nine years of Xi Jinping, China’s government has thrown itself into the work of influencing opinions, stifling speech and controlling dissent within and beyond its borders. Freedom House, a US-based human rights NGO, calls this “transnational repression”. A recent report from Freedom House suggested that since 2014, China was responsible for 214 incidents in 36 countries – everything from abductions in Thailand to physical assaults in Canada. Some of the efforts to project influence would be comical if not so serious, for example, in California a man was arrested driving a car made to look like a Chinese police vehicle through immigrant neighbourhoods.
This article takes a look at these efforts and the effect that China’s influence campaign can have on immigrant communities. In particular the Tibetan community of New York after the arrest of this Tibetan New York City police officer in 2020. The bigger question for the US, and governments around the world, may be if China can recruit someone who arrived as an asylum seeker, who served in the armed forces and was a serving police officer, how far can their recruiters reach around the world?
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