Meng Hongwei's Arrest in China was Politically Motivated

Reuters

The wife of Meng Hongwei, the missing Chinese former head of Interpol, dismissed allegations by authorities in China accusing her husband of graft.

The wife of the missing Chinese former head of Interpol on Thursday dismissed allegations by authorities in China accusing her husband of graft and said his arrest was politically motivated.
China will prosecute former Interpol chief, Meng Hongwei, for graft after an investigation found he spent “lavish” amounts of state funds, abused his power and refused to follow Communist Party decisions, Beijing’s anti-corruption watchdog said in a statement on Wednesday.
Mr. Meng’s wife, Grace Meng, said in a statement sent to Reuters on Thursday by her lawyers, “The press release openly reveals the political nature of Mr. Meng’s case, without addressing the issues concerning our family’s fundamental human rights.”
Interpol, the global police coordination agency based in France, said last October that Mr. Meng had resigned as its president, days after his wife reported him missing while he was on a trip to China.
The Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CDDI) said Mr. Meng was suspected of taking bribes and causing serious harm to the party’s image and state’s interests, adding that he should be dealt with severely.
Grace Meng, who has remained in Lyon, France, with the couple’s two children, said the CCDI has not provided any information about her husband’s whereabouts or well-being.
“Instead, the CCDI made vague, general, uncorroborated statements,” she said.
“Chinese authorities have not formulated actual charges or adduced the alleged supporting evidence.”

Ma Jian: ‘Freedom can’t be taken for granted. We have to remain constantly vigilant’

The exiled Chinese writer on the murder of dissidents, attacks on free speech and his new novel exposing the brutality of his homeland

Interview by Claire Armitstead

‘Everyone thought economic expansion meant China would become increa­singly like the west, but that has been a catastrophic miscalculation’ … the novelist Ma Jian. 

In an era of growing political impunity, when dissidents are murdered on foreign soil and even the head of Interpol is not immune from being “disappeared”, Ma Jian seems almost recklessly brave. Could there be a more provocative title than that given by the exiled novelist to his latest satirical onslaught on the country of his birth? 

For, with China Dream, he co-opts the rhetoric of the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping to tell the story of a politician who is driven mad by memories of his own corruption.
Xi first used the phrase shortly after becoming general secretary of the Communist party in 2012, and Ma has responded “in a rush of rage” with a short, ferocious novel about the way turbo-capitalism and authoritarianism have combined to inform a Chinese dream that excludes all but a chosen few. 

“I wanted to give myself the challenge of encapsulating everything in as few words as possible,” he says, wryly adding that it will be interesting to see how the Chinese authorities react to the novel, given that they’ve outlawed so many “key words” online – “even the name Winnie-the-Pooh is banned because people joked that Xi Jinping resembled him”.
A momentary silence falls as we consider the surreal possibility of the “paramount leader” being forced to ban his own slogan. 

But the reality, Ma acknowledges, is that censorship is now so all-encompassing that the novel will very probably not be allowed to exist in Chinese, even in Hong Kong, which has historically provided a toehold for work by dissident authors banned on the mainland.

‘Today’s China is more extreme than anything George Orwell could have imagined’ … Ma Jian. 

In a tranquil London cafe, close to the home he shares with his translator and partner Flora Drew and their four children, the risks this slight, 65-year-old writer is taking are hard to comprehend. 

Despite living in the UK for 17 years, he does not speak English. 

It’s not as if he hasn’t tried, says Drew, who translates our interview, but he has a stubborn devotion to his mother tongue and remains more engaged with goings-on in China than those in his adopted country. 

“Living in the west allows me to see through the fog of lies that shrouds my homeland,” he writes in the foreword to China Dream. 

During the interview, he invokes Dante’s Divine Comedy: “It’s only through being expelled that the poet gets to see heaven and hell and purgatory.”
It was a perspective forced on him from his earliest days, as one of five children born into a well-to-do family in the provincial city of Qingdao in 1953. 

A childhood in which he had already shown promise as an artist came to an abrupt end with the start of the Cultural Revolution. 

He was 13 years old. 

His art teacher was persecuted as a “rightist” and his grandfather, a landlord and tea connoisseur, was executed. 

At 15, he joined an arts propaganda troupe, beginning an adult life that would take him through various industrial assignments to a job as a photojournalist. 

He married a dancer and had the regulation single child. 

Then a photography prize brought him to the attention of the authorities and he was transferred to work for the foreign propaganda unit of the Federation of Trade Unions in Beijing.

‘When a regime is trying to hurt a person’s physical being, at the heart of it is an attempt to crush their soul’ … Ma Jian. 

There, living in a “one‑bed shack”, he connected with a buzzy young community of writers and artists. 

Officially, he worked as a journalist. 

Unofficially, he made and occasionally sold paintings. 

“Mostly they were stolen, but a man from the US embassy bought one for $40,” he recalls. 

“My hair was encrusted with oil paint and the walls were papered with my paintings.”
In 1983, just as he turned 30, he hit the crisis that would upend his life. 

Divorced from his wife, who forbade him to make contact with his daughter, he was arrested for “spiritual pollution”. 

Though Ma was released, his shack was ransacked and his canvases ripped up. 

“I never painted again,” he says. 

“I saw what a fragile medium it was, and how vulnerable to abuse and persecution, and I asked myself what was I going to do for the rest of my life?”
In his attempt to answer this question he converted to Buddhism and set off on a three-year journey across China on foot. 

At first, he was afraid even to record what he witnessed in his notebook, in case it fell into the wrong hands, but gradually, he says, “I saw that through literature I could paint my own reality. I could record history.”
He arrived in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa to find a people whose traditions had been corrupted by poverty and political oppression even as they celebrated the 20th anniversary of their “liberation” to the status of autonomous region. 

In 1987, Ma poured his impressions into a collection of short stories, belatedly published in English as Stick Out Your Tongue. 

It was immediately banned by the Chinese censors, sending him into an exile from which he has never permanently returned, though until six years ago he was allowed to visit China, and continues to keep in close contact with friends and family.
He turns up for the interview with a dramatically bandaged thumb, the result of an accident while building a shed in his garden, the explanation of which leads on to one of his latest frustrations. 

He had written a letter to one of his brothers inviting him to come over to help, he says, “but during this time there was a huge demo of disgruntled veterans demanding higher benefits, so the whole town had been sealed off and surrounded by armed police. No information was able to get in or out, so the letter has probably been handed over to the authorities. What happened there shows how today’s China is more extreme than anything George Orwell could have imagined, because these events don’t even reach public consciousness: it’s as if they never happened.”

It is not only China that troubles Ma today. 

“The world is becoming increasingly unsafe,” he says. 

“Just look at what happened to Jamal Khashoggi: within the space of seven minutes we saw the triumph of barbarism over civilisation. But this is happening every day in China. Everyone thought we could ignore what happened in 1989 [the Tiananmen Square massacre] and that economic expansion meant it would become increasingly like the west, but that has been a catastrophic miscalculation. China might have draped itself in a coat of prosperity, but inside it’s become more brutal than ever, and it’s this venomous combination of extreme authoritarianism and extreme capitalism which has infected countries around the world.”
Erasure of memory is the abiding theme of Ma’s work, whether through the literal motif of an unconscious man in his epic 2008 novel Beijing Coma, set around Tiananmen Square, or through the allegorical pursuit of a recipe for “Old Lady Broth of Amnesia” to which the municipal leader Ma Daode devotes himself in China Dream, tormented by a past in which he drove his own parents to suicide by denouncing them. 

“The process of dragging back memories that are being constantly erased, especially from my position of exile, makes even more important to me the primacy of memory,” Ma says, “and how it not only involves a nation’s sense of history but a person’s sense of self.”
His satire is always firmly located in violations of the human body. 

Stick Out Your Tongue told stories of ritual rape and multi-generational incest. 

In his 2013 novel, The Dark Road, aborted late-term foetuses are carried around in plastic bags or boiled in Cantonese restaurants to make potency soups for men. 

The fourth of China Dream’s seven episodes takes Ma Daode to a strip club, where VIPs have orgies in Mao’s private room with women who are identified only by numbers. 

The reason for this, he explains, is because “totalitarianism not only seeks to control the thought but also the body in which those thoughts are housed”.
“As a writer, when you are trying to describe your characters, there’s a visceral connection to their being. But in my exploration of the body I’m always trying to show that in these systems, when a regime is trying to hurt a person’s physical being, at the heart of it is an attempt to crush their soul. Sometimes, the body can survive but a lot of the time it becomes no more than a carcass.”
Red Dust, his semi-fictionalised 2001 account of his life-changing three-year journey, introduced another persistent theme, betrayal. 

It recounted how he was twice betrayed by an actor girlfriend, whom he, in turn, considered denouncing to the film studio that employed her, out of jealousy over her infidelity. 

None of his characters is without blame, but neither are they entirely evil. 

Even Ma Daode in China Dream attempts to warn protesters that they will be killed if they refuse to move out when bulldozers arrive to clear their homes for redevelopment.

Exiled author Ma Jian banned from visiting China

Ma relates his story quietly and urgently through Drew, keeping his own record of the conversation in spidery Chinese script. 

The couple met in 1997 when she was working on a TV documentary about the handover of Hong Kong to China and he was one of the few local people who agreed to speak. 

He invited her to a poetry reading and gave her all his books to read; she stayed on to finish them, and by the time she left they were together. 

He moved briefly to Germany after the handover before joining her in London. 

She has translated everything he has written since. 

Does she worry that his repeated attacks on China may put him in danger? 

“This is the first time I’ve felt concerned, because there’s a brazenness to the behaviour now and they can do it without any backlash at all,” she says.
But the couple have kept faith with the best of the country, sending their 15-year-old son to study martial arts at a Shaolin monastery and to spend time with his Chinese family. 

Ma plans to travel to the Hong Kong literary festival this month, to present his novel in English. 

“I refuse to be afraid,” he says. 

“The disregard for truth is infectious. It also explains the rise of Trump. We need to protect concepts of humanity, and freedom can’t be taken for granted. We have to remain constantly vigilant. The more you buckle under these pressures, the huger the monster becomes. One’s responsibility as a writer is to be fearless.”

The Chinese Can Not Be Trusted to Lead Global Institutions

The abduction of Interpol’s president shows that Beijing’s officials will be subordinate to the orders of the Communist Party.

By BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN

Meng Hongwei

China has spent years trying to gain an equal footing in international institutions originally set up by the West. 

Those efforts have seen gradual success, as Chinese nationals have come to occupy leading positions on United Nations committees, multilateral development banks, international courts, and many other organizations.
So when Meng Hongwei, a high-ranking Chinese Communist Party member who was chosen to serve as the president of Interpol in 2016, disappeared last month while visiting China, and was revealed two weeks later to have been detained by Chinese authorities, it seemed like an unforced error. 

Interpol is an important international organization tasked with facilitating cooperation between police forces in countries around the world. 

But even so, party disciplinary authorities were treating Meng first and foremost as a party member who had strayed from the straight and narrow, rather than as the internationally recognized top official of a major multilateral organization who deserves due process.
Meng’s detention shows that under Beijing’s increasingly confident global authoritarianism, China’s participation in and even its leadership of international institutions will be openly subordinate to the diktat of the Communist Party. 

This stands in stark contrast to the preceding eras under previous Presidents Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, when China paid lip service to following international law and to becoming a conforming member of the current international system.
The circumstances under which Meng disappeared highlight the authority the party still wields over Meng, even while he served as the head of a supposedly politically neutral institution. 

His disappearance first became known when his wife reported his absence to police in France, where the couple lives, and the French police launched an investigation. 

His wife had begun to worry for his safety when she received a knife emoji in a text message from her husband, taking it as a coded warning that all was not well on his trip home.
On October 7, almost two weeks after Meng went missing, Chinese authorities announced that they were charging Meng with bribery. 

After coming to power in 2012, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping launched a sweeping anti-corruption crackdown that has felled thousands of mid-level party cadres and numerous high-ranking officials.
But experts say the anti-corruption campaign is used as cover for political purges intended to strengthen Xi’s grip on power. 

There are hints of a political element in Meng’s detention; when announcing the charges against Meng, Chinese authorities also stressed the need for “absolute loyal political character.” 

Meng is now being held in a custody system notorious for torture, abuse, and denial of access to lawyers or a fair trial. 

It is certainly normal for any country to prosecute government officials for corruption; it is not normal to detain them without notice or charge, then thrust them into a system without fair representation or transparency.
That raises serious questions about the fitness of any member of the Chinese Communist Party to serve in a leadership position in international organizations. 

Meng’s detention is a clear sign that any party members abroad, no matter how high their profile or how important political neutrality is to their position, are still subject to the will and demands of the party—a party that’s willing to punish them at any cost if they stray. 

This is far truer under Xi than under his recent predecessors because one of Xi’s top goals has been to revitalize the once-moribund party, reestablish it as the main guiding force in China, and double down on party discipline.
It’s clear that Meng was the party’s man at Interpol. 

During his tenure as Interpol president, Meng simultaneously served as a vice minister in China’s public-security bureau, the country’s chief law-enforcement institution. 

It’s unlikely he could have risen to such a high position without demonstrating years of loyalty to the party. 

And the public-security bureau is behind illegal detentions and numerous other injustices visited upon a populace with few civil-rights protections. 

That means Meng spent his career climbing the ladder within a ruthless organization.
Thus, Meng’s election in 2017 to the position of Interpol president, though a largely ceremonial post, raised concerns that China would use Meng’s position to pursue political dissidents through the issuance of Interpol red notices. 

A red notice is roughly equivalent to an international arrest warrant requested by an individual government, and Interpol approves requests based not on an assessment of the target’s guilt but rather on whether the requesting government followed the appropriate laws and regulations in making the request. 

This makes the red-notice system notoriously easy to abuse; Russia, China, Turkey, Venezuela, and some Central Asian nations are known to request politically motivated red notices targeting political foes and journalists. 

Interpol member nations are not required to detain or extradite those with a red notice against them, though many do.
And indeed, shortly after Meng became president, Interpol issued a red notice for Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire who had recently threatened to release compromising information on leading members of the Communist Party.
But not everything went so smoothly for China, or for Meng. 

In February, Interpol rescinded a red notice, originally issued at China’s request, for Dolkun Isa, the Europe-based president of World Uyghur Congress, a group that advocates for a beleaguered Chinese ethnic minority. 

Beijing claims that Isa is a terrorist, and China has frequently requested that European governments arrest and deport him.
Some observers noted that about six weeks after Isa’s red notice was revoked, Meng was removed from his post as a member of the public-security bureau’s party committee, the party organ embedded inside the bureau to provide leadership and ideological guidance, leading to speculation that the party was unhappy with Meng for allowing Interpol to remove the notice.
“Look at East Turkestan,” wrote Bill Bishop, the author of the influential Sinocism newsletter, referring to the Chinese region where an estimated 1 million Muslims are being held without due process. 

“Does Beijing care if there is fleeting concern over the fate of their Interpol appointee?”
These days, Beijing seems far less concerned about the opinion of the liberal West than it once was. Rather than continuing to try to hide the existence of its concentration camps in East Turkestan, Chinese officials are declaring them to be a true societal good. 

In the contested South China Sea, China now rarely claims that it aims to uphold international law—instead, it emphasizes that no one has the right to criticize its island building and militarization there. 

Might makes right, as it were.
At the same time, Beijing wields greater sway over international institutions than ever before. 

That means stakeholders in the international system would do well to ask themselves what price they might pay if they offer leadership positions to Chinese Communist Party members. 

It’s likely that as China promotes its authoritarian system around the world, one will increasingly see the party justify and even tout its realpolitik approach to international power. 

A liberal world order built on human rights and rule of law will need to find an effective response—and soon.

Rogue Regime: Suspend China From Interpol

China needs to face the consequences when it  abuses the international law-enforcement system.

By Eli Lake

No corrupt regimes allowed.

In the high-stakes drama over the detention of Interpol President Meng Hongwei, one thing stands out. 

It’s the plea the international police agency’s secretary general, Juergen Stock, made to his captors in China.
Over the weekend, Stock officially requested that Chinese police clarify the status of Meng, who had not been heard from since leaving Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, France, to travel to Beijing nearly a week before. 

“Interpol's General Secretariat looks forward to an official response from China’s authorities to address concerns over the President’s well-being,” Stock said in a statement.
On Sunday the Chinese government fessed up. 

Meng had been arrested on charges of bribery and corruption, it announced. 

On Monday, Chinese authorities notified the world that Meng had resigned from his position at Interpol.
Think about that for a moment. 

Chinese authorities appear to have abducted Interpol’s president. 

In response, the agency’s secretary general, who oversees its day-to-day operations, issued a statement pleading with them to let him know how the president is doing. 

Where is the statement urging member states to suspend China from Interpol?
All of this reflects a deeper problem with Interpol. 

Nearly 80 percent of Interpol’s annual operating budget of about $80 million comes from Western democracies, but authoritarian states have begun to corrupt the organization. 

Many countries still rely on Interpol to share information on real criminals. 

But a handful of bad actors have abused the system to target their political foes. 

As Ted Bromund, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation who focuses on Interpol, puts it: “The problem with the Interpol system is that a lot of nations are not like us and we pretend that they are.”
The pioneer in this regard is Russia. 

In the last 10 years, just as Western law-enforcement agencies began focusing on the financial crimes of Russian oligarchs, the Kremlin began requesting red notices, or requests for arrest and extradition, for its political opponents. 

Hedge fund manager William Browder is the most high-profile victim of this kind of abuse.
Other rogue states have followed Russia’s lead. 

Iran has issued red notices for dissidents. 

Turkey has gotten Interpol to issue a red notice to arrest a Turkish writer who had been critical of the government. 

China has abused the system, issuing a red notice in 2017 for the head of the World Uighur Congress. 

The Chinese Uighurs are treated as second-class citizens in western China.
In most of these cases, the Interpol system has worked and the red notices were revoked. 

Last year, Interpol instituted new reforms to make these abuses harder. 

But authoritarians have also adjusted, making use of so-called diffusion notices, which are communicated directly to national law-enforcement authorities and do not have to go through Interpol’s red-notice system.
In the case of Meng Hongwei, a Chinese national who became president of Interpol in 2016, there are two possibilities: Either China nominated a corrupt man to be president of a major international law enforcement agency; or China is detaining an innocent man. 

Whichever way you interpret it, says Bruno Min, a senior policy adviser at Fair Trials, a U.K. based human-rights group, “It shows disrespect to Interpol.” 

China has ignored Interpol’s rules before, he says, “and now they are going even further.”
Until now, the Western nations of Interpol have been loath to suspend any country’s membership. This practice has to stop. 

If China doesn’t face consequences for what it has done, then Interpol will be setting the conditions for its own irrelevance. 

What good is an international law enforcement system that lets rogues act like cops?

Interpol Tragicomedy

Interpol Chief, Detained by China, Resigns Under ‘Supervision’ of Party Watchdog

By Edward Wong and Alissa J. Rubin

Grace Meng, the wife of the missing Interpol president, Meng Hongwei, speaking to reporters on Sunday in Lyon, France, during a news conference in which she did not want her face shown.

In a startling move that could set back the country’s efforts to expand its global presence, the Chinese Communist Party announced late Sunday that the missing president of Interpol, Meng Hongwei, was under investigation on “suspicion of violating the law” and was “under the supervision” of an anticorruption watchdog tied to the party.
The announcement that Meng, a Chinese citizen, was being detained was posted online by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the party’s watchdog against graft and political disloyalty, on Sunday night.
A few hours later, Interpol said it had received Meng’s resignation “with immediate effect.”

The statement of his detention and his subsequent stepping down came a day after Interpol demanded answers from the Chinese government on the whereabouts of Meng, who was reported missing on Thursday.
The detention of Meng, 64, is an audacious step by the party, even by the standards of the increasingly authoritarian system under the leadership of Xi Jinping. 

China has sought legitimacy and a leadership role in international organizations, and Meng’s appointment in November 2016 as the president of Interpol, the first Chinese head of the global policing agency, was seen by many as a significant step in that direction. 

His detention undermines that campaign.
Meng’s appointment “was considered quite an achievement for China and a sign of its international presence and growing influence,” said Julian Ku, a professor at Hofstra University’s Maurice A. Deane School of Law, who has studied China’s relationship with international law.
While China may have had its eye on placing its citizens in other top posts at prominent global organizations, “the fact that Meng was ‘disappeared’ without any notice to Interpol will undermine this Chinese global outreach effort,” Mr. Ku said. 

“It is hard to imagine another international organization feeling comfortable placing a Chinese national in charge without feeling nervous that this might happen.”
The announcement of Meng’s detention came hours after his wife, Grace, told reporters in Lyon, France, that before her husband had vanished on a trip to China, he had sent her a phone message with an emoji of a knife.
She interpreted the knife image to mean “he is in danger,” she said in a brief statement to reporters on Sunday in Lyon, where the two were living and where Interpol is headquartered.
Ms. Meng gave her statement at a hotel, keeping her back to reporters so that her face would not be captured on camera, a precaution that she said was for security reasons for herself and her children.
She said she had received the message with the knife image shortly after Meng arrived in China. 

It came just four minutes after she received a message from him saying, “Wait for my call,” she said.
She has not heard from him since. 

She reported his disappearance to the French police on Oct. 4. 

A French police investigation is now underway, with the authorities saying that he had boarded a plane and arrived in China, but that his subsequent whereabouts was unknown.
In addition to serving as president of the international crime-fighting body, Meng is also a vice minister in the Chinese Ministry of Public Security.

China says Meng Hongwei, Interpol’s president, is under investigation for unspecified legal violations.

The central commission can detain party officials for months or years while carrying out an investigation. 

The commission often concludes an investigation by stripping an official of party membership, stating the official’s violations of party regulations and referring the official to the justice system for criminal prosecution.
Since Xi took power as president of China, the commission has gone on a wide-ranging anticorruption campaign that has touched every level of the party.
His detention means that internal party dynamics supersede any concern from the party about international legitimacy or transparency.
The party’s moves in this case “suggest that the domestic considerations outweighed the international ones,” said Mr. Ku, the law professor. 

“This has always been true for China, but perhaps not so obviously true as in this case.”
It is unclear what led to Meng’s apparent downfall — a power struggle within the party or an actual case of corruption that officials deemed to be beyond the pale.
There have been investigations of prominent figures in the anticorruption campaign. 

The most notable has been that of Zhou Yongkang, a former member of the elite Politburo Standing Committee and top security official. 

Many analysts of Chinese politics say Xi viewed Zhou as a rival and used the anticorruption campaign to imprison him.
“What I find most interesting about Meng Hongwei’s detention,” said Elizabeth Economy, director of Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, “is the continued parade of senior officials being arrested.”
With officials appointed by Xi himself now being caught up in the six-year anticorruption drive, “it raises the question of whether Xi Jinping simply has a very thin bench of clean officials from whom to choose, whether these officials were adequately vetted before being promoted or whether the anticorruption campaign is simply failing to deter officials from continued corrupt behaviors,” Ms. Economy said. 

“Whatever the reason, it doesn’t bode well for the party’s ability, ultimately, to police itself.”
Margaret Lewis, a professor of Chinese and Taiwanese law at Seton Hall University Law School, said Meng’s detention sends a signal that “no one is safe,” and it could give other Chinese officials posted abroad “pause when considering their own travel plans.”
Meng was last seen leaving Interpol headquarters in Lyon on Sept. 29 for his trip to China. 

His wife and children had moved with him to Lyon after his appointment.
Under the terms of Interpol’s Constitution, the acting senior vice president, Kim Jong-yang of South Korea, becomes acting president.
At her news conference on Sunday, Ms. Meng said she had decided to speak publicly because she felt it was her responsibility to do so. 

Her step was extraordinary: Family members of Chinese officials in trouble with the party or government usually do not make a plea for international help.
“From now on, I have gone from sorrow and fear to the pursuit of truth, justice and responsibility toward history,” she said. 

“For the husband whom I deeply love, for my young children, for the people of my motherland, for all the wives and children’s husbands and fathers to no longer disappear.”

Chinese Saga

The Chinese head of Interpol has disappeared — in China
By James McAuley and Gerry Shih

An image from Interpol shows Meng Hongwei, Chinese president of Interpol, speaking in Bali, Nov. 10, 2016. 

PARIS — French authorities launched an investigation into the disappearance of Interpol president Meng Hongwei, whose wife informed French police that he went missing after returning to his native China last week, local media reported Friday.
Meng, a former government minister, was last seen Sept. 29, his wife said, according to unnamed French police officials cited by France’s Europe 1 radio station. 

Other police officials also confirmed the investigation to the Reuters news agency.
Interpol — headquartered in Lyon, France — is an international organization facilitating police cooperation across borders. 

Meng’s wife reported her husband’s disappearance to French authorities because she has been living in France with their children, Europe 1 reported.
A spokeswoman for France’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the national police force, did not immediately respond to a request for independent confirmation. 

Neither did a spokeswoman for the Lyon prosecutor, which oversees investigations in the region.
In a statement, Interpol said only that the disappearance is a “matter for the relevant authorities in both France and China” and declined to elaborate further.
Meng, 64, was named president of Interpol in November 2016, and his term is slated to end in 2020. He is the first Chinese citizen to head the body and was previously China’s vice minister of public security.
The circumstances of his disappearance have raised the possibility that he may have fallen into the dragnet of China’s multiyear anti-corruption campaign, which has seen thousands of officials and business executives suddenly vanish before reemerging to face government charges months later.
That would be a stunning reversal for Meng, who was elected to head Interpol two years ago at the precise moment China was seeking international help to arrest corrupt officials. 

In recent years, China has submitted to Interpol extensive lists of repatriation targets and “red notices” — an international alert for a wanted person ­— for what it says are corrupt fugitives.
At the time of his appointment, human rights groups expressed concern about the opacity of China’s legal system and warned that Beijing could use its clout in Interpol to arrest political dissidents.
During Meng’s tenure, China has submitted “red notices” for dissident business executives and figures such as the German national Dolkun Isa, the head of the Munich-based World Uighur Congress that represents the Uighur minority in far western China. 

China has labeled Isa a terrorist but has not provided public proof.
China last year also requested multiple Interpol red notices seeking the arrest of Guo Wengui, a dissident billionaire who had fled to New York while claiming he possessed explosive secrets about the Communist Party leadership.

China's State Terrorism

Fingers Point to China After Break-Ins Target New Zealand Professor

By Charlotte Graham-McLay

Prof. Anne-Marie Brady’s focus on the Chinese Communist Party’s growing influence overseas has prompted the February burglary of her home in Christchurch, New Zealand.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A burglary targeting a New Zealand professor who has examined the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in Western countries has drawn the interest of Interpol and other police agencies.
Prof. Anne-Marie Brady, a China specialist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, said her home was burglarized in February while she and her family were out. 

The thief or thieves ignored a glass jar of cash and other valuables, she said, in favor of an “old, broken” laptop, on which she had conducted her most recent research, and a “cheap” cellphone the professor had used on travels to China.
There was strong circumstantial evidence that agents of Beijing were responsible.
Peter Mattis, a former C.I.A. analyst and now a China Program fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, said the burglary, along with previous break-ins at her office, meant there was “only one likely culprit for this,” referring to China.
Ms. Brady’s high profile on matters of China’s influence worldwide meant “intimidating her into silence would in a sense be a major win” for the country.
Ms. Brady’s recent paper, “Magic Weapons,” was published last September. 

It identified categories of political-influence activities by China in Western democracies, laid out what Ms. Brady said was the Chinese Communist Party’s blueprint for conducting such activities worldwide, and examined New Zealand as a case study of Chinese influence across most spheres of public life.
When Ms. Brady returned home on the day of the burglary, bed covers were rumpled and papers strewn about, but her husband’s laptop was left untouched. 

She said that it appeared to be a “psychological operation” and the latest in a series of incidents targeting her over her work. 

She said her computer’s hard drive had been tampered with when she was previously in China, and that Communist Party officials questioned people she spoke with there.
Before the February burglary, she said, she received a letter warning her she would be attacked.
Clive Hamilton, a professor at Charles Sturt University in Canberra and author of a book on China’s influence in Australia, said that if evidence emerged that Chinese agents were involved in the burglary and office break-ins, it should act as “a cattle prod to the New Zealand body politic” about its relationship with Beijing.
That relationship has come under scrutiny over the past year among the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing partnership, of which New Zealand is a member, along with the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia.
Ms. Brady’s paper was published around the time that a New Zealand lawmaker, Jian Yang, was forced to deny he had been a Chinese spy. 

Yang, who said he had merely taught English to spies in China, remains in Parliament.
At the time Ms. Brady’s paper was published, New Zealand’s political leaders played down its findings, but those findings struck a chord globally. 

Her paper was cited in government committee hearings in the United States and Australia — which in June introduced national security legislation banning foreign interference in politics. 

Ms. Brady said she had received “more requests to speak around the world than I could fulfill in a lifetime.”
After the report’s release, Ms. Brady’s office at the university was broken into. 

After her house was burglarized in February, the police began investigating two previous break-ins at her workplace.
The New Zealand police said in a statement that Interpol was aiding in their investigation. 

The New Zealand Herald reported that the country’s Security Intelligence Service, which has a counterespionage mandate, was also involved in the inquiry and had swept Ms. Brady’s office for listening devices. 

But the agency itself declined to comment.
Paul Buchanan, a former Pentagon analyst who is the director of 36th Parallel Assessments, a security consultancy in Auckland, New Zealand, said the involvement of Interpol and the local security service meant that the perpetrators of the burglary and break-ins “are abroad at this moment, or are agents of a foreign entity.”
“Everything in the New Zealand government’s response points to a state, a state-sponsored entity, or a foreign criminal organization being involved with this,” he said.
Members of the China research community in the United States and Australia said they were rattled by the case and had beefed up their own security because of it.
“People advising me on my security have been quite alarmed,” Mr. Hamilton, the Australian academic, said of the burglary of Ms. Brady’s home. 

“If China is targeting her, there’s a good chance they’re targeting me.”
While Ms. Brady said she was not frightened and would not back down from her research, Mr. Hamilton said a harassment campaign against her could have a broader target.
“We have to think about the ripple effects of the intimidation, and part of the intention is to send a message to other people who might be critical of the Communist Party,” he said.
Han Lianchao, a former pro-democracy activist in China, who has since worked as a Senate aide and China commentator in the United States, called Ms. Brady’s case unusual, but added if China’s involvement was proved, it would reflect “a pattern of intimidation that is being expanded from the domestic to the international,” and included kidnappings of dissident Chinese citizens abroad.
He said the Chinese state news media had in the past two or three years started to openly advocate “a hooligan spirit” in protecting its national interests in foreign countries.
New Zealand has become increasingly dependent on China as a market for its farm products, especially dairy goods, and the two countries have been in talks to expand a free-trade agreement signed in 2008.
New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, would not comment on the case this week, citing the police investigation; she had earlier told The Herald that she would take action if evidence showed a foreign power was behind the break-ins.
The Chinese Embassy in New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, declined to comment on the case.
Ms. Brady said the government’s silence was “starting to look like procrastination.”
She said New Zealand’s government needed to reach a “level of respect” in its relationship with China “where we can point out things we don’t like.”

Rogue Nation

China’s law-enforcers are going global but their methods are far from orthodox

The Economist

LAST year’s big blockbuster in China, “Wolf Warrior 2”, assured citizens not to fear running into trouble abroad: “Remember, the strength of China always has your back!” 

That is doubtless a comfort to patriots. 

But for those who seek to escape the government’s clutches, its growing willingness to project its authority beyond its borders is a source of alarm. 

In pursuit of fugitives, the Chinese authorities are increasingly willing to challenge the sovereignty of foreign governments and to seek the help of international agencies, even on spurious grounds.
Fugitives from China used to be mainly dissidents. 

The government was happy to have them out of the country, assuming they could do less harm there. But since Xi Jinping came to office in 2012 and launched a sweeping campaign against corruption, another type of fugitive has increased in number: those wanted for graft. 

Though they do not preach democracy, they pose a greater threat to the regime. 

Most are officials or well-connected business folk, insiders familiar with the workings of government. And in the internet age it is far easier for exiles to maintain ties with people back home.
So China has changed its stance, and started to hunt fugitives down. 

It has managed to repatriate nearly 4,000 suspects from some 90 countries. 

It has also recovered about 9.6bn yuan ($1.5bn). 

Still, nearly 1,000 remain on the run, according to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, China’s anti-graft watchdog
The problem is that only 36 countries have ratified extradition treaties with China. 

France, Italy, Spain and South Korea are among them, but few other rich democracies. 

It is easy for Chinese suspects seeking refuge abroad to argue that they will not get a fair trial if returned home, since the government does not believe that courts should be independent. 

Last year the country’s top judge denounced the very idea as a “false Western ideal”. 

What is more, China has thousands of political prisoners. 

Torture is endemic.

The hard way
These failings have forced the Chinese authorities to resort to less-straightforward methods to bring suspects home. 

Typically, they send agents, often travelling unofficially, to press exiles to return. 

The tactics involved are similar to ones used at home to induce people to do the Communist Party’s bidding. 

Many are subjected to persistent surveillance, intimidation and violence. 

Occasionally, Chinese agents attempt to kidnap suspects abroad and bring them home by force.
If runaways have family in China, those left behind are often subject to threats and harassment. 

In an interview in 2014 a member of Shanghai’s Public Security Bureau said that “a fugitive is like a flying kite: even though he is abroad, the string is in China.” 

Exiles are told that their adult relatives will lose their jobs and that their children will be kicked out of school if they do not return. 

Police pressed Guo Xin, one of China’s 100 most-wanted officials, to return from America by preventing her elderly mother and her sister from leaving China, and barring a brother living in Canada from entering the country, among other restrictions. 

In the end she gave in and went home.
In countries with closer ties to China, agents have occasionally dispensed with such pressures in favour of more resolute action. 

Wang Dan, a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, says that he and other exiled dissidents have long avoided Cambodia, Thailand and other countries seen as friendly to China for fear of being detained by Chinese agents. 

The case of Gui Minhai, a Swede who had renounced his Chinese citizenship, suggests they are right to do so. 

He was kidnapped by Chinese officials in Thailand in 2015 and taken to the mainland. 

In a seemingly forced confession broadcast on Chinese television, he admitted to a driving offence over a decade earlier.
Many countries, naturally, are upset about covert actions by Chinese operatives on their soil. 

In 2015 the New York Times reported that the American authorities had complained to the Chinese government about agents working illegally in America, often entering the country on tourist or trade visas. 

Foreign diplomats note that officials from China’s Ministry of Public Security travel as delegates of trade and tourism missions from individual provinces. 

Chinese police were caught in Australia in 2015 pursuing a tour-bus driver accused of bribery. Though France has an extradition treaty with China, French officials found out about the repatriation of Zheng Ning, a businessman seeking refuge there, only when China’s own anti-graft website put a notice up saying police had successfully “persuaded” him to return to China. 

The French authorities had not received a request for his extradition.
This pattern is especially disturbing since the anti-corruption campaign is used as an excuse to pursue people for actions that would not be considered crimes in the countries where they have taken refuge—including political dissent. 

It beggars belief that the Chinese authorities would have worked so hard to capture Mr Gui, the kidnapped Swede, just to answer for a driving offence. 

His real crime was to have published books in Hong Kong about the Chinese leadership. 

By the same token, last year the Chinese embassy in Bangkok reportedly asked the Thai government to detain the wife of a civil-rights lawyer after she escaped over China’s south-western border. 

Her only known offence was to have married a man who had the cheek to defend Chinese citizens against the state.
Increasingly, China is trying to use Interpol, an international body for police co-operation, to give its cross-border forays a veneer of respectability. 

Interpol has no power to order countries to arrest individuals, but many democratic states frequently respond to the agency’s “red notices” requesting a detention as a precursor to extradition. 

In 2015 China’s government asked Interpol to issue red notices for 100 of its most-wanted officials. To date, the government says half of those on the list have returned, one way or another. 

Small wonder that Xi Jinping has said he wants the agency to “play an even more important role in global security governance”.
Since 2016 Interpol has been headed by Meng Hongwei, who is also China’s vice-minister of public security. 

That year alone China issued 612 red notices. 

The worry is that China may have misrepresented its reasons for seeking arrests abroad. 

Miles Kwok, also known as Guo Wengui, a businessman who fled China in 2015, stands accused of bribery. 

But it was only when he was poised to give an interview last summer in which he had threatened to expose the misdeeds of the ruling elite that China asked Interpol to help secure his arrest. 

When America refused to send him home, the Chinese government requested a second red notice, accusing Mr Kwok of rape.
China’s covert extraterritorial activity suggests that foreign governments are right to be cautious about deepening ties in law-enforcement. 

If nothing else, the fate of those who do return provides grounds for concern. 

Although few would shed any tears for corrupt tycoons or crooked officials, the chances of any of them getting a genuine opportunity to prove their innocence are all but zero. 

Nearly half of the repatriated officials who were subject to red notices have been sentenced to life in prison; the other half have not yet been tried. 

Chinese courts have an astonishingly high conviction rate. 

In 2016, the latest year for which figures are available, it was 99.9%.

Is Interpol becoming China's Gestapo

China: Families of Interpol Targets Harassed
End Collective Punishment in Pursuit of Suspects
Human Rights Watch

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping speaks during the 86th INTERPOL General Assembly at Beijing National Convention Center on September 26, 2017 in Beijing, China. 

 
Chinese authorities should immediately stop harassing and detaining family members of suspects living abroad to compel their return to China, Human Rights Watch said today. 

The global police organization Interpol and foreign governments should reject China’s misuse of Interpol’s “red notice” system, which alerts governments to people sought for arrest.
Human Rights Watch interviews with five “red notice” individuals found that the Chinese authorities subjected their family members in China to forms of collective punishment – unlawfully punishing someone for the actions of another. 

The authorities have also pressured relatives to travel to the countries where red notice individuals live to persuade them to return to China.
“Chinese authorities have put all kinds of unlawful pressure on relatives of corruption suspects to get them to return to China,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch. 

“There is no legal basis for these traumatizing guilt-by-association tactics.”

China’s wanton mistreatment of relatives of corruption suspects is bad enough, but Interpol and other governments should not be enabling Chinese abuses abroad.
                                                                          Sophie Richardson

In late 2012, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping launched a purported “war on corruption.” 

As part of that campaign, China asked Interpol to issue red notices against individuals living abroad who have been accused of "corruption".
Interpol red notices are alerts seeking the arrest and extradition of wanted people, issued at the request of the government seeking those individuals. 

They are not international arrest warrants, however, as Interpol’s member countries can determine what legal action to take in response.
In some countries that do not have extradition treaties with China, Chinese authorities have tried to secure the return of red notice individuals by putting pressure on their family members in China. Official reports often depict the individuals initially refusing to return, but later changing their minds due to “the deterrent effect of the law, policy appeals, and family influence.”
Human Rights Watch research revealed that Chinese authorities, using Interpol red notices as a justification, used various means to systematically harass family members of red notice individuals. 

Police and prosecutors visited or summoned relatives without presenting any legal documents and threatened to detain them if they failed to convince the red notice individual to return to China. 

Human Rights Watch identified at least two cases in which authorities formally arrested relatives.
The police have also barred family members – including spouses, children, parents, and siblings and their families – from traveling outside China. 

Children of red notice individuals have been blocked from attending schools abroad. 

Authorities have also imposed collective punishments on relatives by freezing their assets, firing them from their positions in government-owned companies, or warning their business partners not to work with them.
Human Rights Watch takes no position on the merits of Interpol red notices discussed below. However, even properly issued red notices would not justify collective punishment of family members.
Authorities in countries in which red notice individuals reside should investigate harassment and other abuses by Chinese officials or their agents against these individuals or their family members. 

Authorities in the countries in which they reside should ensure red notice individuals in their countries have adequate protection. 

In cases where red notice individuals may be subject to extradition, those authorities should provide them adequate opportunity to contest the extradition, and not return anyone to China if they are likely to face persecution, torture, or ill-treatment there.
Interpol should conduct careful due diligence before processing information provided by the Chinese government and before facilitating information-sharing between the Chinese police and police forces of other countries, Human Rights Watch said. 

They should also ensure that fundamental rights of red notice individuals and their family members are protected.
“China’s wanton mistreatment of relatives of corruption suspects is bad enough, but Interpol and other governments should not be enabling Chinese abuses abroad,” Richardson said. 

Detention, Threats, and Harassment of Relatives of ‘Red Card’ Individuals
Human Rights Watch interviewed four people based in the United States and one in Canada. 

All interviews were conducted in person or by phone. 

They are from four provinces and one municipality in China, and all said they are currently on Interpol’s “red notice” list. 

Human Rights Watch also spoke to three lawyers who represent clients subjected to red notices. 

Three red notice individuals asked to remain anonymous for fear of government reprisal against their families in China. 

Human Rights Watch also reviewed dozens of government and media reports on returned red notice individuals, which generally corroborated the accounts of these individuals.

Detention, Threats of Detention
Interviewees told Human Rights Watch that their family members in China were very scared of the government officials who visited them. 

They said that police and prosecutors invoked Interpol red notices to justify punishing their family members.

Liang Jianguo (pseudonym), a businessman, said, “Police told my family that the government can take ‘any actions to control’ the relatives of red notice personnel and that they won’t live a normal life [unless I] return to China.”

Zhang Datong (pseudonym) said:
They would call [my wife] first, and say, “We are coming tomorrow morning to your home at 8:30, don’t leave the house.” 

Of course, my wife wouldn’t dare to say no… they repeatedly threaten[ed] my wife that if I don’t go back, she would be detained… my wife told me many times that, “You have no idea the mental distress we’re under.” 

She is very worried that if she does anything wrong to displease or provoke them, they would not allow our children to go to school.
Zhang said that the police had also harassed his septuagenarian parents: “[My parents] are very scared, too. One time after they talked to my mother, she had to be hospitalized for a month for high blood pressure-related health issues.”

Li Gang, a former businessman in Wuhan, Hubei province, said that his mother showed signs of mental illness after sustained harassment:
When the authorities started to harass my mother, she was 79. 

During September and October 2016, it was really intense. 

The authorities came to our home about every other day. 

At the end of last year, my mother had a stroke and was hospitalized… 

My brother told me that [our] mother has been losing her mind. 

She would talk to herself, murmuring things like “Ganggang [Li Gang’s nickname], please come back. You will be fine, as long as you sort out the money issues.”

Wang Lihe (pseduonym), a former businessman, said:
They have summoned my siblings countless times, from both the [the name of the prefecture] and the provincial public security bureaus… 

Today they summon my sister, tomorrow my brother, the next day my niece, like that… 

[The police] would threaten them that if I don’t go back, they would be arrested too.

Liang said:
At the beginning, the police came [to our home] about twice a week; later, two or three times a month. 

Every time for one or two hours. 

This has been going on for over a year. 

They come whenever they want, acting like hooligans. 

They threatened my wife, saying that if she doesn’t do what they ask her to do, she would be jailed, and that once she’s jailed, she won’t be able to get out ever.
Liang said police used similar language with other relatives, including his child, a minor: “They are all scared to death. Every time my wife calls me, she cries and cries, begging me to return to China.”

Xie Weidong, a former Supreme People’s Court judge now residing in Canada, said that to compel him to return to China, authorities detained his sister and his adult son for over a year. 

Xie shared with Human Rights Watch documents detailing his case.
The Hubei procuratorate detained Xie Weidong’s sister, Xie Weifang, in September 2016 and his son, Xie Cangqiong, in December 2016 in Beijing, where they were living, and took them to Hubei province. 

Prosecutors charged Xie Weifang with taking bribes, and accused Xie Cangqiong of being a co-conspirator with Xie Weidong in an embezzlement case. 

Xie Weifang was released in January 2017, after the charges were dropped. 

Xie Cangqiong remains held at a detention center in Hubei.
In her letter to the Chinese Communist Party’s disciplinary body, the Central Commission on Discipline Inspection (CCDI), Xie Cangqiong’s mother, Wang Liwei, who is divorced from Xie Weidong, alleged that officials tortured Xie Cangqiong and threatened her: “My son and his aunt, after being tortured… had written letters pressuring Xie Weidong to return to China. [Prosecutors] threatened me…ordering me to make Xie Weidong return to China, otherwise, I would be detained, too.” 

A 2017 Supreme People’s procuratorate report revealed a case in which a family member of a red notice individual was detained. 

Chu Shilin, a businessman in Shandong province, returned to China from Canada in 2016, two months after authorities detained his ex-wife, Xu Jianhong, on suspicion of “harboring a fugitive,” on the grounds that Xu transferred money from China to Canada to aid Chu’s hiding.

Restrictions on Movement
Another tactic Chinese authorities use to compel red notice individuals to return is blocking China-based relatives from leaving the country. 

Interviewees said that none of their family members were shown any legal document for the travel ban. 

Some relatives discovered they were under a ban only when trying to leave the country, while others were informed by the authorities.

Wang Lihe said:
No one in my family can get out of the country – my mother, siblings, siblings’ spouses and children. Even my company’s employees. 

One of my employees was in the US. After they returned to China, now they can’t leave. 

My brother is also banned from travelling domestically. 

He can’t take the train, and can’t fly.

Zhang Datong said:
My daughter had already got the admission letter to a high school in the US, but she couldn’t leave the country. 

We had to find her another school [in China]. 

My son was only 8-years-old. He was stopped at the border [at the airport]. 

Even the customs officer was perplexed, saying, “Such a small child. What happened?” 

But still, he couldn’t leave, and had to go home.

Li Gang said:
[Authorities] confiscated my younger brother’s passport. 

They threatened my sister-in-law, “We know your son is attending college and it is a joint program with a US university. If you don’t convince [Li Gang] to come back, your son can’t leave the country. He will be ‘exit-banned.’”

Xie Weidong said, “My other sister and her family immigrated to Canada many years ago. Her daughter went back to China about two years ago. Now she can’t leave the country.”

Liang Jianguo said:
My parents, my wife’s parents, my siblings, my wife’s siblings, and all of their children, everyone is being “exit-banned.” 

My son had been studying in the UK for over a year, in a middle school. 

He returned to China during the break and wasn’t able to go back to the UK again.

In 2010, Jiang Chunguang, the head of a public hospital in Yunnan province, was arrested for corruption. 

Soon after, authorities issued a red notice against Jiang’s wife, Guo Xin, who at the time was in the US, accusing her of being an accomplice of her husband. 

Guo returned to China in October 2017. 

In a public letter Guo published before her return, she wrote:
The procuratorate… prevents my Canada-based older brother, his wife and daughter from entering China to visit [our] mother.… If [my] brother enters China, he will be detained… The deputy bureau chief of [the anti-corruption bureau]… phoned my sister, informing her… the exit ban…will be extended to the family’s third generation. The generation of my nieces will be banned from leaving the country.

Financial Control
Interviewees said that authorities have frozen all their assets in China, including jointly held bank accounts and real estate properties, but did not present their family members with any legal documents justifying that action. 

The relatives only became aware of the freezes when they tried to withdraw money. 

Authorities sealed off the properties with tape.
One interviewee said that his relatives’ employment was terminated due to him being on the red notice list.

Li Gang said:
My brother worked for a state-owned company. They terminated his employment. They made him go to the office of the procuratorate every day to assist the work of my case, but he hasn’t been paid. He was told that he could only get all his wages back when I return. Every day he just sits in the [procuratorate’s] office. It’s like going to jail.
Li Gang said his ex-wife’s brother also had to go to the procuratorate every day to “assist the investigation” of Li’s case.
Zhang Datong said, “[Authorities] froze all of our accounts, even my daughter’s tuition account. She had put down a deposit for the high school she was admitted into.”

Xie Weidong said that the assets in China of his sister who had immigrated to Canada, “which has nothing to do with my case…were all frozen. She only discovered this when she tried to sell one of the houses she owned.”
Liang Jianguo said that the authorities “confiscated all our properties, even the place my wife and son live. They have no place to live. There is no money for my son’s education. They are on the brink.”

Harassment Abroad
Chinese authorities have sent officials to countries where the red notice individuals reside to press them to return, sometimes wielding threats. 

A 2017 CCDI report says that Chinese police went to France to bring back businessman and red notice individual Zheng Ning. 

In May 2017, officials traveled to the US and secretly met Guo Wengui, a Chinese billionaire against whom Interpol had issued a red notice, to pressure him to return to China. 

The clandestine operation was discovered by US law enforcement authorities and later revealed by US-based media.
Interviewees said that Chinese authorities sent family members, lawyers, and friends to meet them in countries where they live. 

Lawyers with whom Human Rights Watch spoke said that officials typically accompany relatives on such overseas visits, and, in some cases, are even present at the meetings between the relatives and the red notice individuals.
Xie Weidong told the Globe and Mail that authorities had sent his detained sister’s former lawyer and his wife to Canada to harass him and his other sister. 

In December 2017, the lawyer and his wife appeared at Xie’s home in Toronto at 2 a.m.; they also visited the home of Xie’s sister in Ottawa.

“The police did not take any action against the lawyer, because they didn’t think he violated the law,” Xie told Human Rights Watch. 

“Now we are even more scared.”
Hubei authorities had also asked Xie’s ex-wife, Wang Liwei, in China to accompany them to go to Canada to help bring Xie back. They threatened that if Wang did not comply, they would continue to hold his son indefinitely.
“[Authorities told my ex-wife that] having an intermediary go to Canada would give cover to the officials who would want to directly speak to me [when they are in Canada],” said Xie.

Li Gang said:
Around the Spring Festival this year, officials at the procuratorate clearly told my brother that they were going to the US, in March or April [2017]. Six people. Three from the procuratorate. Two from the local CDI, plus my brother. 

My brother was told the purpose of the trip was to “persuade Li Gang to return to China.” They showed my brother the itinerary.

A CCDI report suggests that authorities sent a relative overseas to meet a red notice individual and was successful in having her return: In 2013, authorities issued a red notice against Chen Yijuan, a former manager at a state-owned energy company in Yunnan province, alleging that she had taken bribes and laundered money. 

The report says Chen’s cousin and the lawyers of Chen’s husband went to the UK, where Chen was living, to persuade her to return to China. Chen returned in 2016.

Liang Jianguo said, “[Authorities] have sent my friends – people the police consider are very close to me – to look for me. I refused to meet them. I wouldn’t tell them where I was.”
Although the practice may be common, Human Rights Watch was aware of one case in which Chinese authorities deployed people from China – who were already in the country – to harass a red notice individual.
A Chinese national in the US, who rented a room in her house to Wang Lihe, said that since Wang moved in, three former acquaintances of hers had repeatedly called, texted, and visited her, urging her to evict Wang: “They keep telling me that [Wang] is wanted by Interpol and is a very bad person. I should not let him live in my house. They had come to my house to harass me and Mr. [Wang].”

The woman said she believed the three men were acting on behalf of the Chinese government:
One time, I inadvertently told the men that Mr. [Wang] went with his daughter to [an event]. Mr. [Wang] later told me that his relatives in China called him, telling him that the day after [that event], [authorities] had told them that Mr. [Wang] had gone to [the event].
The woman also said that the authorities told Wang’s family that because Wang had a very good relationship with his daughter, they would work on bringing the daughter back to China as a way to force Wang to return.

Background on Skynet, Fox Hunt
Since Xi Jinping assumed power in 2013, the Chinese government has carried out a sweeping anti-corruption campaign. 

Domestically, partly through shuanggui – a secretive detention system ridden with abuses that Human Rights Watch has extensively documented – the campaign has netted thousands of party leaders and rank-and-file government officials. 

Internationally, the government has launched operations known as “Fox Hunt” and “Skynet.”
In June 2014, authorities established the International Office of Pursuing Fugitives and Recovering Embezzled Assets 国际追逃追赃工作办公室 – comprised of personnel from eight government agencies including the CCDI, Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – to hunt down suspected corrupt individuals who have fled abroad. 

By October 2017, 3,587 fugitives from over 90 countries had been returned to China, according to the CCDI.
In April 2015, China published a most-wanted list, called “100 red notices” 百名红通, against 100 officials and business executives accused in major corruption cases. 

According to government statistics, by December 2017, 51 out of “100 red notices” had returned to China. 

Among them, 10 were reportedly repatriated by foreign governments, while 35 returned “voluntarily” after being “persuaded.”
The total number of red notices that Interpol has issued at the request of the Chinese government in recent years is unclear, as is the number currently in effect, since many notices are only known to national law enforcement authorities, and many of those subjected to them do not know of their existence. 

At present, 83 Chinese nationals are publicly listed on Interpol’s “red notice” webpage.

China’s Red Notice Abuses; Interpol’s "Neutrality" 
Interpol’s constitution stipulates that international police cooperation should be conducted in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a set of human rights standards that all United Nations member countries are expected to uphold. 

Interpol’s Rules on the Processing of Data states that data processing in the Interpol Information System “should respect the basic rights of the persons who are the subject of cooperation.”
According to Interpol, red notices may not violate the organization’s policy of neutrality, found in article 3 of its constitution, which forbids the organization from “undertak[ing] any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious, or racial character.” 

However, China has issued politically motivated red notices against dissidents and others abroad whom China sought to apprehend. 

Dolkun Isa, who campaigns from Germany on behalf of the ethnic Uyghur community in Xinjiang, has been subjected to a red notice for over a decade but has been unable to access or remove it, interfering with his international travel. 

US-based activist Wang Zaigang believed the red notice against him was in retaliation for his pro-democracy activism outside of China.
Given China’s record of arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearance, and unlawful forced repatriation, Human Rights Watch in a September 2017 letter to Interpol raised concerns that those subject to Interpol red notices from China could be at risk of torture and other ill-treatment.
Human Rights Watch also raised concerns about the ability of Meng Hongwei, who assumed Interpol’s presidency in November 2016, to maintain Interpol’s policy of neutrality, and to respect and protect human rights as set out in its constitution. 

Meng is a vice minister in China’s Ministry of Public Security, the police force that has harassed, arbitrarily detained, and tortured countless people for exercising their fundamental rights. 

Human Rights Watch has not received a reply from Interpol.

France Should Spotlight China's Rights Crisis

Foreign Minister Le Drian Should Call for Releases, Announce Policy Review
Human Rights Watch

French President Emmanuel Macron and Xi Jinping attend a bilateral meeting in Hamburg, Germany, July 8, 2017. 

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian should publicly urge respect for human rights in meetings with China’s new leadership, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to the foreign minister. 

Le Drian is visiting China for the first time as foreign minister from November 24 to 27, 2017.
“French President Emmanuel Macron has explicitly committed to promoting human rights in China along with diplomatic and economic concerns,” said Bénédicte Jeannerod, France director. “Minister Le Drian’s visit is an important opportunity to publicly challenge the Chinese leadership over its rampant human rights violations.”
Human Rights Watch urged Le Drian to:

• Publicly call for the releases of political prisoners Liu Xia, Gao Zhisheng, Jiang Tianyong, and Wang Quanzhang;
• Express concerns about China’s increasing efforts to undermine international institutions that should help defend human rights, including the United Nations, Interpol, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB); and
• Announce a review of all bilateral law enforcement cooperation.

“France has long been a defender of fundamental rights and liberties worldwide,” Jeannerod said. 

“In the face of an unreceptive Chinese leadership, Minister Le Drian’s visit will be a test of France’s commitment.”

Gestapol

China hosts Interpol meeting amid concerns Beijing is using the police network to pursue political foes overseas.
By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN

Interpol opened its main international annual meeting in China on Tuesday amid concerns that Beijing is using its growing influence over the police network to pursue political foes overseas.
Xi Jinping said in a speech to the Interpol General Assembly that China wants to work with other countries and organizations to achieve "global security governance."
However, New York-based Human Rights Watch said Interpol needs to address China's misuse of the organization's "red notice" system to seek the arrest and extradition of wanted people.
The election of Chinese Vice Public Security Minister Meng Hongwei as Interpol's president last year alarmed rights advocates who cite abuses, opacity and political manipulation within China's legal system.
China has used red notices to flag cases bearing a decided political taint, making the individuals involved vulnerable to law enforcement action by foreign government bodies.
Human Rights Watch raised the case of Dolkun Isa, an activist in Germany for the Turkic-Muslim Uighur ethnic group native to China's far-western Xinjiang region. 

It said Isa has had trouble traveling internationally since a red notice was issued against him more than a decade ago. 

China routinely accuses overseas Uighur advocates of supporting terrorism while providing little evidence to back up their claims.
The group also mentioned U.S.-based activist Wang Zaigang, whom it said appeared to have been targeted with a red notice in response to his activities promoting Chinese democracy.
Those served with red notices risk torture and other forms of ill-treatment given China's record of abuse, Human Rights Watch said.
"Interpol claims to operate according to international human rights standards, but China has already shown a willingness to manipulate the system," Sophie Richardson, the group's China director, was quoted as saying in a news release. 

"And with China's vice-minister of public security ... as president, Interpol's credibility is on the line," Richardson said.
The Ministry of Public Security is China's main police agency, charged with silencing and detaining critics of the ruling Communist Party, often outside the letter of the law.
Chinese politics expert Willy Lam said China has been using its economic heft to influence groups such as Interpol to further the party's foreign and domestic policy aims.
Lam pointed to cases where the line has blurred between accusations of corruption and apparent attempts to retaliate against those who make allegations against members of the communist leadership, such as outspoken businessman Guo Wengui.
Pressure on Guo has been building since April when a red notice was issued seeking his arrest on corruption-related charges. 

Chinese authorities sentenced several of his employees for fraud in June and have also opened an investigation into rape charges against Guo brought by a former assistant.
In recent months, Guo has become a widely followed social media presence by serving up sensational tales of corruption and scandal within the Communist Party's innermost sanctum, including among Xi's closest allies.
"China has turned Interpol into another venue for projecting its power," Lam said. 

"They've put a lot of investment into pursuing fugitives abroad, those wanted for political reasons."