China's State terrorism: Anne-Marie Brady living in fear of Beijing

Chinese intimidation tactics she has studied are now being used against her

By Eleanor Ainge Roy in Christchurch

Anne-Marie Brady, professor at the University of Canterbury. Chinese harassment has put a strain on her family life.

It’s just gone midday at Canterbury University and Professor Anne-Marie Brady is rock-hopping across a crystal clear stream.
The life-long academic takes an overgrown bush track to reach the Okeover community gardens, her eyes scanning the sky for native birds. 

It’s the height of summer in Christchurch and the garden is filled with rhubarb plants, clumps of chewy spinach and spring onions whose tips have turned white in the sun.
“I used to spend a lot of time here,” says Brady, 52, examining the beds, ploughed by academic staff and students wanting to unwind. 

“I don’t any more.”
Brady has spent more than 25 years researching the Chinese Communist party (CCP), using her base in New Zealand as a refuge to work on her books, cook elaborate meals for her family and tend her vegetable and flower gardens.

But since the publication of her 2017 paper Magic Weapons, which details the extent of Chinese influence in New Zealand, Brady’s life has been turned upside down, becoming the target of a campaign of intimidation and psy-ops directed by Beijing towards her and her family. 

The Chinese government has not responded to requests for comment.
Beginning in late 2017, Brady has had her home burgled and her office broken into twice. 

Her family car has been tampered with, she has received a threatening letter (“You are the next”) and answered numerous, anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night, despite having an unlisted number. 

The latest came at 3am on the day her family returned home after a Christmas break. 

“I’m being watched”, she says.
A self-described “stoic”, Brady has had to draw on her experience of PTSD after the 2010 Christchurch earthquakes to help her handle the harassment.
“I have already protected myself in terms of all my information, and the rest is a mind game. It is meant to scare me… to cause mental illness or inhibit the kinds of things I write on – to silence me,” says Brady, her voice quavering slightly. 

“So I win by not being afraid.”
Close associates of Brady’s have also been visited by the Ministry of State Security in China.
Brady’s employer, Canterbury University, recently hired a security consultant to protect her office. New locks were fitted, CCTV introduced, and encryption software installed.
Despite three requests for expert government assistance, Brady and her husband – an artist from Beijing – have had to learn on the hoof how to protect their home, a suburban spot where they raise three teenage children, whose unease about the situation occasionally “manifests”, Brady says.

China scholar Anne-Marie Brady in Tiananmen Square, Beijing.

“New Zealanders have a deep sense of complacency about their security and feel that they’re very far away from the problems that we are seeing unfold in other parts of the world – that’s just not true any more,” says Brady, sitting on a bench in the gardens, where her interview with the Guardian cannot be overheard.
“We are part of the international environment too, and what happened to me – having my home and workplace invaded – is a wake-up call for people.”

Watcher becomes the watched
In the past few months Brady has begun using humour to counter the fear, has seen a counsellor on police advice, and consciously “lives in the moment”.
Brady has studied the Chinese government’s propaganda and intimidation tactics for decades, so there is a level of irony to seeing it in her own life. 

The watcher has become the watched.
Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, China academics around the world are experiencing increasing intimidation. 

Some refuse to speak publicly for fear of reprisals or being refused visas to China.
“Kill the chicken to scare the monkey” – Brady says, quoting a Chinese idiom.
Dr Kevin Carrico, a lecturer at Macquarie University, has had sensitive segments of his lectures in Australian classrooms reported back to Beijing, whose officials have then visited the China-based parents of some students.
“People have come to realise that there’s no longer any kind of great firewall between academic practice in China and academic practice outside of China,” Carrico told Inside Higher Ed.

China a ‘challenge to our sovereignty’
Brady and her husband rejected overseas job offers to stay in New Zealand and raise their children in a “high-trust society”. 

That belief is slowly souring.
“We are so proud that we punch above our weight internationally, that we have a moral authority on the world stage.But in the last year I have really wondered about that,” says Brady.
“Here is an actual challenge to our sovereignty – and a New Zealand family who have had their safety threatened – and our government is not defending them.”
New Zealand police say they continue to investigate the malicious acts against Brady and that the case remained of “strong interest”.
A spokesperson for prime minister Jacinda Ardern said she “has not received any reports that there is an issue attributable to China”.
Since the intimidation started, Brady has pinned an image of New Zealand world war two spy Nancy Wake above her desk, and sought courage in the writings of George Orwell.
“My main job is to look after myself and keep doing what I’m doing, because it must surely matter if so much attention has been directed at me” she says, chuckling.
Brady has repeatedly been encouraged by government insiders to keep reading, digging, and publishing. 

“I know the research I do is valued by our government, and my courage in speaking up is valued as well,” says Brady.
“But I am part of a changing geopolitical situation and my family is, too. And I have to handle that at the same time as be a mum, an academic, a colleague, a person who is at the supermarket … I have to be normal as well.” 

Hong Kong tabloid with China links tails visiting US-Australian academic

Macquarie University Chinese history lecturer Kevin Carrico subject to detailed reporting of his movements on a recent visit
By Kate Lyons

The front page of Wen Wei Po showing the activities of US-Australian academic Kevin Carrico during his visit to Hong Kong. 

When Kevin Carrico landed back in Australia on Monday after spending a week in Hong Kong, his friend sent him a link to the front page of a Hong Kong tabloid.
It was covered with pictures of Carrico and details of his trip.
It seems reporters for the paper, Wen Wei Po, which has close ties to Beijing, had been following him all week, reporting details of who he met, where he went, even when he returned to his hotel to change his shirt.
There were photographs of the US-Australian academic, who works for Macquarie University in Sydney where he researches Chinese history and society, standing in the street.
Another shows him at the airport about to leave the country and a third shows him in conversation with a friend in a restaurant, that was clearly taken by someone sitting a few tables away.
Hong Kong’s Wen Wei Po featuring in-depth reporting of the movements of visiting Sydney academic Kevin Carrico. 

“Wen Wei Po is very, very closely linked with the Liaison Office, which is Beijing’s office in Hong Kong,” Carrico said.
“I don’t know if this is an attempt to build up pressure to get me banned from Hong Kong, or to intimidate me from returning to Hong Kong.”
Carrico is a US citizen and Australian permanent resident and has just received a large research grant from the Australian government to undertake a project examining tensions between Beijing and Hong Kong.
He said he might have been targeted because he writes about Chinese power in Hong Kong, which inevitably sometimes leads to discussion of Hong Kong independence.
While Hong Kong is part of China, it is a special administrative region, with its own government, legal system and policies.
However, there are concerns that Beijing is making moves to bring the regions more firmly under its control.
The newspaper articles allege Carrico “has close ties with members of the Hong Kong independence organisation” and “secretly came to Hong Kong”, as well as listing all those Carrico met with during his week in the country.
The articles also included inane observations such as: “After that, Carrico returned to the hotel where he was staying and changed his shirt before attending a party;” and, “After the lecture, Carrico and a man returned to the hotel after eating at a nearby Korean restaurant.”
Carrico said independence was a topic that sometimes came up in his work, and he knew people who supported it, but there was nothing illegal or illegitimate about that.

“It’s a violation of the freedom of speech promised to Hong Kong to pretend that discussion of independence is illegal,” Carrico said.
“I always say in the US cannabis was illegal but it wasn’t illegal to talk about cannabis, to talk about legalising cannabis, I think a similar sort of thing regarding HK independence.”
Carrico said the articles did at least make sense of the woman on the train who followed him throughout his first day in the country.
“I noticed a lady, maybe in her 30s, I felt like she was looking at me occasionally. I’m not a celebrity or anything close to that, but I thought, she’s wearing a University of Oxford sweatshirt, maybe she read my book or maybe she was thinking I look funny, I don’t know.”
The woman followed him off the train, into a shopping centre, even waiting for him outside the toilets.
“In a city of seven million people, even in a shopping mall, it’s unlikely you keep running into the same person,” he said.
After Carrico became concerned he twice tried to photograph the woman.
The first time, when she was riding behind him on an escalator she turned around and faced the other way, Carrico said.
The second time, she hid behind a tree.

“Today’s Wen Wei Po article, where I take up the entire front page of a newspaper, begins to answer some of those questions. The people who were following me were probably from that newspaper. At the same time, that raises some pretty major questions. How did this newspaper know I was there? Do they have access to border control? How were they able to start following me the day after I arrived and how did they manage to keep a tail on me for what seems like an entire week?”
Carrico was light-hearted about some parts of the experience.
The Wen Wei Po article devotes several paragraphs to a talk he gave and Carrico joked that he wished he could have got similar media coverage for his speech before it was held.
“I could have got more people there. It wasn’t as well attended as I would have liked.”
But there were other points he found less funny.
“The article mentions my wife. They can write whatever they want about me, but I’d prefer they leave my family out of it.”
Carrico, who has been travelling to Hong Kong for 15 years said his experience would not deter him from continuing to do so, but he hoped it was not a sign of things to come.
“Hong Kong can’t follow China’s path of banning journalists and researchers if it wants to call itself Asia’s world city. I think the Hong Kong government might consider voicing their support for academic freedom, because clearly this is not a very welcoming message to send to academics.”

China has silenced American academics for years. Now they’re pushing back.

By Fred Hiatt

In Peyzawat, in China's East Turkestan colony, children play outside the entrance to a school ringed with barbed wire, security cameras and barricades near a sign which reads "Please use the nation's common language.”

When it comes to China, Americans are victims of an insidious kind of censorship that stunts the debate they hear and read in nearly invisible ways.
The censorship — or self-censorship — stems from fear.
Many academics who specialize in China fear that if they are critical, the Communist rulers will deny them a visa. 
If you are an anthropologist who needs to interview Chinese villagers, being banned from the country can end your career.
A professor who speaks honestly about human rights abuses may fear a rebuke, or worse, from university administrators, who in turn fear losing their satellite campus in China — or the lucrative flow of Chinese students to their school.
Even if you were willing to risk your own future, you might worry that candor would endanger your colleagues here or in China. 
Those working at think tanks and other nonprofits must make similar calculations every day.
The upshot is that America’s — and Australia’s, and Europe’s — leading experts on China often remain silent as its regime becomes ever more repressive. 
Newspaper articles are published without their perspective, op-eds go unwritten, conferences present an incomplete view.
Which is what makes the East Turkestan Initiative so striking — an unprecedented response to an unprecedented, yet little-noticed, assault on freedom.
Xi Jinping has been narrowing the space for free expression for years.
His regime has imprisoned and tortured lawyers, silenced reporters and professors, kidnapped and jailed critics from outside China’s borders.
But the human rights violations taking place now in the western colony of East Turkestan are, as Human Rights Watch said in a recent report, “of a scope and scale not seen in China since the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.”
More than 1 million people, by reliable estimates, have been rounded up and put in prisons, detention centers or concentration camps. 
They are Muslims of Turkic ethnicity, and the government’s goal seems to be to eradicate their religion and inculcate Communist fealty. 
“Within these secretive facilities, those held are forced to undergo political indoctrination for days, months, and even over a year,” Human Rights Watch said.
Outside the camps, meanwhile, people are subjected to unprecedented surveillance and control, including the compulsory collection of biometric data, such as voice samples and DNA, and assignment of “trustworthiness” grades. 
Uighurs abroad are harassed and often unable to communicate with relatives inside China. 
Families are broken up, children indoctrinated while their parents are locked away.
China denies all this — the camps are for “vocational education,” it says — but won’t let inspectors or reporters in.
So news of what is likely one of the greatest crimes against humanity of this young century hardly registers.
Jerome Cohen and Kevin Carrico, China scholars at New York University and Australia’s Macquarie University, respectively, find this unacceptable.
They drafted the East Turkestan Initiative, asking for a pledge to raise awareness of these events in every public forum.
More than 100 China scholars signed on.
“Hundreds of thousands of people of Uyghur and Kazakh descent are being held indefinitely in extra-judicial internment camps in East Turkestan today,” the joint statement explains.
“Prisoners are detained due to their ethnicity or Muslim faith, tearing apart families, destroying lives, and threatening culture.
These are horrific developments that should have no place in the twenty-first century.
“The global response to these developments, however, has been muted.
Many are still unaware even of the existence of these camps.
Reporting on the situation is hindered by an information blockade by the Chinese state, which denies even the existence of any such camps. 
And those who stand up and speak out openly against these policies may face the wrath of a rising power that is determinedly hostile to criticism.”
You could be discouraged that the number of signers is yet only in the low three digits.
You could be discouraged that one signer already has withdrawn his name.
“I’m sure it’s too hot for him, and I’m sure his colleagues have asked him to withdraw it,” Cohen told me.
But the list is growing and already impressive: young and old, from multiple continents, respected scholars from top-flight schools.
What’s most striking about the list is that these are, in a very real sense, China’s friends: men and women who have devoted years and decades to learning the language and understanding the people, who wish nothing but the best for China.
When they and people like them do not participate in the debate, the field is left to shills with little credibility and to the most feverish apostles of deterring and controlling China’s rise.
If, with the East Turkestan Initiative, more of them engaged with the public, awareness of China’s crimes would rise.
But as they shared their appreciation for the challenges of development and for China’s accomplishments, so would Americans’ understanding.
In the long run, China would be so much better off.

China’s Targeting of Filipino Chinese for Intelligence, Influence and Drug Trafficking

By Anders Corr, Ph.D.

Davao City Vice Mayor Paolo Duterte (L), son of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, and the president’s son-in-law, Manases Carpio (R), take an oath as they attend a senate hearing in Manila on September 7, 2017. Paolo Duterte and Manases Carpio appeared before the inquiry to deny as “baseless” and “hearsay” allegations linking them to large-scale illegal drugs smuggling. 

On June 12, Philippine protesters staged coordinated protests against China in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Vancouver. 

Protest organizer Ago Pedalizo said, “Duterte’s government pursues the ‘sell, sell, sell’ approach to sovereignty as a trade-off to all kickbacks he’ll get from the ‘build, build, build’ economic push of China.” 

His protest group, Filipino American Human Rights Advocates (FAHRA), charged that “Duterte is beholden to the $15-billion loan with monstrous interest rate and China’s investments in Boracay and Marawi, at the expense of Philippine sovereignty. This is not to mention that China remains to be the premier supplier of illegal drugs to the country through traders that include the son, Paolo Duterte, with his P6 billion shabu [methamphetamine] shipment to Davao.”
Paolo Duterte has denied the allegations. 

Philippine and Chinese government offices did not reply to requests for comment.
But, experts have confirmed that kickbacks and drug shipments come through Filipino Chinese networks. 

Current Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte himself has self-identified as Chinese in the course of affirming his sincerity to an accommodating position on the South China Sea conflict. 

He said this to a correspondent on CCTV, a Chinese state television network.
Asked about Duterte and influential Special Assistant to the President Mr. Bong Go, one expert replied, “Duterte has been given money by the Chinese as early as when he was mayor [of Davao City, Mindanao]. The Chinese will not give it to him directly, but through the Filipino Chinese. Bong Go is a Filipino Chinese.”
Another source with knowledge of elite networks in the Philippines confirmed that Chinese intelligence services focus on Filipinos of Chinese ancestry in their attempts to infiltrate the Philippines, including Mr. Bong Go and other Filipino Chinese in Duterte’s inner circle. 

He added that some Chinese networks in the Philippines specialize in the illegal drug trade and business more generally, and serve a dual intelligence function. 

He said that China currently has “unprecedented access” to Duterte.
Chinese state targeting of overseas Chinese for intelligence, drugs and influence operations is well documented in a growing field of study on Chinese influence operations globally. 

The contemporary literature has been developed by an impressive number of scholars and journalists, including Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, Anne-Marie Brady, Kerry Brown, Kevin Carrico, J. Michael Cole, John Garnaut, Bill Gertz, Gerry Groot, Clive Hamilton, Alex Joske, Shanthi Kalathil, Peter Mattis, Jonas Parello-Plesner, Josh Rogin, Mark Stokes, Glenn Tiffert, and James To. 

A comedian, Chris Chappell, is even covering the issue and making it accessible beyond audiences for relatively dry scholarship and foreign policy analysis.
Ethnicities other than Chinese are also targeted, of course, but Chinese authorities single out those of their own ethnicity, putting them into particular danger. 

This is arguably a racist or discriminatory practice by China’s intelligence services, which victimizes and endangers overseas Chinese. 

A former attaché in the United States’ embassy in Beijing, for example, explained that China’s intelligence services target those of Chinese ancestry who work in foreign missions. 
“Ethnic Chinese serving in Western embassies in China bear special risks. Chinese intelligence services vigorously target them for compromise. The CCP treats them like race-traitors when they aren’t compromised, and their American countrymen are sometimes insensitive to the pressure they are under. I’ve known ethnic Chinese Americans that finished their service in China embittered by the experience.”

Another former attaché, this one defense attaché in the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, wrote that China’s strategy of targeting those of Chinese ancestry extends back decades. 

“Targeting the diaspora has long been the practice,” he said.
“In the 1980’s, when ethnic Chinese were still a rarity in the foreign service, it was the ethnic Chinese wives who were targeted. I know of a case of an American official in the Embassy in Thailand who had an ethnic Chinese-Thai wife, and he was being induced through his wife, who was dangled with tempting business propositions and offers of cash.”
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, tasked with assisting counterintelligence at U.S. embassies abroad, declined to comment.
Four sources of information in this article asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak on the subject, or because they feared reprisals.