Why Does China Need to Persecute Those Abroad Who Oppose Communism?

Most despotic regimes punish dissent inside their borders. What makes the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime different is that it represses its citizens in other countries.

Freedom House, the Washington-based democracy watchdog, has concluded that China runs “the most sophisticated, global and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world.” Indeed, the CCP is determined to silence those who have already voted with their feet by leaving.¹

A Regime That Follows Dissidents Abroad

The CCP’s reach extends into places where it has no jurisdiction. It intrudes into the daily lives of people outside China who have committed no crime beyond exercising the rights that every functional society takes for granted: open debate and legal protest.

In 2024, Amnesty International documented that Chinese and Hong Kong students studying in Europe and North America are “living in fear of intimidation, harassment and surveillance,” while Beijing punished their family members who remained in China in retaliation for overseas activism.

One report included a student’s words: “On my campus, I am afraid.” A nonprofit investigative journalism organization, ProPublica, found that Chinese intelligence officers actively monitor U.S. university campuses, turning the institutions into zones of enforced silence for Chinese students who dare to be anti-communist.²

Violence on the Streets of Free Nations

The repression extends beyond psychological pressure on what they think. It can turn violent by using proxies or pressuring local law enforcement agencies.

For example, when Xi Jinping visited San Francisco for the 2023 APEC summit, the CCP’s United Front Work Department systematically mobilized diplomatic groups to target Chinese, Tibetan, Hong Kong, and Uyghur activists. Radio Free Asia reported that China’s embassy and consulates bused in hundreds of pro-Beijing counter-protesters (thugs) to “violently suppress” demonstrations. Protesters reported being beaten while San Francisco police looked the other way.³

This pattern follows Xi wherever he travels. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) conducted a cross-border investigation called China Targets.⁴ It found that on at least seven of Xi’s 31 international trips between 2019 and 2024, local law enforcement infringed on protesters’ rights—often detaining activists on fabricated grounds to shield the weak Chinese leader from seeing opposition.⁵

At the 2024 APEC summit in Lima, assaults by CCP supporters were frequent, leaving some victims hospitalized and requiring months of treatment. In Hungary and in Auckland, New Zealand, pro-Beijing demonstrators tore banners from Tibetan protesters and attacked them, sometimes without police intervention.

A government confident in its legitimacy does not need to bus in enforcers to drown out a handful of protesters. The violence reveals exactly what the CCP fears: that its critics are right and that communism is a terrorist

sect that must be extinguished.

Secret Police Stations in America and Long-Arm Coercion

Beijing has also built machinery to reach individuals directly. The rights group Safeguard Defenders exposed a network of 110 covert overseas police service stations operating with impunity. This prompted investigations by at least 14 governments.

Beijing’s foreign ministry effectively acknowledged that it runs “persuasion missions” abroad. Under the banner of “Operation Fox Hunt,” launched in 2014, the CCP has pursued critics overseas under the guise of pursuing “fugitives.”⁶

Government prosecutors have called out this tactic for what it is: transnational policing gone wild. In 2020, the U.S. Justice Department charged eight individuals with acting as agents of the People’s Republic of China in a coercion campaign. The campaign targeted a New Jersey resident, Xu Jin, a former city government official from Wuhan, and his wife, Liu Fang, both of whom were wanted by Beijing. Federal prosecutors described the case as “a multi-year campaign of harassment.”⁷

More recently, Hong Kong authorities issued arrest warrants and offered financial bounties for pro-democracy activists living abroad—a move jointly condemned by the United Kingdom and the U.S. Placing a price on a person’s head thousands of miles from Beijing is an act of aggression against any country that hosts them—and proof that the CCP has no answer to dissent beyond intimidation and violence.⁸

The Stakes Are Universal, Not Restricted

Beijing dismisses these findings as “groundless” and “fabricated.” Yet the reports continue to document the crisis. A Freedom House report again named China a leading perpetrator of transnational repression in 2024. Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2026 found that the CCP’s crackdown continued to deepen and extend beyond its borders. The U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China warns that these operations “intimidate and censor legal residents on U.S. soil and others around the world.”⁹

Everyone, including Chinese residents in other countries, has the right to criticize the unnatural communist system of government and its systematic abuse of its citizens. When Beijing spies on students in Boston, sends operatives to beat protesters in San Francisco, plants covert police outposts in foreign cities, and posts bounties for exiles, it suppresses the freedom of these residents and the cause of freedom worldwide.

As Michael Caster of the Chinese Urgent Action Working Group has observed, for overseas Chinese dissidents, Uyghurs, Tibetans and Hong Kongers, the CCP’s “repression knows no borders.”¹⁰ This repression is everyone’s problem.

By attempting to criminalize dissent outside China, Beijing is testing the international community. The West must respond to this threat, as China attempts to rewrite the rules of global discourse. The U.S. cannot afford to allow this to continue.