US State Department Spotlights Beijing’s Global Repression in New Report

The State Department has called out the Chinese regime for intimidating and exacting reprisals against targets globally to advance its political goals. In its long-anticipated international human rights report, published on Aug. 12, the department noted the wide-ranging ways the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) campaign takes form, including assaults, harassment, hacking, anonymous threats, and bullying through proxies. Victims of the regime’s long-arm tactics, often called transnational repression, are wide ranging, with the report listing ethnic Uyghurs, spiritual practitioners, dissidents, foreign journalists, and Chinese students and faculty members studying outside China as common targets. The department cited research by the D.C.-based nonprofit Freedom House, which found that the CCP is responsible for “the most comprehensive and sophisticated” transnational repression campaign in the world, at times co-opting other countries’ institutions to force targeted individuals back to China—where they’re often in danger of persecution....