Chinese secret police collect personal details and hire local agents in trying to force targeted individuals to return to China.
The Chinese regime hires agents to go after dissidents all over the world in a bid to get them back to China, a former spy and victims have revealed.
The spy, who recently defected to Australia, gave the name Eric. For 15 years, he took orders from secret police in China to target dissidents in countries such as Cambodia, Thailand, India, and Australia.
One of his targets is Li Guixin, a practitioner of the meditation discipline Falun Gong, which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1999 made a goal to eliminate. Mr. Li has experienced at least five arbitrary arrests and detention over his faith before he fled to Thailand in 2014 with his wife and teenage daughter.
“Right now, we need you to confirm whether we are looking at the right apartment,” reads a screenshot Eric shared with The Epoch Times.
“Observe what’s inside and around the apartment; take some photos and videos. Organize what you see later so that we can plan our stakeout,” Eric’s handler instructed him in a message dated Feb. 16, 2021.
The handler sent a series of photos. Some showed Mr. Li and his family in yellow shirts meditating or in Falun Gong events. Others included headshots from their identity cards used in China and their Thailand address from around 2017.
Mr. Li, after reviewing these photos, told The Epoch Times he was shocked.
While many photos are from what his friends had shared on social media, at least one family photo was never posted on the internet, he said.
“Where did they get it?” he said, adding that he felt he was in a movie. It was the first time he was able to confirm the inner suspicions that led him to move multiple times in recent years.
“It’s like, this is for real,” he said.
Eric couldn’t confirm if—and how many—other Chinese agents might be involved in targeting Mr. Li. He had taken a translator with him to inspect the location his handler gave him. He said he had minimal involvement in the case after finding out Mr. Li no longer lived there.
“The infiltration of CCP in Southeast Asia is quite serious,” Eric told The Epoch Times. When it comes to “entrapping” targets, he said, countries such as Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma (also known as Myanmar) are “top choices” for the regime.
“The local governments sometimes turn a blind eye and even cooperate with them,” he said.
Being “no one special,” Mr. Li suggested that Beijing had singled him out because of his dissenting viewpoints. He has written critical pieces on the Chinese regime and became a contributor to The Epoch Times’ Chinese language edition in the fall of 2021.
Both The Epoch Times and Falun Gong are heavily censored in China. The Epoch Times’ website, like many other international outlets, remains inaccessible to mainland Chinese behind the internet censorship wall.
The Justice Department in 2023 also brought two separate cases against suspected Chinese agents, including two who allegedly operated a secret Chinese police station in New York and two others accused of trying to bribe U.S. tax officials against Falun Gong. In the former case, one of the men also helped organize counter-protests to Falun Gong demonstrations during communist leader Xi Jinping’s 2015 Washington trip.
Wang Liming, a Chinese political cartoonist under the pseudonym Rebel Pepper who the former Chinese agent also targeted, said that his close friend, a Japan-based blogger with millions of fans on Chinese social media, had once been asked by Ministry of State Security agents to spy on Falun Gong and The Epoch Times while he was visiting his hometown.
“He rejected flat out,” Mr. Wang told NTD, the sister media outlet of The Epoch Times. “They are mobilizing everyone to become a spy. If anyone with influence thinks they can use you, they will ask, ‘Will you want to collect intelligence for us?’ This is quite scary.”Mr. Li still remembers what happened in late 2021, the same year Eric’s handler asked him to help locate Mr. Li.
That December, on the way back from a Suphan Buri park where they did Falun Gong exercises, Mr. Li’s wife met a man who appeared interested in learning Falun Gong.
The Li couple welcomed him to their home to read Falun Gong books together and later gifted him a copy of “Zhuan Falun,” the practice’s main teaching.
They added each other as friends on the instant communication app Line, and the man asked for the couple’s address, saying he wanted to send them some tea.
The man called himself Li Guoan and described himself as a tour guide. “Guoan,” word for word, means state security.
Mr. Li didn’t catch this clue until weeks later when a woman called, urging them to leave.
“Don’t ask who I am,” Mr. Li remembered the woman saying. “I’m someone very close to that national security guy.
“Your situation right now is very dangerous,” she said. “Hurry up and move to another city.”
According to the woman, the Chinese intelligence forces had surveilled the Li family for some considerable time. For supplying the book and their address, she said the man received from the local Chinese Consulate a reward of 100,000 Thai Baht (about $3,000 at the time), with another equal sum to come.
The man had been trying to locate the Li family since early 2021, the woman told him.
Mr. Li moved to a friend’s place that very day.
In a few months, though, suspicious people, many speaking Chinese, again appeared in their building’s first floor, where his friend had just opened a cafe. They lingered for hours, taking photos. They also showed a particular interest in details about some “Chinese” individuals working “in the media.”
Mr. Li began to fear he was who they were looking for when his friend told him of these activities.
While his friend was in the kitchen, one person tried to sneak upstairs, according to Mr. Li. In late August, one local revealed to Mr. Li’s friend that he had been sent by the Chinese Consulate.
Even today, Mr. Li fears the regime hasn’t let up the pressure on him.
Around the Chinese New Year in February, Mr. Li had a phone call with his sister in China. She told him the police had just come that very day.
“They know your situation quite well,” she told him. Then, bizarrely, she said: “Come back.”
He told her it was impossible.
“Hard to say,” she replied.
Mr. Li felt that the authorities must have threatened his sister. “Of course, she knows that’s dangerous,” he said. “She’s saying this for someone to hear.”
Direct calls to his mother, now 85, have long been blocked, and talking to his sister was the only way for him to communicate with his family.
When his father died in 2017, he said, the man’s eyes wouldn’t close because he longed to see his son.
Mr. Li knew then he’d have to stop calling his sister to not “bring them more trouble.”
“You and mother take care,” he told her during the call.
Mr. Li, who has moved several times since 2022, still feels the shadow of the persecution upon him. But he said he’s trying not to let the fear control him.
Through it all, he said, he has met people like that woman who volunteered to help, a sign that the CCP isn’t enjoying much public support.
It gives him hope that people who have a conscience will not follow the CCP in persecuting good people.
Meanwhile, Mr. Li tries to “take good care of” himself and leaves all the rest to fate.
Living by the values of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance—the core tenets of Falun Gong—he said he has nothing to fear.