Transnational Repression: How Beijing Targets Diaspora Activism in the West

• In Event: Domestic Sources of China’s Overseas Policies

Abstract

How does the Chinese government suppress dissent among its overseas communities who live in the free and democratic West? This paper takes an emotion-based approach to studying the mechanisms of China’s transnational repression of its overseas dissidents. Leveraging elite interviews and document analysis, I examine how authoritarian states use extensive data gathering schemes to link individual exiles to their vulnerable family members back home, with the goal of using the family’s safety as a pawn to intimidate the exile into silence. My theory revolves around the concept of guilt and how agents of the state methodically manufacture imagined guilt among diaspora activists to preemptively immobilize them and demobilize transnational advocacy movements. I identify a psychological strategy of guilt-seeding that Beijing uses to silence its exiles, using its vast surveillance powers and mobilizing its overseas consulates and agencies.

Author

• Tenzin Dorjee, Columbia University