FBI describes China's chilling threat to dissenters in USA

FPI / July 12, 2020

Hundreds of Chinese nationals living in the United States are constantly pursued by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agents, FBI Director Christopher Wray said.

To suppress dissent, Chinese living abroad that supreme leader Xi Jinping sees as threats are told to either return to China or commit suicide, Wray said on July 7.

The operation, known as Fox Hunt, was launched by Xi six years ago under the guise of pursuing corrupt officials and business executives who had fled China. Wray said the operation’s principal aim is to stop Chinese nationals living abroad from detailing the communist nation's many human rights abuses.

“China describes Fox Hunt as some kind of international anti-corruption campaign. It is not,” Wray told the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.

Instead, Fox Hunt is a sweeping bid by Xi to target Chinese nationals who he sees as threats and who live outside of China, across the world, he said.

“We’re talking about political rivals, dissidents and critics seeking to expose China’s extensive human rights violations,” he said.

“Hundreds of these Fox Hunt victims that they target live right here in the United States, and many are American citizens or green card holders. The Chinese government wants to force them to return to China, and China’s tactics to accomplish that are shocking,” he said.

“For example, when it couldn’t locate one Fox Hunt target, the Chinese government sent an emissary to visit the target’s family here in the U.S. The message they said to pass on: the target had two options, return to China promptly or commit suicide.”

Wray said Beijing’s counterintelligence work is the “greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality.”

Wray said that nearly half the FBI’s 5,000 active counterintelligence cases were China-related.

The FBI chief appealed to anyone in the U.S. who thought they were a Fox Hunt target to “please reach out to your local FBI field office.”

Wray said that China was also involved in mass hacking, identity theft and intellectual property espionage, and there are 1,000 investigations into “China’s actual and attempted theft of technology” in all the bureau’s 56 field offices.

“The people of the United States are the victims of what amounts to Chinese theft on a scale so massive that it represents one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history,” Wray said.

Free Press International