Teen with US ties again on the run from China with fiancee
KYIV, UKRAINE >> A teenager who says he’s a U.S. permanent resident and his fiancée are once again on the run from the threat of extradition to their homeland, China, in a sign of Beijing’s lengthening reach over perceived dissidents abroad.
Chinese officials had sought Wang Jingyu, a 19-year-old student, over his online comments about deadly border clashes between Chinese and Indian forces last year. He was arrested by plainclothes police in Dubai while transferring for a flight to the U.S. in early April and was held for weeks in a case that the U.S. Department of State has described as a human rights concern. He said Chinese authorities in Dubai took away his green card.
Finding a safe place
Wang was freed May 27, just hours after The Associated Press asked about him. He fled first to Turkey and then to Ukraine, as a temporary safe place that was open to Chinese passport holders without COVID-19 entry restrictions.
But on Thursday, the AP has learned, Wang received a warning via email that Chinese officials knew he was hiding in Ukraine, and had escalated the charges against him to subversion of state power, a vaguely defined charge often used by Chinese authorities to imprison critics. The email claimed to be from the state security department of Chongqing city police, which has said they are looking for him.
“Your actions have completely changed from the simple charge of picking quarrels and stirring up trouble and demeaning our border martyrs to subversion of state power,” the email read. “We in the public security organs and national security organs know exactly where you are. I
want to remind you that China and Ukraine have an extradition agreement.”
On Monday, Wang received another email from the same person, saying they had prepared measures if the couple fled again. The AP has seen screenshots of both emails.
“I was really scared, I couldn’t sleep well at night,” Wang said. “It was very clear from what they said that they would take action against me.”
The Dutch experience
Terrified, Wang and his fiancee, Wu Huan, 26, flew to the Netherlands, which does not have an extradition treaty with China. They are seeking asylum or at least a temporary stay visa.
Upon arrival at the Amsterdam airport, the couple was informed by Dutch immigration authorities that their passports had been cancelled, said Bob Fu, president of ChinaAid, who helped organize their escape from Ukraine.
Bas Belder, a former member of the European Parliament, said he has been in contact with the Dutch Justice Ministry to bring the couple’s plight to the minister’s attention. He added that the case, including the cancellation of their passports, highlights “genuinely criminal behavior of the Chinese party state
to pursue their citizens even beyond Chinese territory and try by all possible means to capture them.”
The U.S. State Department declined to comment on the specifics of the case on Tuesday but said in a general statement:
“We remain alarmed by human rights violations and abuses in China and call on PRC (People’s Republic of China) authorities to respect the fundamental freedoms to which their citizens are entitled .... This applies to all PRC citizens — both within and outside of China.”
Growing fears
The case feeds into growing fears of extraterritorial reach on China’s part, especially with concerns that Hong Kong’s national security law, passed last year, could apply to people of any nationality even outside Hong Kong.
Formal extradition requests are far from the only tool China uses to exercise control over its citizens abroad, said Jerome Cohen, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations and an expert on Chinese law. More common are informal attempts, used by the U.S. as well, relying on deportations by foreign countries that are rarely made public and are much harder to track, he said.