WASHINGTON, D.C. –– This week, Dr. Bob Fu, a target of transnational repression by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), penned an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, detailing his experience living under an authoritarian, Communist regime as a Christian, and how the CCP has targeted him as a dissident in the United States. Fu, a constituent of Subcommittee Chairman August Pfluger (R-TX), testified at a January 2024 Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence hearing about transnational repression threats in the homeland. Fu also applauded bipartisan legislation put forth by Homeland Security Committee members to counter this threat on U.S. soil and ensure the Department of Homeland Security is prepared to coordinate with state and local law enforcement to protect victims like him.

When Beijing’s Bullies Come to Town
The Wall Street Journal
Bob Fu
March 27, 2025

 
The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of repressing dissent, perhaps most brutally during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Since Xi Jinping took power in 2013, the regime’s hostility to religious freedom and human rights has reached new levels.
 
I have experienced this firsthand. In 1989 I led students from my college in Shandong province to Tiananmen Square to advocate peacefully for democratic reform. Luckily, a member of our group became ill, forcing us to head home three days before the government sent in tanks and killed thousands. In the days following, I was forced to surrender to the police as a student leader, barred from attending classes, and put under investigation for six months. 
 
In May 1996, authorities put my wife and me in jail for running a Bible training center under a business license. We were later placed on house arrest—and, after conceiving another baby without permission under the one-child policy, fled to Hong Kong. The following year we were accepted as refugees in the U.S., where I founded the China Aid Association, which advocates religious freedom and the rule of law in China. 
 
The government, however, isn’t satisfied with repressing religious beliefs within its borders. A federal jury in New York last fall convicted Shujun Wang, then 75, of spying on Chinese dissidents and human rights-advocates. For years Mr. Shujun pretended to support the rights of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang and Buddhists in Tibet, among other causes, to gain the trust of Chinese dissidents in the U.S. He then passed what he learned to the government in Beijing. 
 
In September federal prosecutors also indicted Linda Sun, a former aide to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who authorities claim acted as an illegal agent on behalf of Beijing. One alleged activity, as the Journal reported, included preventing Ms. Hochul, then lieutenant governor, from “recognizing the detention of members of China’s mostly Muslim Uyghur community” in a videotaped message to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
 
From late September to early November 2020, my family and I experienced physical threats and stalking outside our West Texas home. As many as 100 people gathered in front of our residence—what I can only imagine was the workings of the Communist Party. The threats were so credible that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local law-enforcement officers had to rescue my family, leading us through the alley beside our house and to various safe houses.
 
In 2023 I began receiving text messages from unknown numbers urging me to stop my advocacy efforts for Chinese dissidents and threatening consequences if I refused. The regime’s track record of surveillance and intimidation suggests it also launched a systematic “swatting” campaign against me: Hotel rooms in Houston, Los Angeles, New York and Washington were booked using my name, and then people falsely claiming to be me called in bomb threats to the various locations.
 
Since Mr. Xi came to power, many of my friends and colleagues have been targets of hostility and intimidation. At least 12 employees of my religious-freedom nonprofit—all naturalized U.S. citizens—have been arbitrarily detained while traveling to China to visit family. Each one was told to spy on the organization once he returned.
 
When Mr. Xi visited San Francisco to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November 2023, hundreds of dissidents gathered to object to Beijing’s repression of religious freedom and human rights. Groups of well-organized thugs met these protests with harassment and violence. One extensive report published by the Washington Post found that protesters “were attacked with extended flagpoles and chemical spray, punched, kicked and had fistfuls of sand thrown in their faces.” The Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles reportedly paid for these supporters’ meals and hotel rooms. 
 
Congress has begun to wake up to the threat. Rep. August Pfluger (R., Texas) this month introduced a bill to create a Transnational Repression Taskforce within the Department of Homeland Security to monitor and prevent acts of harassment and intimidation by foreign countries. Two other bills, sponsored by Rep. Gabe Evans (R., Colo.) and Rep. Seth Magaziner (D., R.I.), would provide resources to victims of such repression and enhance the ability of state and local law enforcement to investigate it.
 
I hope these bills pass, but each will be insufficient if our leaders and citizens don’t appreciate this underlying behavior for what it is. People all over the world long to live in America, where for decades you haven’t had to worry about government toughs bullying your family or threatening your friends. That ideal is now beginning to fade for many Chinese-Americans.
 
During the Cold War, America wouldn’t have tolerated the Soviet Union sending hoodlums to badger religious-freedom campaigners and assault Russian dissidents in American cities. Nor should we now. 

 
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