China Leads Global Campaign To Silence Dissidents On American Soil, Official Warns
(Photo credit SAM YEH/AFP via Getty Images)
Foreign governments are increasingly using transnational repression to silence religious dissidents on American soil, posing a direct threat to U.S. sovereignty, officials and advocates warned Tuesday at the International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington, D.C.
Freedom House President Annie Boyajian, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, and victims of these attacks outlined how authoritarian regimes extend their reach beyond their borders through surveillance, physical intimidation, and even violence. Tactics include threatening relatives abroad, orchestrating arrests and deportations, and, in extreme cases, assassination. Between 2014 and 2024, Freedom House documented 1,219 incidents of physical transnational repression by 48 governments across 103 countries — though Boyajian noted the true scale is likely far higher.
Former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, spoke about the personal costs of speaking out. Turkey’s government placed a bounty on him after he criticized the regime using his basketball platform, and his father was arrested in retaliation. Freedom hasn’t seen his family in 11 years.
“The hardest thing about going against a dictatorship is what your family has to go through,” Freedom said. He added that his advocacy extended to criticizing China’s human rights record, which he believes led to him being blackballed from the NBA.
Boyajian emphasized that China leads the world in transnational repression, running “the most sophisticated global and comprehensive campaign” of this type. China accounts for 22% of all physical transnational attacks documented by Freedom House.
Mark Yang and Cynthia Sun of the Falun Dafa Information Center said they are preparing a nationwide survey on Chinese government harassment of Falun Gong practitioners in the U.S. Falun Gong, a spiritual movement founded in 1992 that combines meditation, qigong, and elements of Buddhism and Taoism, was banned in China in 1999 due to its rapid growth. The group operates Shen Yun, the touring dance production, and The Epoch Times.
Despite its controversial teachings, practitioners in China have faced brutal repression, including labor camps and documented forced organ harvesting. Yang and Sun’s survey, based on interviews with over 1,000 U.S.-based practitioners across 42 states, found widespread surveillance and retaliation against relatives in China.
The Chinese government has also targeted Falun Gong advocates on U.S. campuses and online. At the University of Pennsylvania, Chinese students circulated a petition labeling a Falun Gong advocate as racist for hosting events critical of Beijing, part of a broader strategy to weaponize Western political terminology, Sun said.
Online campaigns involve bot networks, AI deepfakes, and even attempts to pay social media influencers to spread anti-Falun Gong content. According to leaked Chinese Ministry of Public Security documents, Beijing instructed agents to “mobilize concealed agents to create and escalate internal conflicts of Falun Gong” and “force the U.S. government to strike on all fronts, eliminating the force of Falun Gong.”
China is not the only country involved. Uyghurs face similar targeting from Beijing, and governments in Turkey, India, Egypt, Iran, Russia, Uzbekistan, and Cambodia actively employ transnational repression against diaspora communities, Boyajian said.
Ambassador Waltz called these practices “wholly unacceptable” and a violation of U.S. sovereignty.
“This has always been and will always be a land of religious freedom,” Waltz said, noting that America was founded by religious refugees. “We will not stand for it. We will stand for U.S. sovereignty and for everybody’s right to worship.”
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