From the archive: ‘We are so divided now’: how China controls thought and speech beyond its borders

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• 00:00

  This is The Guardian.

• 00:21

  Hi, my name is Lauren Hilgers.

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  I'm the author of We Are So Divided Now,

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  How China Controls Thought and Speech Beyond Its Borders, which was published in 2021.

• 00:31

  The reason I wanted to write this story is a few years before I had a book come out about a Chinese democracy activist that had moved to New York City.

• 00:43

  And there were various things going on in his life.

• 00:46

  We made it clear that sort of China was reaching out to try and keep him from talking about what had happened in this hometown.

• 00:53

  And so this was sort of on my radar, and I heard about An Wang in the news.

• 00:59

  And so I was curious about how An Wang was a police officer,

• 01:04

  how this sort of outreach, this sort of repression worked.

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  And that was the original spark of the story.

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  Since 2021,

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  there have been a lot of cases like these where Chinese immigrants living in the US have been charged with acting as a foreign agent.

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  An Wang got off.

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  The charges were dropped against him,

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  but there have been a lot of other immigrants living in New York and around New York that have been convicted on similar charges.

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  And it's often about visas.

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  So this is ongoing.

• 01:42

  I think this kind of transnational repression is very chilling and it's more about the message it sends than the intelligence gathered.

• 01:52

  And I also really feel for the people that get caught in between these two powers

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