Ever since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, violence and intimidation have been used by the CCP as routine means of control and dominance over the Chinese people.
During the fight over the passage of the permanent normal trading relations act in 1999, a friend found a rattlesnake in his mailbox. More recently, another friend found three sharpened knives neatly arranged on her front steps. “I can easily make you disappear” is sometimes whispered into the ears of activists, me included.
Guan Weiyan, noted physicist, former president of the University of Science and Technology—China's MIT—and a force for reform in the CCP, was killed on the sidewalk of a Texas street when a car plowed into him in 2003. Wei Jingsheng, China's most famous dissident, has had several assassination attempts on him, and three arranged near car accidents—one near Geneva, one near Hamburg and one in front of my house. Wei had one poisoning that landed him in the ICU for two weeks. Similar poisonings have killed dissidents in Australia, France and other countries. Wei continues to face endless lawfare cases that drain his time and finances.
Why do authorities choose to ignore the CCP's acts of violence and intimidation? We now have a relatively new phrase, “transnational repression”, to describe these acts of violence and intimidation. With this new phrase and proposed legislation by U.S. Congressman John Moolenaar and U.S. Congressman Chris Smith, will these acts of violence and intimidation be reported more often by the mainstream media?
Authorities in western democracies have been loath to take note of massive repression against the Chinese people, both inside and outside China, because the west adopted the British Empire's commercial approach beginning in 1793. It aimed to gain entry into the vast China market and maintain regime stability in order to continue raking in the money. Please note the difference here. Regime stability is not at all the same as stability and safety for the Chinese people. The British Empire even attempted to maintain regime stability for the Manchu Empire in 1900 by sending troops from eight western countries into China to quell rebellions for the ruling regime.