Liu Jianchao spearheaded Beijing’s efforts to illicitly force the return of thousands of people to China, including through kidnappings.
A top Chinese Communist Party official who spearheaded Beijing’s efforts to illicitly force the return of thousands of people to China, including through kidnappings, will attend meetings in Manhattan tomorrow, as part of a worldwide campaign to soften the country’s global image.
Liu Jianchao, the senior official who leads an office tasked with influencing foreign political leaders and sits on the Party’s Central Committee, will first speak in person at a Council on Foreign Relations event Tuesday morning, a CFR staff member confirmed. The discussion at CFR is billed as a conversation about U.S.–China relations to mark the 45th anniversary of the normalization of ties between Washington and Beijing. Then in the afternoon, Liu is scheduled to have a photo op with U.N. secretary-general António Guterres.
As leader of the party’s International Liaison Department, Liu holds a prominent post. Today’s version of the department, originally conceived as the Mao-era party’s instrument for fomenting global revolution, instead fosters contact between the party and foreign political leaders. Liu, who was appointed in 2022, has made trips to Europe, Asia, and Africa. He also has held meetings with U.S. officials in China, including ambassador to China Nicholas Burns and a delegation of California state lawmakers who visited the country last year.
The department cultivates foreign political allies of the party and advances Beijing’s united-front strategy of influencing non-party members in pursuit of Beijing’s aims, according to Anne-Marie Brady, a professor at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury and the world’s leading expert on the topic. She wrote in 2020 that the International Liaison Department is “tasked with gathering intelligence on foreign politicians and political parties, and developing asset relations with them.”
Human-rights advocates have expressed alarm at Liu’s track record. Since 2015, he has served in various roles within the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection anti-corruption and loyalty-enforcement agency and as head of the Central Anti Corruption Coordination Group’s “International Fugitive Recovery Office.”
Ahead of a trip by Liu to the United Kingdom last year, the watchdog group Safeguard Defenders petitioned the country’s authorities to not let him travel to the country, writing in a legal filing that he “bore command and/or oversight responsibility” for human-rights abuses and the violation of the sovereignty of foreign countries.
“He bears responsibility for the forceful return to China of thousands of individuals through illegal methods — notably persuasion to return operations, which account for the vast majority of ‘successful fugitive returns’ — that [flouted] those individuals’ (as well as their families’) rights to a legal defense, the right to a fair trail and the prohibition of non-refoulement under the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the UN Convention on the Protection of Refugees,” Safeguard Defenders states in the dossier.
The International Fugitive Recovery Office that Liu led was tasked with coordinating the work of several government agencies involved in Beijing’s Operation Fox Hunt, a worldwide effort to force the return of fugitives accused of graft to China, sometimes through abductions. U.S. leaders have condemned the program as a willful violation of America’s sovereignty and an effort to target Chinese dissidents in America, and the Justice Department has brought several cases against individuals alleged to be involved in it.
Last year, a federal jury convicted for the first time three individuals involved in an Operation Fox Hunt scheme. “We will remain steadfast in exposing and undermining efforts by the Chinese government to reach across our border and perpetrate transnational repression schemes targeting victims in the United States in violation of our laws,” Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said at the time.
Safeguard Defenders noted that some analysts believe that Liu’s initial move to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, indicates that he was tasked with overseeing diplomacy to make Operation Fox Hunt work.
A State Department spokesperson told National Review, “We have nothing to announce at this time.” NR had asked the spokesperson why State seems to have granted Liu a visa to enter the U.S., if it has commented on Liu’s alleged role in Beijing’s repression, and if department officials will meet Liu.
China’s embassy in Washington, its mission to the U.N., and its consulate-general in New York did not respond to requests for comment on Liu’s trip.