Members of the US House select committee on China pledged in its final hearing this year to do all they could to hold Beijing accountable for any cross-border targeting of activists, hours before the Hong Kong government announced HK$1 million (US$128,000) bounties on five more opposition figures.
“We will do everything in our power to hold the [ Chinese Communist Party] accountable when it violates human rights and silences speech here in America,” said Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, the top Democrat on the bipartisan panel.
Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican and the committee’s chair, said: “We lose nothing by putting human rights at the forefront of our agenda.”
The hearing, titled “CCP transnational repression: the Party’s effort to silence and coerce critics overseas”, sought to feature first-hand testimony from alleged victims and generate ideas for legislative action.
Wednesday’s witnesses included Anna Kwok of the Washington-based Hong Kong Democracy Council; Jinrui Zhang, a Georgetown University law student; and Sophie Richardson, a former China director at the New York-based Human Rights Watch.
Kwok is one of eight opposition figures who was targeted in a bounty list announced in July by the Hong Kong government. Along with the 12 others now on the list, she is accused of violating the city’s national security law.
Testifying before lawmakers, Kwok described receiving online threats before a planned protest at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit last month in San Francisco, where US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in person.
Human rights groups have accused the Chinese government of supporting incidents of physical and online harassment that they said occurred during the summit, but there has been no definitive evidence tying Beijing to the acts.
The Chinese embassy in Washington has denied involvement.
The witnesses on Wednesday drew a distinction between “formal” and “informal” or more subtle types of transnational repression, a term typically referring to the targeting of diaspora by governments.
“Formal repression is carried out under the orders of the Chinese state by government workers, while informal repression is carried out organically by CCP supporters,” Zhang testified.
