China Keeps a Close Eye on Exiled Activists

(March 9) -- The world got a rare glimpse at how China keeps tabs on exiled dissidents and activists Monday, when a political refugee living in Sweden was sentenced to 16 months in jail for spying on his fellow Uighurs for the Chinese state.

According to press reports, 62-year-old Babur Maihesuti started gathering information on Sweden's 100-strong Uighur community -- from their travel plans to political involvement – soon after arriving in the country in 2007. Maihesuti then passed details on to Chinese spies posing as journalists and diplomats.

The Stockholm court said the case, which was built around wiretap evidence and interviews with Uighur witnesses, was "especially serious because the intelligence served a superpower that does not have full respect for human rights." A spokesman for the foreign ministry in Beijing dismissed the allegations, saying, "This kind of criticism of China is sheer nonsense and has ulterior motives."

Western governments have long suspected China's intelligence services of keeping an extremely close eye on certain troublesome expats. In November, for example, German police raided four properties in Munich believed to be home to spies observing the city's large Uighur community. And just last month, a Chinese citizen living in Canada was threatened with deportation after he was discovered to have been monitoring dissidents from China's Inner Mongolia region.

Yiyi Lu, a China expert at London think tank Chatham House, says Beijing's espionage efforts are focused on ethnic émigrés believed to support separatist movements that could be "plotting violent activity." So although the Chinese government issues frequent noisy denunciations of Tibetans campaigning for independence for their homeland, Lu says, intelligence operatives aren't that concerned about these groups, as the Dalai Lama has explicitly rejected violence. Most Tibetan organizations are also extremely open about their campaigning activities, meaning covert operations will uncover little important information that isn't already in the public domain.

Beijing sees a much greater threat in the Uighurs, a Muslim minority who live in northern Xinjiang province and are ethnically and culturally related to the peoples of Central Asian nations like Turkmenistan.

Beijing claims that Uighur expats living in Europe, the United States and Turkey have provided financial and ideological support to Muslim extremists fighting to establish an autonomous and Islamic state in Xinjiang province. And it has accused influential Uighur figures, such as Washington entrepreneur and campaigner Rebiya Kadeer, of masterminding the bloody ethnic riots that devastated the provincial capital, Urumqi, last summer, leaving some 200 people dead.

But Uighurs at home and abroad refute allegations that they support terrorism, saying the Chinese government has labeled them Islamic fanatics in order to justify Beijing's crackdown on the Uighur language and culture. They claim Beijing's spy games are in fact part of wider campaign aimed at silencing their struggle for Uighur rights, which is a source of international embarrassment for the People's Republic. In 2007, for example, Maclean's magazine reported how one Canada-based Uighur activist -- who had kept his location secret since fleeing China 16 years ago -- received a phone call from a Chinese official, warning him to stop campaigning. "We have your mother here, and your brother, too," the official warned. "We can do whatever we want."

While the ruling by the Swedish court suggests that spying and intimidation can bear consequences for Chinese working for the government abroad, there's no evidence that it will materially influence China's own stance toward the Uighurs and other minorities.