(p. 10) As a lawyer in China, Lu Siwei belonged to a rare and increasingly besieged group willing to take on sensitive cases to defend rights activists and political pariahs. To stop him, the authorities put him under surveillance and barred him from practice, depriving him of his livelihood.
Mr. Lu’s wife and young daughter fled first, moving to the United States. Nearly two years later, it was Mr. Lu’s turn. He left China last month, crossing over into Laos. A few days later, as he was preparing to board a train to Thailand, he was arrested by local authorities. Accused of using fraudulent travel documents, he was in Laotian custody as of late August and facing the threat of deportation.
Under Xi Jinping, China’s most iron-fisted leader in decades, Chinese authorities have aggressively expanded their net outside the country. They have opened police outposts in foreign countries, offered bounties for critics who have fled overseas, pressured members of the Chinese diaspora to become informants, and secured the detention or deportation of exiles abroad.
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(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 26, 2023, and has the title “He Fled China’s Repression. But China’s Long Arm Got Him in Another Country.”)