Stop Repatriations to China

The principle of non-refoulement should be honored

A security guard (right) and a police officer (left) secure the area at the entrance to the Zhongnanhai leadership compound of the Chinese communist regime in Beijing on May 18, 2020. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

The U.S. government just gave the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) a victory, and violated international law, by repatriating a former bank manager to China. The repatriation will chill internal resistance in China.

On Nov. 14, China’s anti-graft watchdog announced that Xu Guojun, former president of the Bank of China’s Kaiping branch, was repatriated to China. There, he will face harsh punishment by the CCP, including likely torture, degradation, and irreparable harm.

The principle of non-refoulement under international human rights law forbids the return of anyone to a country that will likely impose such human rights abuses.

The Beijing regime’s watchdog, called the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), claimed that the repatriation resulted from international cooperation, and a day later, specified that the United States repatriated Xu.

The United States’ reported cooperation with Chinese authorities is a blow to the struggle for democracy in both China and the world. A victory was handed to the CCP that apparently followed from a major strategic mistake by the Biden administration, as it will chill resistance within China to Xi Jinping’s totalitarian government.

Not all defectors from the CCP are saints, of course.

Xu fled to the United States in 2001, where he was convicted in 2008 of “racketeering, money laundering, international transportation of stolen property as well as passport and visa fraud,” according to the FBI. He was sentenced by a U.S. federal judge in 2009 to 22 years in prison and three years of supervised release.

He apparently did it for the money.

But the CCP is worse. In fact, the U.S. government should recognize the Party as a terrorist organization per U.S.C. § 1189, according to Washington-based human rights lawyer, Dr. Terri Marsh, and University of Chicago academic, Dr. Teng Biao.

This terrorist organization, called the CCP, is today $314 million richer, and can publicly punish one of its defectors, because of the U.S. government.

The $314 million should have gone to the CCP’s victims, including Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong, and all those who have suffered from COVID-19 over the past two years. Returning the money to Beijing is complicity in its crimes.

According to the CCDI statement, the Chinese regime recovered the $314 million from three cases, including that of Xu. The other two former executives, Xu Chaofan and Yu Zhendong, were repatriated from the United States in 2018 and 2004, respectively.

The problem of repatriations to China is not just with the Biden administration, but with past Republican administrations, including those of Presidents Donald Trump and George W. Bush. Due to America’s trillions of dollars worth of investment in China, and hundreds of billions in annual trade, successive American governments, since the opening to China in 1971, have been willfully blind to Beijing’s excesses and cooperated with its despotism. While Trump did stand up to Beijing on trade issues more than other presidents, even his administration had a policy that allowed the repatriation of people back to China.

After Xi’s threats of war against the United States, Australia, Taiwan, and the Philippines, however, and the Chinese regime’s invasion of territory in India and Bhutan, not to mention its attempted taking of the entire South China Sea, and its naval pulsing of the Japanese Senkaku Islands, it is past time to recognize through executive order and legislation that any government led by the CCP is illegitimate and does not deserve the cooperation of other governments, especially democracies like the United States.

The next time the Beijing regime seeks the repatriation of anyone to China, it should be refused. We don’t repatriate people to terrorists, and we shouldn’t do so to the CCP.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.