The Abduction of Political Exiles is International Terrorism. The Democratic World Must Fight Back
Artist: Yuriy Pogorelov
In May of this year, posts heavily concerned about the fates of Jingyu Wang and Roman Protasevich, two young political dissidents from the People’s Republic of China (PRC)* and the Republic of Belarus, respectively, flooded my Twitter timeline. Coincidentally, the first twenty-one years of my life are tied to the PRC and Belarus, the former being where I grew up and the latter being where I received my college education. As both are authoritarian states, their political atmospheres are suffocating. Teenagers are forced to join national youth leagues and are shaped into dictators’ patriotic tools. Dissenting opinions are silenced, and the regimes’ political opponents can spend their lives behind bars for speaking up.
Given all these factors, I was terribly frightened when I first heard of Wang’s incident. On April 6, during his stopover in Dubai en route to New York City, Wang was abruptly taken away and detained by Dubai police, who accused him of violating Blasphemy law. If convicted, he would face possible extradition to the PRC. Wang, a 19-year-old Chinese youth and U.S. permanent resident, came onto the PRC’s wanted list in February 2020 after his comments on Sina Weibo (Chinese Twitter) went viral. In the comments, Wang criticized the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s provocations that incited a Sino-Indian border clash in June 2019 and questioned the authority’s tardy report of four Chinese soldiers’ deaths eight months after the clash. Only a couple of minutes after he posted those comments, the police department of Chongqing City, Wang’s hometown, published a notice on the internet for his detention. Because Wang has been residing in Europe since 2019, this wanted notice officially turned him into an exile. By the same token, his arrest in Dubai one year later is widely believed to be a PRC intervention aimed at bringing him back into the country.
Just a month following Wang’s detention in Dubai, Belarus orchestrated an even more jaw-dropping abduction, this time of a fleeing journalist. On May 23, a Ryanair flight carrying 26-year-old dissident journalist Roman Protasevich and his Russian-national girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, was hijacked by Alexander Lukashenko’s regime. The flight took off in Athens, Greece, and was initially set to land in Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania, where Protasevich was granted asylum. However, when the flight flew through Belarusian airspace, Lukashenko government agents forced it to divert and land at Minsk Airport by fabricating an onboard bomb claim and deploying a fighter jet to follow the flight.
Despite Protasevich’s pleas to the Ryanair crew not to land because of his fear of persecution, the flight diverted per the Lukashenko government’s order. After landing, Protasevich and Sapega were immediately apprehended by the authorities. It was quickly evident that Lukashenko’s regime intended to catch and silence Protesvich, whose reports featured the nationwide protests following the disputed presidential election of August 2020—during which the opposition candidate, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, was believed to have actually received the majority of the votes.
These consecutive apprehensions by the PRC and Belarusian authorities bring on severe safety concerns for the future overseas trips of all exiled political dissidents. The PRC and Belarus have stripped their regimes’ political opponents of the right to movement; dissidents fear getting kidnapped and brought back to the countries where they underwent persecution if they step out of the countries sheltering them.
Expressing their thoughts to me after learning of Wang and Protasevich’s situations, some exiled Chinese dissidents in the United States, whom I have known on Twitter for years, concluded it would be safer to stay inside the United States unless an overseas trip were absolutely necessary. They told me they had to ensure that flights they took did not stop in a country deemed “risky”—particularly countries having ratified extradition treaties with the PRC or those likely to succumb to the PRC’s pressure for economic or political benefits.
Surprisingly, this high-risk list is not short. In addition to the United Arab Emirates, where Wang was detained for weeks, it includes nations like Thailand, which has a record of sending migrant Uyghurs fleeing detention and religious persecution back to the PRC from as early as 2015; Egypt, which assisted the PRC to raid and detain Uyghur college students studying in Cairo in 2017 (most of whom majored in religious studies that were prohibited in the PRC); and Kenya, which helped the PRC abduct Taiwanese nationals by deporting them to the PRC in exchange for a $600 million loan.
Along with avoiding layovers in a risky third country, the Lukashenko government’s abduction of Protasevich raised a red flag for Chinese exiles to avoid routes traveling through the PRC’s airspace, assuming the PRC may use Lukashenko’s air piracy as a precedent for snatching exiles. Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, has a similar concern that the world’s dictators will use this “new tool of oppression” to kidnap dissidents after witnessing Lukashenko’s big success and the small price he paid for it in the aftermath.
In fact, this is not the first time Lukashenko influenced his few remaining allies across the globe. In 2004, Lukashenko managed a constitutional referendum that successfully removed his two-term limit, granting him the power to stay in office indefinitely. In 2018, fourteen years later, Xi Jinping’s constitutional amendment achieved the same goal after his puppet Congress overwhelmingly voted “Yes.” In 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin even replicated Lukashenko’s constitutional referendum to extend his stay in office. Lukashenko’s history of successful usurpation could have been a part of Xi and Putin’s inspiration for paving their path to lifelong emperors. This time, he exemplified a new approach for his dictator friends to grasp fled dissidents. Who can then ascertain if Xi will not follow Lukashenko’s footsteps to hijack Chinese Protasevichs from his airspace someday?
According to Wang’s Twitter post, due to interventions by the U.S. government, he was freed on May 27; Protasevich, however, remains jailed and faces a minimum of 12 years in prison. On June 4, the European Union banned Belarusian carriers from entering EU airspace and forbade EU carriers from flying over Belarus. On June 29, the United States banned flight ticket sales to Belarus.
However, these measures are far from disabling future cross-border abductions of political exiles by the PRC and Belarus. I believe there is a moral imperative for repressive regimes like the PRC and Belarus to be further isolated in the international society and pressured through more comprehensive sanctions. For example, the PRC should be removed from the UN’s Security and Human Rights Councils. Spy agencies disguised as cultural exchange platforms, such as Confucius Institutes, should be shut down worldwide. All business with the PRC should be stopped, and all goods sourced from the PRC should be withheld until its domestic political environment substantially changes.
For Belarus, the United States and its allies should ban its major exports, such as potash, petroleum, and oil, to mortally incapacitate Lukashenko’s already shaky regime. The democratic world must be fully aware that by abducting people overseas, not only did the PRC and Belarus trample international law, but they also elevated domestic political terror to international terrorism.
The PRC remains a major source country of people seeking asylum in the United States thirty years after the Tiananmen Massacre. Likewise, Lukashenko’s Belarus keeps producing political exiles forced to flee across Europe. These people had to step on a path where they had no way to return. These people overcame every difficulty to start new lives where they found safety. Yet each of them is now a “hostage” of these terrorist states and face a frightening reality: they are no longer safe no matter where they are. It is time for the democratic world to take more actions against these terrorist states before it is too late.
Author’s Note: In this piece, the sole reason that I use "PRC" instead of "China" is that I do not want to equate this illegitimately founded regime to "China." Since the PRC was founded in 1949 by the Communist Party through deception and treason, it has committed numerous crimes against the Chinese people, including the active mass detention of Uyghur Muslims. I do not and will never recognize PRC's legal representation of China, and I hope to do my best to distinguish them from each other all the time.
Though originally from China, Sveta went to college in Belarus, among other Eastern European countries. They are proud to be Roman Protasevich's schoolmate. At Columbia, Sveta (GS ‘23) studies political science and music while working at human rights organizations that promote freedom and democratization in China, Hong Kong, and Tibet.
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