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As steam rises from the stove, Ma Ruilin hand-pulls fresh noodles for the lunch service at the Chinese restaurant he runs in New York.
Most of his former cadres inside China’s ruling Communist Party wouldn’t understand why he left his comfortable life as a government official to work in a kitchen on the other side of the world, he says.
But after a creeping sense of disillusionment with Beijing’s policies, the 50-year-old made the choice to risk everything – including his own family – and flee to the United States. Now, he’s stepping forward to become a rare whistleblower on the Chinese system, exposing closely guarded secrets about how China spies on its citizens at home and abroad – including in the US.
“The system has always been evil,” he said. “If you don’t leave, you’ll keep doing evil there.”
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In more than three hours of interviews[...], Ma revealed his role in designing and implementing programs that suppressed China’s religious minorities – and detailed the expansion in scope and scale of China’s United Front Work Department (UFWD), a shadowy branch of the Communist Party where he worked.
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Ma’s decision to speak out against the system he escaped provides important evidence from an insider during a broader crackdown by American law enforcement against “transnational repression” – the intimidation tactics Beijing is accused of deploying against its own diaspora.
“This is a campaign by the Chinese government to silence dissent on US soil,” Roman Rozhavsky, Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division [said]. “It’s been very aggressive and widespread.”
Rozhavsky said “hundreds” of Chinese operatives are working inside the US – a “gross breach of US sovereignty” – and many more working are remotely from China.
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Since its inception, the “united front” has been both a political philosophy and a branch of the Communist Party – which Mao and Xi have described as one of China’s “magic weapons” to strengthen the CCP. The department is heavily entwined with the public and state security apparatus, creating “‘one chessboard,’ all together, one whole,” Ma said.
The party has expanded the strategy in recent years, with calls for “stronger measures to implement” United Front work to “enhance the capacity” of the operation, China’s state news agency Xinhua reports. Ma said staffing “basically doubled” since 2019.
“The United Front Work Department has been expanding continuously,” Ma said. “When these Party departments expand, it becomes a contracting, tightening society.”
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People connected to the UFWD have been accused of harassing and intimidating activists and critics, largely from groups China defines as the “Five Poisons” – advocates for independence or greater freedom for Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and followers of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong.
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Lin Hai, a Chinese national who lives in New York and works as an Uber driver, said he was beaten and injured by pro-China protesters while attending a rally in 2019 to support a visit by Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s President at the time.
“I was shocked,” Lin Hai said. “Because I never expected to be threatened or beaten on American soil.’ [You can see a video in the linked article.]
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Anti-CCP protesters also had violent confrontations with pro-Beijing groups near the 2023 APEC summit in San Francisco, which was attended by Xi.
The UFWD has tentacles across some student organizations along with community groups in the US known as “hometown associations.” China says that these groups help people with everyday tasks like applying for drivers’ licences. But the FBI’s Rozhavsky says they are also being used as recruitment grounds for “people who are willing to engage in transnational repression.”
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More than 2,000 organizations connected to the United Front system have been identified in four democratic countries – the US, Britain, Canada, and Germany – according to a recent report by The Jamestown Foundation, a DC-based think tank. Nearly half of those groups are based in the US.
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Starting in 2018, Ma said Xinjiang officials were also sent on visits to Rwanda to study “a real genocide,” referencing the 1994 massacres that killed hundreds of thousands. He said the trips were designed to reduce their guilt when they saw how “benevolent” the Party is in comparison – but also to give them new ideas.
“It teaches you how to use even more brutal methods to torment people,” he said.
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Since coming to power, Xi has intensified efforts to assimilate ethnic minorities, and rolled out a nationwide campaign to “sinicize” religion – ensuring it aligns with Communist Party leadership and values.
“It’s never been as severe as it is under Xi: so systematic, so intense,” Ma said.
“Based on my understanding, privately no one likes him,” he said, referring to his former CCP colleagues in Gansu. “But on the surface, everyone has to praise him.”
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“The longer I stayed within that system, the more I felt a sense of guilt,” he said. “I always wanted to escape that kind of cage-like life.”
When he arrived in the US in February 2024 with his wife and two children, the next challenge was adjusting to a lower standard of living compared to the privileged existence they had left behind.
“My wife was a university professor, and I was within the CCP system and on an upward trajectory,” he said. “So, I lived a worry-free life.”
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“China’s Muslim community is living in a very bleak world, a hopeless era,” he said. “I want to stand up in this era and give others some hope.”
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