China

Two days before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Malaysia in April, police officers arrested more than 70 Falun Gong practitioners and allegedly held them until after Xi left the country, echoing a pattern of detention identified by ICIJ in its recent China Targets investigation.

Kuala Lumpur Police Chief Datuk Rusdi Mohd Isa told ICIJ partner Malaysiakini, which first reported the detentions, the group had been arrested under suspicion of being involved in an “illegal organization.” He refuted allegations that officers had received instructions to preemptively detain the practitioners ahead of Xi’s visit to the country and said he directed Kuala Lumpur’s criminal investigations chief to “take strong action against the group.”

As part of China Targets, which exposed Beijing’s tactics for silencing its critics worldwide, ICIJ found that during Xi’s overseas trips between 2019 and 2024 local law enforcement detained or arrested dozens of activists, often for spurious reasons. Those targeted by local police included Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, as well as members of the Falun Gong movement.

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China outlawed Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa, in 1999, labeling the spiritual movement “an evil cult.”

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At the beginning of March 2025, non-governmental government (NGO) sources confirmed that Zhang will soon be tried on the charge of ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’, a charge often used by Chinese authorities to suppress journalists, writers and human rights defenders. The date of her trial is still unknown, as she remains detained in the Pudong Detention Center in Shanghai, facing an additional up to five years in prison if convicted.

Zhang Zhan was apprehended by the police on 28 August 2024, only three months after completion of an earlier four-year sentence under the same charge, while travelling to her hometown in the Shaanxi province in northwest China. In the weeks leading up to this incident, Zhang kept reporting on the harassment of activists in China on her social media accounts.

Her first detention was deemed arbitrary under international human rights law by the United Nation’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in a 2021 opinion. In a November 2024 letter to the Chinese government, nine UN Special Procedures mandates raised lengthy concerns about patterns of repression against Zhang Zhan, alongside 17 other human rights defenders, requesting the government take measures to prevent any irreparable damage to life and personal integrity, and halt the violations of her human rights. The government’s three-line response on Zhang Zhan’s status merely asserted that ‘her legitimate rights and interests have been fully protected’.

China remains one of the most repressive countries for freedom of speech and press, ranks 178th out of 180 in the 2025 Reporters without Borders (RSF)’s World Press Freedom Index, and is the world’s leading jailer of journalists and writers, according to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists, RSF, and PEN America.

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A campaign started in 2018 by Safeguard Defenders, a human rights organization focused on China, revealed how the Chinese police use threats and fear to coerce scripted confessions for television. In 2021, it led to a ban on broadcasts of the international arms of China’s state TV (CGTN and CCTV-4) in several countries, including the UK, Australia and a number of European nations.

After 2020 China's forced televised confessions of foreigners ceased, except for those of Taiwanese citizens.

But now, it appears they’re back at it again.

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On April 3, domestic channel CCTV-13 and the international Chinese-language channel CCTV-4 broadcast the forced confessions of three Filipino expats living in China.

The two young men and one young woman are accused of espionage, something which the Philippine government vehemently denies.

The CCTV-4 broadcast (which includes one of the confessions) was aired internationally, including in Canada, where our long-term regulatory complaint on the use of such forced televised confessions remains pending before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The renewed airing of forced confessions, abusive and harmful content, is yet another clear violation of the terms and conditions of CCTV-4’s continued broadcasting license in Canada.

Now, Filipino authorities and TV providers face the same issue, as the illegal forced televised confessions of their compatriots were broadcast on their own soil.

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CCTV-4 is broadcast in the Philippines through SKY Cable Corporation. In its public values statement, the pay television and broadband arm of ABS-CBN highlights its commitment to “serving the Filipino”. It claims to uphold a customer service that drives the company “to treat Filipinos as our Kapamilyas (e.g. ‘family’) whose interest is put above all”.

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The threat of a Chinese military invasion of Taiwan dominates global discussion about the Taiwan Strait. Far less attention is paid to what is already happening—Beijing is slowly squeezing Taiwan into submission without firing a shot.

Instead of launching a full-blown attack, China is ramping up a full spectrum of coercion: political meddling, economic pressure, information operations, legal manoeuvres, cyberattacks and diplomatic isolation, all conducted within the pressure cooker of constant military threats. The goal? Wear Taiwan down bit by bit until it has no choice but to give in to Beijing’s demand for unification.

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The international community can’t afford to ignore China’s evolving tactics. These coercive strategies don’t just increase tensions; they create a serious risk of miscalculation that could spiral into a larger conflict. That’s why it’s important to keep a close watch on these developments. By tracking China’s actions, policymakers can better understand where the red lines are, strengthen deterrence efforts and help Taiwan remain a resilient democracy.

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One example of coercion is when countries engage with Taiwan in ways deemed unacceptable, Beijing typically responds with strong rhetoric in official statements designed to deter further interaction. [...] in 2024, Beijing’s most common grievance (representing 48 percent of observations) was foreign governments ‘violating China’s One-China principle’—a broad category that encompassed any action perceived as recognising Taiwan as distinct or autonomous, even if it fell short of full diplomatic recognition. Another 22 percent of criticisms stemmed from foreign officials meeting with Taiwanese counterparts, reflecting former president Tsai Ing-wen’s increased participation in international security forums.

In another form of coercion, Beijing consistently and deliberately revokes the tariff-free status of Taiwanese exports as a means of leverage and punishment, as indicated in the graph below. Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, which is responsible for cross-strait relations policy, has characterised this form of coercion as ‘economic oppression’. In 2024 alone, China imposed trade restrictions on 169 Taiwanese exports, primarily through the removal of tariff-free status; the only exception was polycarbonate, which faced anti-dumping tariffs. Machinery and parts constituted the largest category of Taiwanese exports, followed by plastics.

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[What the linked article illustrates] is only data on two coercion tactics from one year. In future, ASPI intends to expand State of the Strait by developing a searchable public database and assessment platform. That interactive tool will visualise coercion data across domains and years, distil key insights and help policymakers track long-term trends with greater clarity.

The goal is simple: to help decision-makers and the public understand how China is ramping up the pressure, how close we are to a tipping point, and how these tactics are affecting Taiwan’s government, society, and decision-making. Over time, State of the Strait will become an essential resource for tracking China’s tactics and shaping the strategies to counter them.