China Is Finding New Ways to Coerce Uyghurs Abroad

Writing in Foreign Policy, VOC Senior Fellow in China studies, Dr. Adrian Zenz, and researcher Muetter Tohti explore how Beijing is pioneering new tools of transnational repression.

Transnational repression has moved from the margins of human rights reporting to the center of Western security debates. According to new data released by Freedom House, 54 governments, more than a quarter of the world’s states, reached across borders to silence exiles and diaspora communities from 2014 to 2025, committing at least 1,375 direct, physical incidents in more than 100 host countries.

Western democracies are finally taking the threat seriously. Governments are adopting formal definitions, have set up interagency working groups, and are opening reporting and support channels for victims. In 2025, the G-7 leaders issued a joint statement on the topic, and the European Parliament adopted a resolution on transnational repression targeting human rights defenders.

Yet the threat that these instruments describe is already changing shape. In a newly published peer-reviewed study, we examined Beijing’s campaign against Uyghur diaspora researchers and activists. We found that the most consequential tool of transnational repression that Beijing directed at the diaspora over the past year came in a deceptively benign form: the visa.

In 2013, the German political scientist Johannes Gerschewski argued that authoritarian stability rests on three mutually reinforcing pillars: repression; co-optation in order to secure loyalty; and legitimation to manufacture broad, popular consent. Political science scholars have long argued that repression alone cannot sustain a regime: It is costly, invites backlash, and fails to produce the enduring compliance that regime stability requires.

We argue that the same logic extends across borders. Regimes that perpetrate transnational repression also practice transnational co-optation, securing acquiescence by offering conditional benefits, as well as transnational legitimation, manufacturing consent through propaganda and related narrative control. Transnational repression has become a rallying point for human rights activists and politicians because acts of coercion are readily observed and condemned. For the same reason, however, this concept has become too narrow to capture the evolving repertoire by which states intimidate and silence their diasporas.

Beijing’s recent conduct toward the Uyghurs demonstrates this ability to innovate. Since 2023, the Chinese state has quietly opened Xinjiang’s borders to visits by diaspora Uyghurs. While never announced, the policy simply spread by word of mouth. What began as a trickle of desperate individuals has grown steadily. A prominent Washington-based Uyghur activist told us that while Uyghur Americans still concealed their trips in 2024 out of fear of criticism by other community members, by 2025, the practice had become normalized. Even some formerly outspoken critics of Beijing have visited Xinjiang and abandoned activism altogether upon their return. Some Xinjiang residents have even been permitted to travel abroad to see relatives, completing the appearance of a two-way opening.

The mechanism at this policy’s core is what our study calls a restorative inducement. The state first produced a deprivation. For years, Beijing sealed Xinjiang off from the outside world, detaining Uyghurs merely for receiving phone calls from abroad. One of us (Tohti) had to sever contact with her own grandmother in 2017. Then, having engineered the separation, the state offers to restore what it took.

Uyghurs “are willing to risk everything for a final visit,” Elfidar Iltebir, the former head of the Uyghur American Association, told us, “perhaps to see a dying parent one last time.”

For those who go, the true price of the reunion often becomes clear at the airport. In confidential interviews and leaked recordings, several Uyghurs who traveled to Xinjiang in 2023 and 2024 described being interrogated by police upon arrival. A Uyghur American man was offered jobs, business funding, and travel permits for his family.

“In return, we want you to be our informant,” officials told him. “If there is anything that grabs your attention in the Uyghur communities abroad, we want to be informed about that. If you cooperate well with us, we can also help to send your parents and your younger sister to you.” When he hesitated, they threatened to send his parents to a reeducation camp.

Others are conscripted into propaganda. A young Uyghur woman was instructed to “tell everyone else about your good experience when you return.” Another visitor was videotaped delivering a scripted statement declaring that “Uyghurs are doing well, and Xinjiang is booming.” Even now, she feels compelled to maintain contact with the police, fearing that the recording could be released to brand her as a traitor in her own community.

Yet others fare far worse: Earlier this year, one Istanbul-based Uyghur who had joined four state-organized tours was detained on a private visit and sentenced to six years in prison.

Inside the Uyghur diaspora, Beijing’s strategy of transnational co-optation is achieving what years of overt threats did not. After more travelers came home apparently unscathed, the risk perception of Uyghur communities shifted. Silence is now looking like a reasonable price to pay for reuniting with loved ones after many years of painful separation. As a result, participation in protests and advocacy has declined precipitously.

The travel question is setting Uyghurs against one another. Those who go risk being branded as collaborators. Conversely, those who abstain wonder which returnees are now acting at the behest of the state. Some diaspora members lead double lives, confiding the interrogations in private while insisting in community settings that everything is normal. These choices about familial and emotional survival corrode communal trust.

Beijing’s new approach, the Washington-based activist observed, is “changing how Uyghurs in America talk, connect, and trust each other.”

For the small circle of Uyghurs who actively document the atrocities, the isolation is acute. The rights advocate Jewher Ilham was disinvited from a wedding after Xinjiang police warned the hosts via WeChat against her attendance. Witnesses withdraw their testimonies or fall silent. Where earlier research trips by the Uyghur Transitional Justice Database yielded 40 to 50 testimonies, the organization’s team recently struggled to secure five. Repression and co-optation thus reinforce each other: Coercion creates the desperation that the state’s offers then exploit.

To account for this evolution, our study introduces the concept of transgressiveness: the degree to which a tactic violates the host country’s laws and international norms. Assassinations and abductions are high in impact but also highly transgressive, inviting prosecution and global attention. A conditional family visit shapes diaspora behavior just as powerfully, yet it breaks no law in Washington or Berlin. Beijing’s adapted strategy deliberately favors tactics that are low in transgressiveness yet high in impact.

This strategy serves what scholars have termed “authoritarian image management”: the systematic effort by autocracies to promote flattering narratives of themselves abroad while obstructing their critics, hoping to build a friendlier international environment for their rule.

Beijing has poured resources into rehabilitating Xinjiang’s image ever since Chinese leader Xi Jinping ordered officials in 2022 to “tell the story of China’s Xinjiang well.” In January, Chinese state media celebrated the arrival of 42 Xinjiang-born residents of Turkey on a homeland tour organized by the Chinese consulate and the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department so that participants could “personally witness Xinjiang’s development achievements.”

This is repression for the age of what the scholars Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman call “spin dictators”: rulers who prefer the quiet engineering of perceptions to visible terror. To an unsuspecting outsider, Beijing’s new open-door tactic looks like normalization.

Beijing is not alone in expanding its transnational authoritarian repertoire. Eritrea has conditioned its consular services and property rights at home on payment of a diaspora tax and on political quiescence. In 2023, Belarus created a new commission through which exiles could petition to return safely after “repenting,” then exploited this mechanism to extract pro-regime statements and obtain intelligence. Bashar al-Assad’s Syria conditioned refugee return on security clearances and reconciliation agreements with its intelligence services, a strategy used to compel returnees to inform on themselves and their relatives. Rwanda has courted its diaspora with organized homeland tours and civic education camps. Conditional access to the homeland is becoming a more widespread instrument of transnational control, complementing coercion with co-optation.

An advantage of tactics that are low in transgressiveness is that they fall below the threshold of criminal prosecution. While a prosecutor can indict an assassin, there is no law against restorative inducements. Western democracies are at last drafting laws and directives against transnational repression, and that effort deserves support. But instruments calibrated to yesterday’s tactics will remain inadequate against adversaries who innovate faster than democracies legislate. The gravest incidents in transnational repression next year may well be the ones that never appear in any report.

This article was originally published in Foreign Policy.