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The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hi, my name is Lauren Hilgers. I'm the author of We Are So Divided Now,

How China Controls Thought and Speech Beyond Its Borders, which was published in 2021.

The reason I wanted to write this story is a few years before I had a book come out about a Chinese democracy activist that had moved to New York City.

And there were various things going on in his life, made it clear that sort of China was reaching out to try and keep him from talking about what had happened in his hometown.

And so this was sort of on my radar, and I heard about Anwang in the news. And so I was curious about how Anwang was a police officer,

how this sort of outreach, this sort of repression worked. And that was the original spark of the story.

Since 2021, there have been a lot of cases like these where Chinese immigrants living in the U.S.

have been charged with acting as a foreign agent. On Wang got off.

The charges were dropped against him, but there have been a lot of other immigrants living

in New York and around New York that have been convicted on similar charges.

And it's often about visas.

So this is ongoing.

I think this kind of transnational repression is very chilling, and it's more about

the message it sends than the intelligence gathered. And I also really feel for the people that get

caught in between these two powers, Because they just want visas.

Usually they're pretty regular people.

I think it's a really difficult issue for both the United States trying to weed this out

and for individuals who really just want to get a visa and go home and see their families.

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