[Newsweek] Why Is China Policing My City?

The country is honing a parallel policing system to track down exiles.

The second he stepped off the plane at Madrid’s Barajas airport in 2019, a Chinese citizen — identified as Liu by state-run media — breathed a sigh of relief. Wanted since February in his home county of Qingtian, in southeastern China, for an environmental misdemeanor, Liu had spent the eight-hour flight to Spain imagining a golden exile. The charge was severe, but Liu thought he had escaped it for good, aware that a Spanish judge would be unlikely to grant extradition. The two countries’ 2006 treaty on the matter has been neutered since human rights groups began warning that standard guardrails against torture and the death penalty no longer held in China.

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