Transnational repression has moved from the margins of human rights reporting to the centre of Western security debates. According to new data released by Freedom House, 54 governments, more than a quarter of the world’s states, crossed borders between 2014 and 2025 to silence exiles and diaspora communities, carrying out at least 1,375 direct physical incidents in more than 100 host countries.
Western democracies have finally begun taking the threat seriously. Governments have adopted formal definitions, established inter-agency working groups, and opened reporting channels and support mechanisms for victims. In 2025, G7 leaders issued a joint statement on the issue, while the European Parliament adopted a resolution addressing transnational repression targeting human rights defenders.
Yet the threat described by these measures is changing shape. In a recently published peer-reviewed study, we examined Beijing’s campaign against Uyghur researchers and activists in the diaspora and found that the most consequential instrument of transnational repression Beijing deployed against the community over the past year came in a deceptively benign form: the visa.
Repression Is Only One Part of Authoritarian Control
In 2013, German political scientist Johannes Gerschewski argued that authoritarian stability rests on three mutually reinforcing pillars: repression, co-optation to secure loyalty, and legitimation to generate broad public acceptance.
Political scientists have long recognised that repression alone is insufficient to preserve a regime. It is costly, can provoke backlash, and often fails to produce the durable compliance required for political stability.
We argue that the same logic extends beyond national borders. Regimes that engage in transnational repression also practise transnational co-optation, encouraging compliance through conditional benefits, while pursuing transnational legitimation by using propaganda and narrative control to cultivate acceptance.
Transnational repression has become a rallying point for human rights activists and policymakers because coercive acts are relatively easy to identify and condemn. For that very reason, however, the concept has become too narrow to capture the expanding range of methods states use to intimidate and silence their diaspora communities.
Beijing’s recent conduct towards Uyghurs demonstrates this capacity for adaptation.
Beijing Opens Xinjiang to Selected Diaspora Visits
Since 2023, the Chinese state has quietly opened the borders of Xinjiang to visits by members of the Uyghur diaspora. The policy was never formally announced, but spread through word of mouth. What began as a small trickle of desperate individuals has steadily grown.
A prominent Washington-based Uyghur activist told us that while Uyghur Americans were still concealing their trips in 2024 for fear of criticism within their own community, the practice had become normalised by 2025.
Some previously outspoken critics of Beijing travelled to Xinjiang and abandoned political activism altogether upon their return. Some Xinjiang residents were also permitted to travel abroad to visit relatives, reinforcing the appearance of greater openness in both directions.
At the heart of this policy is what our study calls a “compensatory incentive”.
The state first created the deprivation. For years, Beijing isolated Xinjiang from the outside world and detained Uyghurs merely for receiving telephone calls from abroad. One of the study’s authors, Tohti, was forced to cut off contact with her grandmother in 2017.
Then, after engineering the separation, the state offered to restore what it had taken away.
Elfidar Iltebir, former president of the Uyghur American Association, told us: “Uyghurs are willing to risk everything for one final visit, perhaps to see a dying parent for the last time.”
The Price of Family Reunion
For those who make the journey, the real price of reunification often becomes clear as soon as they arrive at the airport.
In confidential interviews and leaked recordings, several Uyghurs who travelled to Xinjiang in 2023 and 2024 described being interrogated by police immediately upon arrival.
One Uyghur American man was offered employment opportunities, business funding and travel permits for his family.
Officials told him: “In return, we want you to become an informant for us. If anything in overseas Uyghur communities catches your attention, we want you to report it to us. If you cooperate well with us, we can also help bring your parents and younger sister to you.”
When he hesitated, they threatened to send his parents to a “re-education” camp.
In other cases, individuals were forcibly recruited for propaganda purposes. A young Uyghur woman was instructed to “tell everyone about her good experience when she returned”.
Another visitor was filmed reading a prepared statement declaring that “Uyghurs are doing well and Xinjiang is prospering”.
To this day, the young woman feels compelled to maintain contact with the police, fearing that the recording could be released and used to brand her a traitor within her own community.
Others have faced far worse consequences. Earlier this year, a Uyghur resident of Istanbul who had previously participated in four state-organised tours was detained during a private visit and sentenced to six years in prison.
Silence Becomes the Price of Reunification
Within the Uyghur diaspora, Beijing’s strategy of transnational co-optation is achieving what years of overt threats failed to accomplish.
As more travellers return home apparently unharmed, perceptions of risk within Uyghur communities have shifted. Silence increasingly appears to some as a tolerable price for being reunited with loved ones after years of painful separation.
As a result, participation in protests and advocacy activities has declined sharply.
Travel has also become a source of division among Uyghurs themselves. Those who travel risk being accused of collaborating with the authorities. Those who refuse to travel wonder whether returning visitors are now working for the state.
Some members of the diaspora effectively live double lives, privately revealing details of police interrogations while publicly insisting that everything is fine.
These deeply personal choices, shaped by family survival and emotional pressure, are eroding trust within the community.
The Washington-based activist said Beijing’s new approach is “changing the way Uyghurs in America speak, communicate and trust one another”.
Activists and Witnesses Become Increasingly Isolated
For the smaller circle of Uyghurs actively documenting abuses, the sense of isolation has become acute.
Human rights activist Jewher Ilham, for example, had an invitation to a wedding withdrawn after Xinjiang police warned the hosts through WeChat not to allow her to attend.
Witnesses have also begun withdrawing testimony or refusing to speak.
Where previous research trips conducted by the Uyghur Transitional Justice Database produced between 40 and 50 testimonies, the organisation’s team recently struggled to secure even five.
Repression and co-optation therefore reinforce one another. Coercion creates the desperation that the state’s subsequent offers are designed to exploit.
A Strategy Designed to Stay Below the Legal Threshold
To explain this shift, our study introduces the concept of “transgression”, meaning the degree to which a tactic violates the laws of a host country or international norms.
Assassinations and kidnappings may have enormous impact, but they also involve high levels of legal transgression, making them more likely to trigger prosecution and international attention.
A conditional family visit, by contrast, may shape diaspora behaviour just as powerfully while violating no law in Washington or Berlin.
For that reason, Beijing’s adjusted strategy deliberately favours tactics that involve the lowest possible degree of legal transgression while still delivering substantial political impact.
This strategy serves what researchers have called “authoritarian image management”: the systematic effort by authoritarian regimes to promote positive narratives about themselves abroad while suppressing critics, with the aim of creating a more favourable international environment for their rule.
Beijing has invested heavily in improving Xinjiang’s image since Chinese leader Xi Jinping instructed officials in 2022 to “tell China’s Xinjiang story well”.
In January, Chinese state media celebrated the arrival of 42 Türkiye-based residents originally from Xinjiang on a nationwide tour organised by the Chinese consulate and the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, allowing participants to “see Xinjiang’s development achievements for themselves”.
Repression in the Age of Information Autocracy
This is what repression looks like in the age of what political scientists Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman call “spin dictators”: rulers who prefer quiet manipulation of perceptions over visible terror.
To an uninformed outside observer, Beijing’s new open-door tactics can easily resemble normalisation.
But Beijing is not alone in expanding its toolkit of transnational authoritarian control.
Eritrea has made consular services and property rights at home conditional on payment of a diaspora tax and political compliance.
In 2023, Belarus established a new commission through which exiles could petition for safe return after “declaring repentance”. The mechanism was later used to extract pro-regime statements and gather intelligence.
Under Bashar al-Assad, Syria conditioned refugee returns on security approvals and reconciliation agreements with its intelligence services, a strategy used to pressure returnees into reporting on themselves and their relatives.
Rwanda has similarly cultivated relations with its diaspora through organised homeland tours and civic education camps.
Conditional return to the homeland has therefore become a widely used instrument of cross-border control, combining coercion with co-optation.
Why Existing Democratic Responses May Fall Short
One advantage of low-transgression tactics is that they remain below the threshold of criminal prosecution.
A prosecutor can indict a hired assassin. There is no comparable law criminalising conciliatory incentives.
Western democracies are finally developing laws and policy frameworks to confront transnational repression, and those efforts deserve support.
But tools designed to counter yesterday’s tactics will remain inadequate against adversaries capable of innovating faster than democratic legislatures can respond.
The most dangerous cases of transnational repression in the coming year may be the ones that never appear in any report.
