Deng Yuwen, a prominent Chinese writer now living in exile in suburban Philadelphia, has regularly criticized China and its authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping. China’s response lately has been severe, with crude and ominous personal attacks on the Internet.
A covert propaganda network linked to the country’s security services has blocked not only Mr. Deng but also his teenage daughter with sexually suggestive and threatening posts on popular social media platforms, according to researchers at both Clemson University and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.
The content, posted by users with fake identities, appeared in replies to Mr Deng’s posts on X, the social platform, as well as public school accounts in their community where the daughter, who is 16, was falsely portrayed as a drug user, arsonist and prostitute.
“I tried to delete these posts,” Mr. Deng said of the online attacks, speaking in Mandarin Chinese in an interview, “but I couldn’t, because today you try to delete and tomorrow they just switch to new accounts to leave. text and language attack’.
Vulgar comments targeting the girl have also appeared on community Facebook pages and even on websites such as TripAdvisor. Patch, a community news platform. and Niche, a website that helps parents choose schools, according to the researchers.
The harassment fits a pattern of cyberbullying that has raised alarm in Washington, as well as in Canada and other countries where China’s attacks have become increasingly brazen. The campaign includes thousands of posts that investigators have linked to a network of social media accounts known as Spamouflage or Dragonbridge, one arm of the country’s vast propaganda machine.
China has long sought to discredit Chinese critics, but targeting a teenager in the United States is an escalation, said Darren Linville, founder of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson, whose researchers documented the campaign against Mr. Deng. Federal law prohibits serious online harassment or threats, but that doesn’t appear to be a deterrent to China’s efforts.
“There’s no question that this crosses a line that they haven’t crossed before,” Mr. Linville said. “I think that suggests that the lines have no meaning.”
China’s propaganda machine has also stepped up attacks against the United States more broadly, including efforts to discredit President Biden ahead of the November presidential election.
“They are exporting their repression and human rights abuses — targeting, threatening and harassing those who dare to challenge their legitimacy or authority even outside of China, even here in the U.S.,” said Christopher A. Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Research, he told the American Bar Association in Washington in April.
Mr Wray said China was exerting “intense, almost mob-like pressure” to try to silence dissidents now living legally in the United States, including online and offline activities such as posting leaflets near their homes.
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said in a statement that he was not aware of the Deng case and had no comment. He added that the State Council of the government issued regulations in China last year to protect the safety of teenagers online.
In a statement, Meta said it took down Facebook accounts targeting the Dengs as part of monitoring Spamouflage’s activities. The statement said the activity had not gained much traction on Facebook. Patch and Niche said they had also removed the accounts for violating their usage standards. X and TripAdvisor did not respond to requests for comment.
Not all posts targeting the Dengs were removed, according to Mr. Linville’s team at Clemson. New posts also continue to appear, and traces of even removed posts can remain online for years. Spamouflage attacks still appear in searches for Mr. Deng and his daughter on Google, for example.
Attacks from China have posed a challenge to government and law enforcement officials in the United States. Last year, the Justice Department indicted 34 officers working for China’s Ministry of State Security on charges of harassing United States residents like Mr. Deng, but the officers live—and apparently continue to work—in China, outside of scope of US law enforcement.
Some have called for a more aggressive response, including Representative John Moolenaar of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
“We must educate and empower law enforcement officers and the American people to understand the tactics of the KKK,” he said in a statement, referring to the party, “and protect the people who seek safe haven in our country.”
The Spamouflage network was first identified in 2019 during mass anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong. It creates inauthentic accounts on social media or technology platforms to bombard real users with spam-like content — hence the name researchers have given the network. While the content often fails to go viral, the mass nature of the attacks can be a nuisance, or worse, for those being targeted.
The network, which Meta linked last year to law enforcement agencies in China, once focused most of its attention domestically on discrediting and intimidating Communist Party critics, such as protesters in Hong Kong.
It has become increasingly active abroad, seeking to influence political debates and elections in Taiwan, Canada and, at least as of the 2022 midterm elections, the United States. An American Olympic figure skater and her father, a former political refugee from China, were targeted in what the Justice Department described as a spying operation ordered by Beijing. Chinese journalists working abroad, especially women, have also been featured in fake escort ads and faced bomb and rape threats.
The Justice Department’s indictment against the Department of Homeland Security officers did not specifically link them to the Spamouflage network, but the activities described closely mirror its work and appear “extremely likely” to be the same operation, according to a recent report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a non-profit research group. The institute also warned that the network is increasingly focused on the US presidential election.
In Mr Deng’s case, as in others, the intention appears to be to silence criticism. Mr. Deng, who was born in Xinyu, southeast China, once served as an assistant editor at Study Times, a weekly magazine of the Communist Party Central School that trains aspiring officials.
His comments sometimes pushed the envelope of the party line. He was sacked in 2013 after writing an opinion piece for the Financial Times – which appeared in its Chinese and English editions – calling for China to abandon its strategic ties with North Korea’s volatile authoritarian leader Kim Jong Un. He eventually left the country.
Mr. Deng, who is 56 years old, has been living in the United States with his wife and two children since 2018. He continues to publish essays in various news media and books on Chinese politics and foreign policy. The latest book was “The Last Totalitarian,” published in Chinese in April by Bouden House in New York. In it, he argues that the Communist Party has lost the faith of the people and must be reformed.
In the interview, Mr. Deng said he was used to criticism from China’s officials, but the personal attacks began after he published an article in February comparing Mr. Xi’s cadre of top officials to Mao’s Gang of Four Che Tung.
The first post Clemson investigators found appeared that month on X, where Mr. Deng’s account has more than 100,000 followers. He mentioned a high school in the family’s town and his daughter. The harassment spread to other accounts on X and then to multiple platforms, including Facebook, Medium, Pinterest, DeviantArt and Pixiv, a Japanese website for artists.
The press denounced him as a traitor, a plagiarist and a tool of the United States. More than 5,700 posts to date on X alone have singled out his daughter, according to Clemson research.
User profiles often made them appear American, albeit with few or no followers. Many posts contained polished, ungrammatical English, a signature of Spamouflage campaigns.
They became increasingly noisy and threatening. Photographs appeared on Facebook of Mr Deng’s daughter’s face superimposed on scantily clad women, advertising sex for $300. At least one post called for sexual assault, offering an $8,000 reward.
His daughter, who speaks English with the fluency of a teenager in Gen Z slang, was initially angered by the attacks, Mr. Deng said, but with his encouragement, she also tried to fend them off. “I want to do my best not to involve my family in my affairs,” he said.
Meta, Google and other major tech platforms have long been aware of Spamouflage’s activities and have tried to mitigate their reach. Last year, Meta announced that it had removed more than 7,700 fake Facebook accounts connected to the network in just one quarter.
Mr. Linvill of Clemson said China’s tactics are likely to continue because the country “has yet to face significant repercussions beyond the removal of accounts, and that comes at no cost from their perspective.”
Bing Guan contributed to the report.
