The Chinese government tried to silence them. It backfired.

She had almost forgotten about the petition, a critique of the Chinese government that she had posted online months earlier. The woman, a Chinese citizen living in the United States, had been careful to register on the site anonymously, and the petition drew little notice.

Except, that is, from the Chinese government.

Early one morning last year, she said, she got a call from her father in China, as police officers in his office dictated questions about the petition and demanded she log into her social media accounts.

“It’s kind of unbelievable. How did they find out? My only reaction was to think about how to fool them, how to protect my parents,” said the woman, a scientist based on the East Coast who asked not to be identified by her real name and to withhold her exact location for fear of reprisals from the Chinese government.

Rights groups say that of all authoritarian governments, China is one of the most aggressive in pursuing dissidents abroad, often by threatening and harassing their relatives back home, and sometimes using sophisticated technology to track critics online.

Two prominent Chinese bloggers in exile said this week that Chinese police were interrogating their hundreds of thousands of followers on X and other international social media platforms, urging fans to unsubscribe from their accounts.

Some of the hacking tools that Chinese police use to investigate social media users around the world were revealed in a recent leak of documents from I-Soon, a private security contractor linked to the Chinese government.

Such allegations of transnational repression are “groundless and malicious defamation,” the Chinese Embassy in London said in a statement in January. “The Chinese government fully protects Chinese citizens’ legal rights and freedoms in accordance with the law and is fully committed to protecting the safety and lawful rights and interests of overseas Chinese citizens.”

The U.S. and other governments have raised the issue at the United Nations and elsewhere. At a regular U.N. review of China’s human rights record in January, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Michèle Taylor, listed “transnational repression to silence individuals abroad” among Washington’s issues of concern.

In some cases, however, China’s tactics have emboldened, not cowed, overseas critics of its ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“After that, I felt so angry,” the scientist said. “I think maybe I’m not quite a typical Chinese. If you offend me, I will take my revenge. So when they try to harass me, I’m thinking, ‘So my family and I are in trouble. Let’s get everyone in trouble.’”

She responded to the demands by going public, describing her family’s experience with the Chinese police in posts on X seen by NBC News that have since been deleted.

The idea was to “expose them to the whole world,” said the woman, whose experience with the Chinese police NBC News was not able to independently verify.

Though her interrogators appear to have relented for the moment, she said she expects to be questioned again if she returns to China.

“After the interrogation, they told my parents to warn me not to mention this to anyone, and to tell me that protests and petitions are useless: ‘The West won’t listen to you.’”

‘Determined to speak out’

A chemical engineer living in California has a similar story.

Like the scientist, he had spent some of his youth in China under the leadership of Xi Jinping, and had jumped at a job opportunity in the U.S. after studying at an American college.

“Under Xi Jinping, things got worse and worse,” said the engineer, who like the scientist requested anonymity because of safety concerns for himself and his family.

The Chinese leader has concentrated power in his own hands since taking office in 2012, tightening control over civil society, the media and the internet. Rights groups also accuse Xi’s government of abuses against Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang region, allegations that Beijing denies.

The engineer said he had posted critical videos online while concealing his identity, but that was well before authorities first contacted his family last March.

“My father called me. He asked me, ‘What are you doing? Did you say something against our government and the CCP?’ So he wouldn’t worry, I told him ‘no.’ I lied.”

He said he was then contacted by a police officer on the Chinese messaging service WeChat.

“He asked me to provide my personal accounts for YouTube and Twitter,” the engineer said. “I said no, you can’t ask me that, because I’m in the United States,” where unlike in China he can access such services freely.

“He said even if you’re in the United States, it’s your responsibility as a Chinese citizen to maintain our country’s good image.”

He said police contacted his family two other times, and threatened his father with not being able to leave the country — a practice known as an exit ban that rights groups say is an increasingly favored tool of Chinese state repression.

NBC News was not able to independently verify the engineer’s account.

He said that before police visited his family in China, he had not expressed much criticism of the CCP, “since I have my own work and life.”

“But based on their unreasonable threats — threatening my family, asking me to delete my social media accounts and shut up — I’m even more determined to speak out more frequently against them,” the engineer said.

Taking on the Chinese government is a step that dissidents, even those abroad, do not take lightly.

The severity and type of transnational repression varies widely depending on the countries in which critics live and the relationships their governments have with China, Human Rights Watch says.

While the U.S. takes strong measures to counter Chinese espionage, in other places “people have told us that they have suspected quite blatant physical intimidation,” said Maya Wang, associate director of the rights group’s Asia division.

That includes “being followed by cars, by Chinese suspected security agents, very visible,” she said.

The repression may not always be direct. Chinese dissidents say the ruling party has fostered a culture in which critics fear denunciation by fellow citizens.

In January, a U.S. federal jury found a Chinese music student guilty of cyberstalking and other charges after he harassed a pro-democracy activist posting fliers at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, including claiming that he had reported her to a Chinese public security agency.

Because the intimidation and surveillance often comes from inside their own communities, some Chinese dissidents abroad “take extreme pains to essentially isolate themselves,” Wang said, undermining their mental health.

Uyghurs in particular have been harassed, detained and sometimes extradited back to China, at times with the help of Beijing-friendly governments in regions such as the Middle East and North Africa.

“If you’re a Uyghur, you’re pretty much doomed in many parts of the world,” Wang said.

Going public

Lyndon Li Shixiang, 24, is a rare critic of the Chinese government who has dared to go public with his real identity.

Li had been studying law in Britain and planning to write an article with a human rights lawyer in China about Zhang Zhan, a journalist jailed in 2020 over her reporting on the emergence of Covid in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.

But then the lawyer, Xie Yang, was arrested and detained in China in early 2022 on suspicion of inciting subversion of state power, prompting Li to break his cover. (Xie, who is still in detention, has yet to be tried, according to the U.S.-based advocacy group China Human Rights Defenders.)

“That was the triggering point. Before, I was planning to write that piece without my name because I was scared, I was so scared. Even though I was in the U.K., the fear was unreasonable sometimes,” said Li, now based in London and training to become a barrister.

He said he has since faced a torrent of abuse online from other Chinese people accusing him of betraying his country.

“I didn’t care much when other people said that. But when my family said that, that really broke me. They’re the people I hoped would be understanding,” Li said.

“That made me feel powerless at that point. I had a mental breakdown.”

Like other Chinese dissidents in Britain, Li has found solace in the company of other activists, including 26-year-old graduate student Kyle Ma.

Sitting with Li at a London coffee shop, Ma said he had found it liberating to go public with criticism of the Chinese government.

“The fear is like a parasite that creeps into my mind, my blood, my bones to make me feel crippled, disempowered and unable to speak my political opinion,” he said.

“Only after I became a public dissident, and now I fight, I feel I’m free from this fear.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com