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January 20, 2016

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Group ‘fabricated information about China’

CHINESE authorities said yesterday that they had smashed an illegal organization that sponsored activities jeopardizing China’s national security.

The suspects, including a Swedish national, have been put under coercive measures in line with the criminal law.

According to a statement from Chinese police and national security authorities, the Swedish national, Peter Jesper Dahlin, and some other people had been operating an unregistered “China emergency rights aid group” on China’s mainland, received undeclared money from overseas and carried out unregulated activities.

The police said the organization hired and trained others to gather, fabricate and distort information about China, providing “China’s human rights reports” to overseas organizations.

It also organized others to interfere with sensitive cases, deliberately aggravating disputes and instigating public-government confrontations to create mass incidents, according to the police.

The police said the organization had been accepting huge sums of money from seven overseas organizations.

Dahlin was also connected to the Fengrui Law Firm, which police last year said had been found to have organized paid protests.

Dahlin and Wang Quanzhang, a lawyer with Fengrui, co-founded “Joint Development Institute Limited” in Hong Kong in August, 2009. JDI operated on the Chinese mainland under the name of “China emergency rights aid group.”

Dahlin’s organization also provided funds to Xing Qingxian, who was accused of illegally assisting the son of Wang Yu, another Fengrui lawyer, to illegally cross the Chinese border.

Dahlin is said to have confessed that all of the “China’s human rights reports” were compiled via online research and could not reflect reality. “Not seeing some cases myself, I cannot guarantee they are true,” he said.

The statement cited Dahlin’s confession as saying that an unspecified foreign NGO had explicitly asked JDI to file no less than 96 lawsuits against the Chinese government each year.

The NGO also asked JDI to help train civil lawyers, each of whom would be paid 3,000 yuan (US$456) a month. For practising lawyers like Wang, JDI would pay 5,000 yuan and give them 20,000 yuan for every case against the Chinese government.

Two members of the organization said Western anti-China forces had planted Dahlin and some other people in China to gather negative information for anti-China purposes such as smear campaigns.

They were also tasked with organizing forces in China, fanning anti-government and anti-Party sentiment, and deceiving people to disrupt state and social order, thus, changing the social system of China, according to confessions of the two members.

The police said they found that the organization received nearly 10 million yuan from overseas in recent years, yet nearly half of the money was pocketed by Dahlin and his men through false receipts and other claims.

“If I give out salaries strictly according to the receipts, there will be no profits for me,” he said.

Dahlin is said to have expressed remorse, saying: “I need to offer my deep apologies for hurting the Chinese government and the Chinese people.”

He was detained on January 3 over charges of funding activities threatening China’s national security. He was later placed under residential surveillance. His right to a consular visit was granted on January 16.




 

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