This article is part of the China Targets project, an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) involving 42 media partners, including The Irish Times, into transnational oppression by Chinese authorities. See also: Corrosive and dishonest and Exerting control from a nondesctipt office on Capel Street.
Nuria Zyden, a naturalised Irish citizen who lives in Dublin, has complained to the Garda that she receives calls from the security services in China suggesting that she co-operate with them.
A Uyghur from the Chinese province of Xinjiang in northwestern China, where her mother still lives, Zyden is a founder member of the Irish Uyghur Cultural Association and an activist with the World Uyghur Congress.
There are about 12 million Uyghur and other mostly Muslim ethnic Turkic people living in Xinjiang, many of whom prefer to call the province East Turkestan. A report in 2022 from the office of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights described the Beijing regime’s campaign against the Turkic people in the province as possibly amounting to “crimes against humanity”. The Chinese government has described the report as a “farce” organised by western governments.
For the past number of months, a police officer in China has been calling Zyden to talk to her about her work on the Uyghur issue, while using continued contact with her mother in China as a way of putting pressure on her, she says.
“He started to say: ‘You are not like other Uyghur activists. You care about your mother. You are not supposed to do things against us. You should co-operate.’”
When the Irish Uyghur Cultural Association was launched in January 2024, the limited online contact Zyden then had with her mother, who is in her 70s, was cut off.
Then, later in the year, contact resumed and was not only organised by the security services in Xinjiang, but encouraged.
Although it is not stated directly, it is implicit in her dealings with the Chinese police that contact with her mother could be cut off again, Zyden says.
The police in Xinjiang, she says, “asked my mother to ask me to co-operate”.
When she came to Ireland in 2009, it was to escape surveillance and oppression.
“I wanted to escape this. Now I am back with it. I live in a democratic country, but I still have this trauma,” she says.
The Turkic Muslims of Xinjiang have been subjected to a campaign of surveillance and repression over the past decade.
In addition to opening detention camps across the province, the campaign led to Uyghurs and others living outside China cutting off contact with their families out of fear that it would land them in trouble.
Until January 2024, Zyden’s only contact with her family back in Xinjiang was the postings uploaded to a social media account by her mother.
Only one of her three Irish-born children has met their maternal grandmother, and Zyden has not met her mother for more than a decade.
Her limited contact with her mother was cut off in January 2024 following the launch of the Irish Uyghur Cultural Association.
Around this time her mother was also questioned by the police and had a health episode that Zyden says was linked to being questioned by the Chinese police. Zyden, who didn’t know what was happening, was frantic with worry.
Then contact resumed late last year after Zyden had attended an assembly of the World Uyghur Congress in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The congress is a representative body for Uyghur people globally. The Chinese embassy in Dublin has described it as an “outright separatist and extremist organisation that has sold its soul to anti-China forces”. The congress says it is a peaceful movement opposed to Beijing’s occupation of East Turkestan.
The resumed contact with her mother was organised by a security official in Xinjiang, Zyden says, so they could use it to put pressure on her after she returned from Sarajevo.
“They set up my mom, told her she can freely call her daughter, that you guys can chat, but they monitored [the contact] and started to learn about me,” she says.
The police visited her mother’s home in Kashgar, a city in Xinjiang, made inquiries about Zyden’s childhood and university education and asked about her friends and hobbies.
Then she started to receive direct calls in Dublin from an officer in Kashgar.
“He told me: I know you very well, even better than you know yourself.”
She believes this is how the Chinese police work when targeting people abroad. They look for a person’s weak spot. In her case, it was her concern for her mother.
“I thought they would immediately use strict tones to argue with me, but they don’t,” she says.
“But still, it’s scary, they kind of give me a signal, that they know my movements, that I should behave myself, that they are watching me.”
The Irish Times has been able to verify that Zyden has received calls from the Chinese police.
When Zyden agreed to be interviewed near the home where she lives with her Irish-born children, she was asked when she had last received a call from the police in Xinjiang.
“Yesterday,” she said.
She had been at work when she received a text from a Chinese officer requesting a conversation and agreed a time.
“We spoke during my lunch break,” she said.
The Irish Times interviewed Zyden as part of a project organised by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) – China Targets – an investigation into transnational repression by China carried out by 43 ICIJ media partners including the Guardian, the Washington Post, Radio France and ABC Australia.
A week after Zyden gave an interview to The Irish Times, one of her colleagues in the World Uyghur Congress, Dilshat Reshit, whom she knows, was arrested in Sweden where he is now facing charges of having spied for the Chinese on the Uyghur community for years.
In February, when the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, was in Dublin to meetTaoiseach Micheál Martin, the Irish Uyghur Cultural Association and the European Hong Kong Diaspora Alliance issued a statement raising the issue of transnational repression.
“We do not feel safe, even after years of settling here,” they said on behalf of the Uyghur and Hong Kong communities in Ireland, calling on the Taoiseach to raise the issue with Yi.
“It is a matter of Ireland’s security as much as it is about the security of [the] person,” they said.
In October, when Zyden flew to Sarajevo via Frankfurt for the Uyghur assembly, she believes she was followed by two Chinese men.
“They even offered to help me with my bags in Frankfurt,” she says.
Something about the men made her suspicious and she snapped them from behind when the small number of passengers from Dublin who were flying on to Sarajevo were being transported in a small bus in Frankfurt to their onward flight.
The two men on the bus turned up at the Sarajevo hotel where the Uyghur assembly was taking place and where most of the delegates were staying.
The men aroused suspicion when they were seen taking photographs of the delegates in the hotel lobby and were themselves photographed, recorded on video and asked to leave.
The Irish Times has been able to confirm from sources that the men photographed in the Sarajevo hotel travelled on the same flights as Zyden.
However, it has not proved possible to identify the two men, despite efforts by The Irish Times and the ICIJ.
Zyden believes the authorities in China arranged the resumed contact with her mother and then made direct contact themselves with Zyden because she agreed to take on a role with the World Uyghur Congress while in Sarajevo.
In more recent times Zyden has come to suspect she is being watched and has sought help from An Garda Síochána. She is not happy with the level of protection she is receiving.
Asked about the case, the Garda press office said it did not comment on named individuals.
“An Garda Síochána has received a complaint as suggested in your query. This matter is now under assessment,” it said.
The Irish Times has independently confirmed that the Irish authorities are monitoring Zyden’s situation.
How the Chinese government monitors its citizens in Ireland
“They could easily use a different tactic,” says Zyden, referring to the Chinese police.
“They could bribe me, or threaten me, or use my family here to negotiate with me, or directly use my family back home as hostages,” she says.
Then, she wonders, what would she do? Would she too become a spy?
The so-called “Strike Hard” campaign in Xinjiang was launched by Chinese president Xi Jinping in 2014 and eventually led to global condemnation.
Policy has changed since last summer, Zyden says, and Turkic people living abroad are now being allowed return to visit family members.
“People don’t want to do anything that would stop them going home,” she says.
A WhatsApp group of Uyghurs in Ireland she belongs to once had 50 members; it now has 27.
Zyden says she understands that everyone gets only one life, that it is logical to stay quiet and not attract the attention of the authorities back in China.
“That is a type of suffering for people. Imagine you would be never able to go home to your hometown, where you grew up, never see your family.”
Nevertheless, she agreed to speak to The Irish Times and the ICIJ.
To come all the way to Ireland only to find she still must hide what she believes in, she says, is also a type of suffering.
“That is really horrible,” she says.
Asked about Zyden’s claims, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Dublin asked if they had been verified and said it believed An Garda Síochána was “fully capable of – and certainly committed to – taking appropriate measures” to protect Irish citizens who were being illegally harassed.
“The Chinese embassy had always required Chinese citizens to comply with Irish laws, and all activities conducted by the embassy are carried out in accordance with Irish legal norms and regulations,” the spokesman said.
He added that The Irish Times, as a reputable media outlet, bore a responsibility to verify the authenticity of quoted content.
