On October 4 at Los Angeles International Airport, FBI agents arrested a woman at the boarding gate of a flight bound for China, moments before she could depart. The next day she appeared in federal court in shackles, charged with acting as an agent of the Chinese Communist Party and surveilling the eldest son of Taiwan’s president Lai Ching-te inside the United States. On October 5 the U.S. Department of Justice announced prosecutions seeking to strip U.S. citizenship from 40 people, among them a man who collected intelligence on Falun Gong practitioners for Beijing while living in America.
These two cases, both closely watched by Chinese communities, point to the same network of agents—commonly called spies or “special intelligence personnel”—whose lines run back to the Chinese regime. They also illustrate a system that free societies have formally labeled “transnational repression.”
An exclusive document obtained by The Epoch Times, a database titled Political Involvement Investigation Personnel Database (涉政落查人员库), offers a concrete look inside that system.
Contents of the Blacklist
The database comes from the Chinese Communist Party’s political-legal apparatus. Both “political involvement” (涉政) and “investigation and location” (落查) are standard terms in that system: individuals are tagged for “interfering in politics” and then traced to precise personal identities and locations. The next step after “落查,” the document’s logic implies, is formal “disposition” or persecution by specific political-legal organs.
It contains 24,170 records. Because of duplicate names and overlapping entries, the actual number of distinct individuals is estimated at more than 10,000. The targets are accounts on overseas platforms—Twitter/X, Facebook, and major Chinese-language outlets such as The Epoch Times, NTD, and Wenxuecity—that the regime has decided to monitor. The goal is not limited to virtual identities; the database seeks Chinese ID numbers, residential addresses, work units, and family members.
Roughly 22,500 records (93 percent) list locations inside mainland China. Of the approximately 10,500 people marked with a domestic residence, nearly half—4,783—have been narrowed to specific addresses that would allow authorities to visit the door. A China address does not prove the person is currently inside the country; it may be a pre-departure address or that of family members still there.
Who Appears on the List
Comments