By the time human rights groups began campaigning in July for four Chinese dissidents held in a Bangkok detention centre, one of them had been gone for weeks.
Tan Yixiang (譚翼翔), an advocate for Tibetan and Uyghur rights, was quietly returned to China in June — a fact that emerged only after Human Rights Watch published its appeal. "There was no notification to anyone," Sunai Phasuk, the organization's senior Thailand advisor, told Storm Media in an interview for its English edition in late July. "His lawyer was not aware of it. UN agencies, human rights groups — none of us was aware of his return to China."
Nobody outside the Thai state appears to know how he left, or where he is now. "We only knew, with confirmation now from Thai authorities, that he is no longer at the immigration detention center. He already returned to China," Sunai said. "We don't know his fate or his whereabouts upon his return, which adds a new concern about his life and well-being."
For the three still inside, the precedent is the problem. "They are facing what I would call constant, imminent risk of forced deportation," he said, "because they sent Tan back quietly without informing anyone. None of us — no human rights groups, no UN agencies, no embassies — had a chance to try to intervene, or to reason with the Thais that sending Tan back to China is not the right thing. There are dangers waiting for him back in China. We didn't have that opportunity. And the same could happen to the remaining three."
Four names, one detention centre, and a plane to Vancouver that never boarded
Human Rights Watch's July 13 statement named four men and women held at the Suan Phlu Immigration Detention Centre in Bangkok, all recognized as refugees by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, all at risk of removal to China as Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul prepared for an official visit to Beijing from July 16 to 20.
Bai Zhaodong (白兆東), 56, is a former investigative journalist at Caixin (財新) known for reporting on high-level corruption; rights groups say he has been held since January, and China has submitted a formal extradition request describing him as a suspect in extortion and bribery. Tan Yixiang (譚翼翔), a Catholic activist, entered Thailand in 2022, was arrested that year, released on bail in mid-2023 and returned to immigration detention in February 2024. Zhou Junyi (周俊義), 54, belongs to the banned China Democracy Party; he fled to Thailand in 2015 and was arrested by Bangkok police in June 2025 over visa violations, shortly after organising a memorial for the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.
The fourth case is the one that has drawn diplomatic attention. Zhang Xinyan (張信燕), 56, a Falun Gong practitioner who fled to Thailand in 2014, is among 15 overseas activists targeted by Hong Kong arrest warrants and bounties in July 2025 for alleged subversion under the national security law. Thai police detained her in May 2026 for overstaying her visa. On July 8, hours before she was due to fly out under a resettlement agreement, Thai authorities stopped her from boarding.
Sunai's account of why is unusually specific. "Her travel was stopped by one letter from the Chinese embassy in Bangkok to Thai immigration, saying that they have an outstanding warrant for her — therefore she needs to be returned to China, not any other country," he said. "And Thai immigration agreed to that and stopped the flight to Canada."
He reads the calculation plainly. "Canada is a friend of Thailand too, a very close friend of Thailand. But they don't care about Canada."
Jenny Kwan, the New Democratic Party MP for Vancouver East and her party's public safety and national security critic, has taken the case to the Canadian government.
"I remain deeply concerned about Ms. Zhang Xinyan's continued detention after she was prevented from boarding her flight to Canada despite having been recognized as a UN refugee and accepted for resettlement by the Canadian government," she said in a written reply to Storm Media. "I have raised her case with Global Affairs Canada and continue to press the government to engage urgently with Thai authorities to secure her safe release and passage to Canada."
"Canada has a responsibility to do everything possible to protect people we have committed to resettle," she added. "No refugee should be denied safety because of political pressure from a foreign government."
Three channels: deportation, extradition, and a plane at a military airfield
Sunai breaks Beijing's methods for retrieving people from Thailand into three routes.
The first is deportation. China formally asks for someone's return on the grounds that they are a Chinese citizen; the person is then arrested in Thailand on immigration charges and, being a Chinese national, removed to China.
The second is extradition. "China would say — and it happened in many cases — that there are outstanding warrants, because those people targeted are charged or convicted," Sunai said. "But the question is, are those charges or convictions genuine, or are they politically motivated? As often as it happens, most of the charges or convictions are politically motivated."
Both routes are supposed to pass through a filter. Thai courts have the authority to review removals against international standards and Thai domestic law, which bar sending anyone into harm's way. "But the Thai court, sadly, chooses not to play this important role as a gatekeeper," Sunai said. "So there is no review, no safeguard. If there is an agreement between China and Thailand to send someone, there is no effective functioning safeguard to prevent that."
The third route is newer and harder to see: charter flights, arranged under what Sunai described as criminal law enforcement cooperation. Private and chartered aircraft move people nominally classified as scam-centre operators or gambling suspects between Chinese cities and Thailand. "But who knows," he said. "Dissidents or refugees could be added very easily, very conveniently — because those flights basically land at a military airport, which the public has no access to. We cannot monitor that. It can happen at nighttime or any time."
There is a tell, he said. When a mass return is being prepared, the detention center goes into lockdown and nobody is admitted for days.
The principle that cannot be violated, and the mechanism that doesn't work
What all three routes have in common, in Sunai's assessment, is a breach of non-refoulement — the prohibition on returning anyone to a place where they face persecution or torture.
"Non-refoulement is an absolute condition. It cannot be violated under any circumstances," he said. "That is according to international law and Thailand's own law. But the safeguard mechanism, which is the Court of Justice, doesn't do its job in reviewing each of the returns. That is the problem."
Thailand is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, which is part of why so much weight falls on that domestic review — and why its absence matters so much.
A pattern with more than a decade of precedent
None of this began this month. In July 2015, Thailand deported more than 100 Uyghurs to China over sustained international objection. That November it forcibly returned the Chinese rights activists Dong Guangping (董廣平) and Jiang Yefei (姜野飛), both of whom were prosecuted after arriving. In February 2025 it sent back another 40 Uyghur men.
Dong's story has an unlikely ending. In May, more than a decade after Thailand handed him over, he crossed open water from China to South Korea in a 3.3-meter inflatable boat on a 30-hour voyage — his fourth known attempt to escape — and was picked up by the South Korean coast guard. He arrived in Toronto in late June under Canada's refugee resettlement program, rejoining a wife and daughters who had been resettled there in 2015.
The Uyghur cases are the ones Sunai returns to. "The most shocking cases are the Uyghurs, given the numbers, given the very high level of international attention before the deportation," he said. "Yet Thailand went ahead anyway."
Thai authorities had promised, under international pressure, to monitor the deportees' welfare in Xinjiang. "The Thai authorities lied," Sunai said. There were one or two visits and no follow-up, and officials could not establish whether the Uyghurs they met were even the same people sent from Bangkok. "It is that pathetic for Thai authorities to go this low to satisfy Beijing and sacrifice their own international reputation, their own legal and human rights obligations."
He also draws the wider conclusion that worries him most. "If they could do that to such big groups that received a lot of support, a lot of attention from the international community, they could do it to anyone."
Chinese officials have not always waited for Thai cooperation. Reporting over the years has described the activist Xiang Li being photographed and questioned by Chinese officials inside Thai immigration detention in 2018, and Dong Guangping being taken from detention by people sent by Chinese authorities — episodes exiled activists describe as abduction rather than extradition.
Sunai's summary is the line that gives this piece its title. "China basically treats Thailand as its backyard," he said. "They can extend the arm of repression anytime, targeting anyone, which Thailand is willing to yield to. So Thailand becomes a kind of extension of repression by Beijing."
A new deportation rulebook, approved as the prime minister flew to Beijing
On July 14 — two days before Anutin left for China — the Thai cabinet approved a draft Prime Minister's Office Regulation on Deportation, the country's first unified administrative procedure for removing foreign nationals. Government spokesperson Ratchada Thanadirek said the regulation, proposed by Deputy Prime Minister Pakorn Nilprapunt, followed a June cabinet resolution tasking him with overhauling immigration procedure. Officials argue that the 1956 Deportation Act granted the authority but no standardized process existed, making removals slow and cumbersome.
The draft sets out six grounds for deportation where officials judge it necessary to protect public order and public morality: entering or remaining in Thailand unlawfully; working in breach of foreign-worker law; operating a business in breach of foreign-business law; forging or using forged official documents; committing an offence carrying three years' imprisonment or more; and acting as principal, instigator or accomplice in any of the above.
Two features matter for the people in Suan Phlu. Deportees are to be returned to their country of nationality — the default that Beijing invokes. And where a third country or international organization wants to accept someone instead, it must apply through diplomatic channels and commit in writing to cover the costs, turning what is currently an ad hoc arrangement into a formal request Thailand can decline.
Sunai's reading is blunt. "We're worried this will further facilitate transnational repression," he said. "We think they are developing this protocol to make that work with China even easier."
The direction of travel was set out in public days later. The joint statement issued at the end of Anutin's visit commits both governments, at paragraph 21, to a zero-tolerance stance on transnational crime including human trafficking, telecom and online fraud, narcotics, illegal gambling and money laundering — and, in the same paragraph, to deeper collaboration between law enforcement and judicial agencies "as well as extradition and mutual legal assistance in criminal matters."
A regional network, and a law that makes it look lawful
Thailand is not an outlier so much as a node. "There is now a kind of vast network across Southeast Asia working to serve the interests of China," Sunai said, "identifying, hunting down exiled dissidents, including those with refugee status recognized by the UN. No one is spared."
Once located, people are arrested and handed over "in total disregard of international concerns for human rights or international laws. They don't care. So this is both pitiful and frightening."
He identifies three compounding trends: China's expanding sphere of influence in the region; governments copying one another's techniques, with the practice of dressing up detentions in arrest warrants spreading after it worked elsewhere in Southeast Asia; and domestic human rights safeguards that "are not working in any of the countries in this region."
Against that background, he does not expect Beijing's new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, in force since July 1, to change Thai behavior — because there is nothing to change.
"I don't see any sign at all that the Thai government or Thai authorities at large will argue or push back against China regarding the implementation of the new law," he said, "which in fact seems unnecessary, because China already takes Thailand as its backyard. It can come to arrest anyone, or it can let Thailand do the dirty bidding."
What the statute supplies is presentability. "The new law will make this cooperation appear lawful, and it will be used as an argument," Sunai said. "If it faces criticism, if it faces condemnation, it can basically say it is implementing a law the two countries agreed to cooperate on."
Thai public opinion is moving in the opposite direction from Thai policy. "Public reaction in Thailand has become more aware of interference by China, more aware of bullying behavior by China, and they are not happy with the way that the Thai government has cooperated," he said. "There's been a lot of public criticism, in the mainstream media, in social media, against the Thai government, against the Chinese embassy in Bangkok, and against Beijing."
Kwan sees the same gap between law and practice from Ottawa. "The pattern over the past decade is deeply alarming," she said. "We have seen repeated deportations and forced returns of refugees and dissidents despite well-established international protections against refoulement, including the deportation of Uyghurs and Chinese human rights defenders. These cases raise serious concerns that political pressure from Beijing is undermining Thailand's obligations under international human rights law. The international community cannot remain silent when refugees are placed at such grave risk."
She reads the wider campaign as having grown "increasingly sophisticated and brazen," reaching well beyond China's borders to target journalists, human rights defenders, democracy advocates and refugees through intimidation, surveillance, coercion and forced returns — and as aimed at more than the individuals in front of it. "This is not only an attack on individual freedoms but also on the sovereignty of democratic countries and the international refugee protection system," she said.
The intended effect, in her assessment, is cumulative. "These efforts are intended to make people believe that nothing is beyond the reach of the Chinese state."
Sunai has watched enough of these cases to know how they usually end. He described following the convoy that took the Uyghur deportees from the detention center to the airport in 2025 — decoy trucks sent to one airport while the real one went another way, contacts losing track, and then the news that the plane had already taken off.
"It appears that we are powerless to stop this," he said. "But it will not stop us from continuing to fight to protect those refugees, those exiled dissidents. We will try our best to keep trying."
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