A Chinese dissident based in Italy said a police force from his home country could be searching for him in Europe, members of Congress revealed today.

The fears come amid a reckoning with the Chinese Communist Party’s transnational repression — its capabilities to harass people overseas as if they were back in China. Italy has previously hosted police forces from China, though that practice ended in 2022, following revelations about the Chinese regime’s international network of illegal police stations set up in democratic countries.

The revelation came in a letter, obtained exclusively by National Review, that the leading lawmakers on the House select committee on the CCP addressed today to Italian ambassador Mariangela Zappia. Chairman John Moolenaar (R., Mich.) and ranking member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D., Ill.) warned about a series of disturbing threats directed at Li Ying, an art student in Italy with a large social-media footprint, calling his account on X, where he has 1.7 million followers, a “lifeline for those seeking to voice their dissent.”

Li was active in the White Paper movement against China’s draconian zero-Covid policy.

“He has received death threats and faced coordinated smear campaigns aimed at discrediting him,” the lawmakers wrote. “His PRC financial accounts have been frozen, and his parents have been placed under extreme scrutiny. Ministry of State Security officials have visited his parents’ home in Fuyang City, pressuring his family for information about his whereabouts, threatening to block their pensions unless he ceases his online activities and returns to the PRC, and installing surveillance cameras outside their house.”

Moolenaar and Krishnamoorthi also described the harassment that Li has faced in Italy, including the leak of his passport online and visits by an unknown man to his previous residence.

Those tactics escalated in October, the letter states, when two people showed up outside his apartment and then, five days later, two people “scrawled graffiti on the front door of his home, writing ‘stupra’ (rape).”

They added: “He has heard from sources that there is a police force from the PRC in Italy looking for him.”

The lawmakers asked Zappia to “take quick and decisive steps” to protect him.

In 2022, the human-rights watchdog Safeguard Defenders found that the Chinese government had set up eleven illegal police stations in Italy, prompting the country’s interior minister to say that Rome will stop running joint police patrols with the Chinese authorities. That decision appeared to reverse a 2015 agreement authorizing that practice.