China’s campaign to track down its own officials overseas — through programs like “Operation Fox Hunt” and “Sky Net” — has quietly extended into more than 100 countries, including the United States. But as Dake Kang’s investigation revealed, a surprising engine behind this global surveillance operation is software built with American technology.
The Beijing-based correspondent launched the project after Yael Grauer, a freelance investigative journalist, obtained a massive trove of internal emails and databases from Landasoft, a Chinese surveillance company.
Breaking through the silence surrounding China’s global pursuit operations, Kang cultivated a yearslong relationship with a former Chinese official who had fled abroad. That work paid off when the ex-official agreed to speak exclusively with AP, providing not only testimony but thousands of pages of documents detailing his case and interactions with Chinese authorities.
Kang validated and expanded the story by examining state media reports, corporate filings and conducting interviews with dozens of lawyers — painting a detailed picture of how this vast surveillance and pressure network works in practice.
The investigation stands as a rare look inside one of the Chinese government’s most secretive efforts — and how U.S.-origin technology has helped power it.
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