On May 3, 2023, four policemen with two police vehicles from China came to the independent country of Mongolia and arrested Mr. Lhamjab Borjigin, a prominent Southern Mongolian writer in exile, at his temporary residence in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar. Shortly after the arrest, Borjigin was deported back to China on the same day.

A week before the arrest, Borjigin notified the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center (SMHRIC) that the Chinese authorities were harassing and threatening his family members in Southern Mongolia.

“My family members told me that an army of police and security personnel are visiting my family and pressuring them to bring me back,” Borjigin said in the audio message to the SMHRIC. “They are claiming to come to Mongolia with my daughter and bring me back.”

The SMHRIC immediately contacted the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR’s) regional office in Bangkok, Thailand, and demanded urgent action to prevent Borjigin from being deported to China. An unidentified official from the office responded to the SMHRIC by email, asking for Borjigin’s phone number and email address. After providing Borjigin’s contact details, the SMHRIC did not receive further communication from the office. The question of whether the office was able to contact him remained unanswered. 

“Yes, unfortunately, he was brought back to China on May 3. Some of his family members were also among the dispatchers from China,” a close friend of Borjigin from Ulaanbaatar told the SMHRIC. “Nothing we can do about it now. All we can do is publish his books here.”

As a well-known Southern Mongolian dissident writer and the author of numerous books, Borjigin was sentenced to two years in prison in 2019 for writing a book entitled China’s Cultural Revolution. In 2021, following his prison term, he was placed under indefinite “residential surveillance,” a form of house arrest.

On March 6, 2023, Borjigin managed to escape from China and arrived in the independent country of Mongolia. According to his testimony to the SMHRIC, his plan was to publish his three books in Mongolia to inform the world of how the Chinese colonial regime had established itself in Southern Mongolia and how the Mongolian resistance had been quashed. 

“These are my plans should I be lucky enough to live a few more years in peace here without being followed, monitored and questioned, until being called by Karl Marx to join him in heaven,” Borjigin said in the testimony. 

This is the fifth major case of the deportation of Southern Mongolian dissidents in exile from the independent country of Mongolia since 2009. In most cases, the Chinese authorities sent their police directly to Mongolia to make their arrests on Mongolian soil. They completed the deportation process in coordination with the Government of Mongolia. 

In 2009, Chinese police dispatchers arrested Mr. Batzangaa, a Southern Mongolian dissident and Mongol-Tibetan medical school principal, in front of the UNHCR office building in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Along with his daughter and wife, he was deported to China and sentenced to three years in prison followed by indefinite surveillance. 

In a similar case, Chinese police dispatchers recently detained and interrogated a Southern Mongolian dissident named Adiyaa in Bangkok, Thailand. Thanks to the urgent intervention of the UNHCR’s regional office, Mr. Adiyaa was swiftly resettled in Canada shortly after. 

As China doubles down on efforts to pressure her neighboring countries to silence criticism, Mr. Munkhbayar Chuluundorj, a Mongolian citizen, human rights defender, writer and journalist, was sentenced to 10 years in prison last year. The charge brought against him was “collaborating with a foreign intelligence agency to spy against the People’s Republic of China.” Chuluundorj has been an outspoken critic of China’s human rights violations in Southern Mongolia and the Mongolian authorities’ unusually cozy relationship with the Chinese Communist regime.