China’s renowned investigative journalist Bai Zhaodong secretly abducted in Thailand by the Chinese Communist regime in collusion with Thai authorities; missing for six months

(Rights Defense Network Information Center report) On May 24, 2026, this outlet learned that Bai Zhaodong, a former investigative journalist with Caijing, disappeared in Thailand in November 2025 and has remained unheard from for six months. It was initially suspected that his disappearance was related to a local property dispute, but it was later confirmed to have no connection with a civil dispute and to have been a secret abduction carried out by the Chinese Communist regime in collusion with Thai authorities. Before leaving China for Thailand, Bai Zhaodong angered the interests of Chinese Communist bureaucrats by conducting in-depth investigative reporting and exposing the abuses of power and money involving Chinese Communist officials and businesspeople.

On November 27, 2025, Bai Zhaodong lost contact after sending his final message from Thailand. In February 2026, an appeal and call for help titled “Seeking Investigative Journalist Bai Zhaodong” circulated widely online, but the article was soon blocked in China, and its original author also appeared to delete it under pressure. Bai Zhaodong has now been unheard from for six months.

In recent years, Chinese dissidents, rights defenders and refugees seeking asylum in Thailand have faced extremely serious security threats. The Chinese Communist state security and public security systems have used the close bilateral relationship between China and Thailand to forcibly return Chinese citizens who fled to Thailand through “joint case handling,” diplomatic pressure, financial inducements, or transnational abductions carried out outside regular procedures. For example:

In February 2025, Thailand carried out the mass forced deportation of Uyghur refugees. Approximately 40 Chinese Uyghur refugees had been arbitrarily detained for as long as 11 years in Thailand’s immigration detention centers. The United Nations, Human Rights Watch and other organizations repeatedly urged the Thai government to comply with the “principle of non-refoulement.” However, on February 27, 2025, under pressure from the Chinese Communist regime, Thai authorities forcibly deported the 40 refugees to China. To this day, the Chinese Communist regime has refused to explain their fate or whereabouts.

In November 2019, Chinese rights defender and citizen journalist Xing Jian, who was exiled in Thailand, was arrested by Thai authorities at his Bangkok residence under the direct command of police from the Chinese Communist regime. A letter from Xing Jian was later circulated from prison, directly stating that “the Chinese Communist Party has dispatched large numbers of agents to seriously infiltrate Thailand … gradually breaking down refugees who fled to Thailand and secretly abducting and repatriating them one by one.”

In January 2016, Li Xin, a former new-media editor at Southern Metropolis Daily who had fled to Thailand to seek refuge after refusing to work as an informant for Chinese Communist state security, was secretly abducted by agents of the Chinese Communist regime on a train traveling from Bangkok toward the Thai-Lao (Laos) border. Several days later, it was confirmed that Li Xin was in China and under the control of Chinese Communist police. The Chinese Communist Party’s state-run media outlet Global Times subsequently published a commentary, publicly defending this kind of “cross-border arrest” for the first time and declaring that “Chinese law allows law-enforcement personnel to travel abroad to carry out work after obtaining approval,” openly demonstrating that the Chinese Communist Party’s hand of “cross-border abduction/law enforcement” extended directly into Thai territory.

In October 2015, Gui Minhai, a Swedish citizen of Chinese descent and shareholder in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay Books, was secretly abducted from his apartment in Pattaya, Thailand, and taken back to China by agents of the Chinese Communist regime. Several months later, he suddenly appeared on the Chinese Communist Party’s CCTV to make a “televised confession,” claiming that he had “voluntarily returned to China to turn himself in.” The case bypassed Thailand’s normal judicial extradition procedures and constituted an outright secret abduction abroad.

In November 2015, the case of Dong Guangping and Jiang Yefei’s deportation. Chinese dissidents Jiang Yefei and Dong Guangping, who had fled to Thailand, were arrested in Bangkok by Chinese Communist police acting in cooperation with Thai authorities and imprisoned in an immigration detention facility, despite having been granted official refugee protection status by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The Canadian government had already approved emergency protection visas for both men and purchased their air tickets, but Thai authorities nevertheless forcibly handed them over to Chinese police and had them escorted back to China on a chartered flight several days before they were due to board. Both men were subsequently sentenced in China. This was a typical and egregious case in which the individuals were jointly arrested despite having already obtained official United Nations refugee status.

Profile of Bai Zhaodong: Born on January 10, 1970, he is from Hengshan District, Yulin City, Shaanxi Province, and is a former investigative journalist with Caijing. In 2015, he joined the magazine’s legal and public affairs team and worked for many years on in-depth investigative reports in the judicial, political-business and social spheres. His investigative works include the series “The Hundred-Billion-Yuan Fake Gold Loan Fraud Case,” “Qinghai Alkaline Industry’s 3.3 Billion Yuan in Assets Taken Over at Half Price by a Local State-Owned Enterprise,” “Turbulence in Gansu’s Officialdom: Several Officials Jump into the Yellow River,” and “The Qinling Mountains’ Super Illegal Villas,” among others, attracting widespread attention in the public sphere. In the years before leaving China for Thailand, he had focused on power and gray-interest structures in Shaanxi and northwestern China. Representative reports include “Exposing the Interest Chain Behind Yan’an’s Private Lending” and “Shaanxi’s Version of the ‘Sun Xiaoguo Case’: After Robbing, Escaping Prison and Killing a Police ‘Informant,’ He Mysteriously Got Out of Prison and Became a Coal Boss.”