In China, she enjoyed the privileges that came from marrying a high-ranking member of the government’s elite. Her husband was a senior police officer in the security apparatus who kept the Communist Party in power and trusted him so much that China sent him to France to take on a prestigious role at Interpol.
But Meng Hongwei, the former president of Interpol, has now disappeared into China’s extensive penal system, falling out of favor in one breathtaking case. And his wife is alone with her twins in France, a political refugee who is under French police protection around the clock after an alleged attempt by Chinese agents to kidnap them and hand them over to an uncertain fate.
From being an insider, Grace Meng has become an outsider who looks inside – and says she is appalled at what she sees.
So much so that she is now giving up anonymity and potentially putting herself and her family at additional risk to speak out against China’s authoritarian government, which her husband – a vice minister of public security – served before he disappeared in 2018. He was later tried and detained.
Meng now calls the government he worked for “the monster”. “Because they eat their children.”
In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, Meng decided to show her face for the first time and agreed to be filmed and photographed from behind without the dark lighting and camera angles that she had previously insisted on for them to speak frankly and in unprecedented detail about her husband, herself, and the disaster that tore her apart.
“I have a responsibility to show my face, to tell the world what happened,” she told The AP. “In the last three years I’ve learned – just as we know how to live with Covid – I know how to live with the monster, the authority.”
Among the global critics of China – many of whom are now mobilizing against the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing – Meng brings with him the unique perspective of a former insider who has gone through the mirror and emerged with her changed views. The change is so profound that it has largely given up its Chinese name Gao Ge. She says she feels more like herself now than Grace, her chosen name, with her husband’s last name, Meng.
“I’ve died and been born again,” she says.
She is completely in the dark about Meng, his whereabouts and his health as an imprisoned, soon to be 68-year-old. Her last message was two text messages he sent on September 25, 2018 on a work trip to Beijing. The first said, “Wait for my call.” Four minutes later, a kitchen knife emoji followed, apparently signaling danger. She believes he likely sent her from his office at the Ministry of Public Security.
She has not had any contact with him since then and several letters from her lawyers to the Chinese authorities have remained unanswered. She’s not even sure he’s alive.
“That made me so sad that I can be even sadder,” she said. “Of course it’s just as cruel to my children.”
“I don’t want the children to have no father,” she added and began to cry. “When the children hear someone knocking on the door, they always go and see. I know they hope the person who walks in is their father. But every time they realize that they are not, they silently bow their heads. You are extremely brave. “
The official news of Meng’s fate came in droplets and gloom. A statement in October 2018, moments after Grace Meng first met reporters in Lyon, France, to raise the alarm about his disappearance, announced that he was being investigated for unspecified legal violations. This signaled that he was the youngest high-ranking Chinese official to fall victim to a party purge.
Interpol announced that Meng has resigned as president with immediate effect. This still infuriates his wife, who says the Lyon police “were of no help at all”. She argues that the global organization working on common law enforcement issues has only encouraged authoritarian behavior from Beijing by not adopting a more solid stance.
“Can someone who has disappeared by force voluntarily write a letter of resignation?” She asked. “Can a police organization turn a blind eye to a typical crime like this?”
In 2019, China announced that Meng had been stripped of his Communist Party membership. It is said that he abused his power to please his family’s “extravagant lifestyle” and allowed his wife to use his authority for personal gain. In January 2020, a court announced that he had been sentenced to 13 years and six months in prison for accepting bribes exceeding $ 2 million. The court said he confessed his guilt and expressed regret.
His wife has long claimed the allegations were fabricated and that her husband was purged for using his high-profile position to push for change.
“It’s a fake case. It’s an example of how a political disagreement turned into a criminal matter, ”she said. “The level of corruption in China today is extremely serious. It is everywhere. But there are two different opinions about how to solve corruption. One is the method that is now used. The other is to move towards constitutional democracy to solve the problem at its roots. “
Grace Meng also has political ties through her own family. Her mother was a member of an advisory body to the Chinese legislature. And the family has already experienced political trauma. After the Communists came to power in 1949, Grace Meng’s grandfather was stripped of his business assets and later imprisoned in a labor camp, she said.
History, she says, repeats itself.
“Of course this is a great tragedy in our family, a source of great suffering,” she told the AP. “But I also know that many families in China today face a fate similar to mine.”
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