“Of course, it’s equally cruel to my children.” “This has already saddened me beyond the point where I can be saddened further,” she said.
Since then, she says she has had no contact with him and that multiple letters sent by her lawyers to Chinese authorities have gone unanswered. She thinks he likely sent them from his office at the Ministry of Public Security. The first said, “wait for my call.” That was followed four minutes later by an emoji of a kitchen knife, apparently signaling danger. Their last communication was two text messages he sent on Sept. She says she now feels more herself as Grace, her chosen name, with her husband’s surname, Meng.Ībout Meng, his whereabouts and health as an imprisoned soon-to-be 68-year-old, she is entirely in the dark. So profound is the change that she has largely stopped using her Chinese name, Gao Ge.
“During the past three years, I learned - just like we know how to live with the COVID - I know how to live with the monster, the authority.”Īmong the global critics of China - many of them now mobilizing against the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing - Meng brings the unique perspective of a former insider who has walked through the looking glass and emerged with her views transformed. “I have the responsibility to show my face, to tell the world what happened,” she told The AP. In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, Meng chose for the first time to show her face, agreeing to be filmed and photographed without the dark lighting and from-the-back camera angles that she previously insisted on, so she could speak openly and in unprecedented detail about her husband, herself and the cataclysm that tore them apart. “The monster” is how Grace Meng now speaks of the government her husband worked for. So much so that she is now shedding her anonymity, potentially putting herself and her family at additional risk, to speak out against China’s authoritarian government that her husband - a vice minister of public security - served before disappearing in 2018. And his wife is alone with their twin boys in France, a political refugee under round-the-clock French police protection following what she suspects was an attempt by Chinese agents to kidnap and deliver them to an uncertain fate.įrom being an insider, Grace Meng has become an outsider looking in - and says she is horrified by what she sees. Her husband was a top police official in the security apparatus that keeps the Communist Party in power, so trusted that China sent him to France to take up a prestigious role at Interpol.īut Meng Hongwei, the former Interpol president, has now vanished into China’s sprawling penal system, purged in a stunning fall from grace. LYON, France (AP) - In China, she enjoyed the privileges that flowed from being married to a senior member of the governing elite.