China Is Still Conducting Police Activities in Berlin, Germany Says

A man on a bicycle rides past the Chinese Embassy in Berlin on Dec. 11, 2017. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

German officials said on May 15 that they believe the two unauthorized Chinese police outposts remain in operation in the country, though Beijing had promised to shut them down in February.

These police outposts were “not fixed-location offices, but mobile facilities,” a spokesperson of the Federal Ministry of the Interior said at a daily briefing on Monday. Individuals, with some holding Chinese citizenship, conduct “official duties” at the behest of the Chinese regime, the spokesperson added.

The “overseas police station” is believed to be part of over 100 similar facilities operated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) across the globe, according to Safeguard Defenders, a Spain-based human rights group. Citing official announcements, researchers identified the unofficial police centers in at least 53 countries, including the United States, Britain, Canada, Italy, and Garmany.

The Chinese regime uses these facilities to “harass, threaten, intimidate and force targets to return to China for persecution,” the group said in its follow-up report published in December 2022.

The widespread presence led the German government and other European nations to open investigations into the facilities on their own soil.

“The federal government does not tolerate the exercise of foreign state authority, and accordingly, Chinese authorities have no executive powers on the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany,” an interior ministry spokesperson told local newspaper Handelsblatt in October 2022.

Berlin later said the Chinese regime set up at least two police stations across the country, one more than the Safeguard Defender’s revelation. The group’s report only mentioned one unit in Frankfurt.

These Chinese police outposts don’t have permanent offices in Germany and are managed by leaders of the Chinese diaspora, according to a March government response to a written question from a lawmaker.

In November, the German government urged the Chinese regime to shut down its police station.

“The Chinese side got back to us at the beginning of February and said that these so-called service stations, as the Chinese side called them, had been closed,” Andrea Sasse, the spokesperson for the German foreign ministry, told reporters on Monday.

However, “the security authorities continue to assume that there are two so-called overseas police stations in Germany,” the interior ministry spokesperson said.

A balloon is held at a press conference and rally in front of the America ChangLe Association highlighting Beijing's transnational repression, in New York City on Feb. 25, 2023. A now-closed overseas Chinese police station is located inside the association building.Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Officials in Ireland and the Netherlands have ordered similar stations operating in their own countries to close.

The United States has brought in the first criminal charges against individuals linked to the secret police units. In April, the FBI arrested two men accused of running the police station in New York City on behalf of the CCP. Federal prosecutors charged the two with conspiring to act as agents of the CCP and obstructing justice. The criminal complaint alleged defendants took orders from the Chinese authorities to locate and intimidate Chinese dissidents living in the United States.

“This prosecution reveals the Chinese government’s flagrant violation of our nation’s sovereignty by establishing a secret police station in the middle of New York City,” Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the eastern district of New York, said at the April press conference.

“Just imagine the NYPD opening an undeclared secret police station in Beijing,” Peace said. “It would be unthinkable.”

“It is our belief that the ultimate purpose of this illegal police station was not to protect and serve, but rather silence, harass, and threaten individuals here in the United States, and particularly those expressing views contrary to the Chinese government,” said Michael Driscoll, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office.