National Security Concerns Raised Over China-Run Police Outpost in New York: Security Expert

Mainland Chinese media fjsen.com article dated April 30, 2022, about the Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station in New York City, screenshot taken Oct. 8, 2022. Screenshot via The Epoch Times

The 54 police service centers opened by Chinese authorities outside of mainland China—including one in New York City—that reportedly use coercion to repatriate Chinese people might also be a tool for sabotage or espionage, according to a security policy expert.

Frank Gaffney, the executive chairman of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, sees those outposts as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) campaign of global transnational repression.

“The Chinese are not simply forcing people to go back to China and stand trial, but they may be giving them directions to do other things,” such as espionage, recruitment, influence operations, sabotage, or subversion, Gaffney told NTD’s “China in Focus” program.

He said those are the sorts of things that we need to “ensure do not continue.”

Gaffney described the regime’s police operations as “instruments of reaching out and not just touching but garroting individuals that they seek to either extricate from wherever they may be and return [them] home to face prosecution there for some cause.”

230,000 Compelled to Return

With such a vehicle, the regime could also “compel foreigners to China to suffer whatever fate the Chinese Communist Party would have in mind for them,” he said.

“Some 230,000 people have been compelled to return to China,” he said about the report of the police service centers operating in 30 countries across five continents. “That alone is an extraordinary indictment of what these service centers are actually servicing.”

“China claims 230,000 suspects of fraud and telecom fraud were successfully ‘persuaded to return’ to China from April 2021 to July 2022,” according to the report by Safeguard Defenders (pdf), a human rights organization.

Gaffney said he believes the operation is likely contrary to U.S. law, given that there’s no reciprocity agreement in place to allow the FBI to operate in China.

“That’s the sort of thing that we will not accept, I believe, in our country, not from our own law enforcement agencies, and certainly not from a foreign to say nothing of a hostile foreign one, like the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.

He further pointed to the book titled “Unrestricted Warfare” by two Chinese military officers in 1999, which he said, “laid out … different ways in which the Chinese Communist Party, in a period before they became strong enough militarily to fight us the old fashioned way, could wage war against us.”

“It took the form of economic warfare, political warfare, information operations, subversion, threats to our electric grid, and not least, biological warfare.”

‘Course Correction’ Needed

Given the potential threat that the Chinese operation in New York poses, Gaffney urged its swift closure and an immediate investigation to unravel its nature.

The probe should seek answers to questions such as, “Has there been some sort of authorization given to allow the Chinese to do this? If so, on what basis, with what constraints? Is there, in fact, oversight of what they’re doing,” he said.

“There’s a question of who knows about these operations? What do they know about them? Is this being done with the Biden administration’s permission?” he asked.

The United States needs to press other governments to shut down similar operations in their countries, particularly in Canada, Gaffney said.

“You can find very easily those operations reaching into our country if they were allowed to continue.”

Gaffney pointed to the U.S. policy with the Chinese communists which he said President Ronald Reagan went against during his administration.

“We are still at this moment, engaged in what Ronald Reagan ran against in 1980, namely, détente or engagement policy with this enemy. He recognized that’s a formula for disaster,” he noted.

“We really need a course correction on this,” he argued.

“This Chinese Communist Party is not just a mortal threat to us, it is a horrific, indeed mortal threat to its own people.”

“We ought to be de-legitimating it, we ought to be countering at every turn its influence operations,” he said. We need to try “to help the Chinese Communist Party meet an end at the hands of the Chinese people at the soonest possible moment.

“It is in all of our interests that that happens.”

Correction: The number of overseas police stations was incorrectly stated. There have been 54 stations identified, not 110. The Epoch Times regrets the error.