Communist China Establishes Global Presence Through Overseas Police Stations

The America ChangLe Association in New York on Oct. 6, 2022. An overseas Chinese police outpost in New York, called the Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, is located inside the association building. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Commentary

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is engaged in a multipronged campaign to establish its power overseas, especially over the ever-growing Chinese diaspora.

It started for real with the launch of Operation Fox Hunt, a campaign to hunt down Party members, state functionaries, and those working in or with public entities, and it seems to have been initiated following CCP leader Xi Jinping’s “anti-corruption” campaign.

The message being sent is clear: You won’t be safe just because you leave China. At the same time, and growing in strength since, the CCP’s United Front Work Department has been hard at work co-opting local Chinese media organizations around Asia, Australia, North America, and Europe. In Australia, about 95 percent or more of all local Chinese language media toe the Party line.

With the migration from China increasing and the number of asylum-seekers having shot up by almost 800 percent since Xi took power in 2012, it isn’t surprising that the Chinese regime is working hard to establish a clear presence overseas. The latest development of this campaign is the establishment of overseas Chinese police service stations.

When Safeguard Defenders first exposed this operation with its “110 Overseas” investigation, 54 stations were identified, mostly in Western countries, that are run by two local police jurisdictions. New information continues to trickle in, and on Dec. 4, the Spain-based human rights nongovernmental organization released a follow-up investigation—“Patrol and Persuade”—and the number of stations now identified has reached more than 100, with several more police jurisdictions in China running such stations.

The purpose is becoming more apparent, with one such jurisdiction claiming that it was “using overseas Chinese to govern overseas Chinese.”

In fact, since first revealing this information, additional stations in New York and also Los Angeles have been uncovered, as well as in Vancouver and one unknown location in Canada, bringing the total number of stations in the United States and Canada to eight—although the actual number is likely higher.

Fox Hunt

The international manhunt for high-value targets, Operation Fox Hunt, is carried out by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) under the leadership of the CCP’s “anti-corruption” watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI).

FBI Director Christopher Wray attends a virtual press conference at the Department of Justice in Washington on Oct. 28, 2020. Eight people have been arrested as part of "Operation Fox Hunt," an effort by the Chinese regime to threaten people to return to China. Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images

At the Party Congress in late October, the CCDI presented new data showing that since its start in 2014—a consequence of Xi’s domestic “anti-corruption” campaign—Fox Hunt has successfully forced more than 11,000 Chinese nationals back to China, including several thousand who returned during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods range from using extraditions and INTERPOL red notices, although very rare, to the more common involuntary return methods, such as “persuasion” by going after family members living in China, sending agents abroad to harass and intimidate targeted individuals in their new home country, and kidnappings.

So far, 84 cases of these stations playing a role in “persuasion” operations to force people back to China against their will have been identified. This reveals that the Chinese regime lied about the purpose of these stations, claiming that they assist the local diaspora community in renewing driver’s licenses and other minor administrative tasks.

To stop these stations from operating and to ensure that the activities themselves don’t continue to go unnoticed in a different form, a number of steps need to be taken.

Overseas Chinese Police Service Stations

The stations, which, as far as is known, started appearing in 2016 and expanded in 2018—in direct contravention of Beijing’s statement that these stations were established, without the host country’s knowledge or approval—to assist Chinese citizens during the pandemic.

The way it works is that police in a certain jurisdiction—particularly those that have seen significant emigration, such as Fuzhou—reach out to local trade or cultural associations in those cities and areas where many people from the city or region happen to live. Chinese emigration, after all, tends to be group-oriented; if many from Fuzhou have settled in one region, others who emigrate tend to want to go to those places for a support network and a shared language, culture, and food.

The police will thus approach an existing association and ask them to take on the task of running the stations. Here’s when things get a bit more complicated. As these are run by local police, the stations vary significantly in their appearance. In some cases, such as in Budapest and Dublin, they'll establish a proper office, hang out signage and plaques declaring that they’re overseas police service stations—always without informing the host country government—and have a more strict physical presence.

In other cases, the office of the association itself will be used, while the address and phone number announced will go to a front, which can be an auto mechanic, as in Porto, Portugal; a convenience store, such as in Toronto, Canada; or a restaurant, as in Glasgow, Scotland.

Similar operations also exist around Asia and particularly Africa, but such establishments are done in public, with the full cooperation of the host government; otherwise, the operations are strikingly similar to the clandestine stations in the democratic world.

To understand the overall purpose and the role they play, this quote from the Nantong is illustrative: “At present, representatives of overseas Chinese and overseas students have been hired in the United States, Australia, South Korea and other places as overseas liaison officers to cooperate with domestic officers both internally and externally.”

A Chinese state media outlet lists this single-story commercial building in Markham, Ontario, as one of three overseas Chinese police stations in Canada. Human rights nongovernmental organization Safeguard Defenders stated that the outposts in the Greater Toronto Area are part of the first batch of Fuzhou overseas police service stations. Michelle Hu/The Epoch Times

Here alone, without going into the use of such stations to assist police back in China with “persuasion” operations of targets China wants to be returned, a number of issues arise. As the Netherlands, Ireland, and Canada have shown, they consider the establishment of such stations, regardless of their duty, to be illegal and in violation of the Vienna Convention. All three countries have ordered them to shut down. The fact that they’ve been established secretly—without informing host governments and that their presence is almost only known in the Chinese language–has allowed them to operate undetected for so long.

The associations that actually run the stations, per command from the local police jurisdictions, are also in breach of administrative regulations. Any association needs to be registered, and Safeguard Defenders believes most of them are, as they’ve existed for a long time. However, they aren’t registered to perform these duties or act in any way as a liaison for the Chinese police or government. Hence, regulatory action can and must be taken against any association found to violate administrative regulations.

More importantly, to avoid simply shutting down the stations, only for their actual activities to be carried out clandestinely, via, for example, United Front Work Department-affiliated associations, means that security service needs to launch a formal investigation and, where evidence allows, bring forth criminal charges.

That 84 cases of “persuasion” operations have been carried out, including two cases related to Operation Fox Hunt, is likely just the tip of the iceberg. The targets are often low-profile and low-value targets, and if returned, they’re rarely heard from; if they refuse, they likely go silent. Finding such cases is very hard, and dedicated investigations are required. Safeguard Defenders sees such cases in Canada, Portugal, Sweden, Scotland, and the United States.

But in many other countries, they’re being treated merely as a political issue via the foreign ministries—that isn’t enough and risks allowing the activities to continue.

Since Safeguard Defenders’ initial investigation, several more stations have been identified in the United States and Canada. An initial investigation by security police has already identified many others, at least in Europe. Further investigation will reveal more and is an essential step forward.

After Safeguard Defenders exposed one case of such “persuasion” operations carried out by one of the stations in Madrid, the Chinese Foreign Ministry responded by saying that “bilateral treaties [extraditions] are cumbersome” and that some European countries turn down such requests—offering this as an excuse for why the ministry found it acceptable to carry out such “persuasion” operations nonetheless. And that’s despite Spain maintaining an extradition treaty with China and often approving such requests.

In the United States, the FBI, in late October, unsealed two more indictments concerning Fox Hunt operations in the country, as well as in Canada, bringing the total number of known indictments to three. This is a very positive step, but with China claiming to have successfully concluded more than 11,000 of them, it’s a drop of water in a large sea. No other country has so far undertaken any similar action. Since Beijing claims to have persuaded 230,000 people to return to China between April 2021 and July 2022 alone—and only related to those wanted for fraud and related crimes—it’s hard to not assume that such persuasion operations are carried out on a large scale not just in the United States and Canada, but also in Europe and elsewhere.

On the plus side, the websites of these associations that run the stations often post incriminating information, and tracking down the individuals hired or appointed to run the stations is relatively straightforward. That the police back in China sometimes feel the need to publicize their work to secure the approval of their superiors also helps, as open-source research using Chinese police bulletins, police newspaper, and local media can be very helpful.

Ordering the stations to shut down by explicitly stating that they violate the law, launching formal investigations into the operations of these stations, and filing criminal charges where possible while evaluating the legality of the associations’ registration are all key steps to move forward. Until such is done, the Chinese diaspora across the United States, Canada, and elsewhere will live in fear, be unable to speak out freely, and be denied their democratic rights in their new homeland.

For them, it’s a matter of basic democratic freedoms that are being denied to them because of communist China’s growing presence overseas, where these stations are yet another tool in “using overseas Chinese to govern overseas Chinese.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.