South Korea Conducts Nationwide Probe Into Alleged Covert Chinese ‘Police Stations’

A Chinese paramilitary policeman stands guard on the Bund waterfront during China's National Day celebrations in Shanghai on Oct. 1, 2022. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

South Korean officials opened a probe of alleged Chinese police stations operating covertly across the country after a Chinese restaurant in Seoul was found to have served as such a base last month.

South Korean intelligence officials and police jointly investigated the presence of covert Chinese police stations in various regions, including the capital city of Seoul and on Jeju Island, The Korea Herald reported on June 16.

Lawmaker Choe Jae-hyeong revealed findings that suggest Confucius Institutes promoted Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda and led activities targeting pro-Hong Kong democracy rallies at South Korean universities.

South Korea’s intelligence agency arrived at a tentative conclusion in May that a Chinese restaurant in the Songpa-gu district of Seoul was operating as a base for unofficial Chinese police operations.

In December 2022, a Chinese restaurant in the Gangnam district of Seoul was closed temporarily after South Korean authorities suspected the business of operating as a base for a covert Chinese police station.

Late last year, Spain-based Safeguard Defenders revealed that China was running more than 100 police stations in 53 countries that the human rights watchdog alleged were used to surveil Chinese dissidents and coerce them to return to China.

The report, titled “110 Overseas: Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild,” examined the initiative, which was begun by 10 “pilot provinces” in 2018. These stations also are called 110 Overseas, named after the country’s police emergency services phone number.

Police Outpost in New York City

An outpost in New York City was among the “first batch” of 30 overseas police service stations in 21 countries set up by the Public Security Bureau in Fuzhou, the capital city of the southern coastal province of Fujian. Other Chinese cities also set up their own outposts abroad.

On April 17, FBI agents arrested two men on charges that they helped operate the alleged Chinese secret police station in New York to track down and silence Chinese dissidents living in the United States.

China’s government has denied that they are police stations, saying that they exist mainly to provide services to citizens such as renewing driver’s licenses.

Safeguard Defenders, however, said such stations have a “more sinister goal, as they contribute to ‘resolutely cracking down on all kinds of illegal and criminal activities involving overseas Chinese.’” Some of the stations have already been “implicated in collaborating with Chinese police in carrying out policing operations on foreign soil,” the group said.

Until all the overseas Chinese police stations are shut down, “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,” Safeguard Defenders founder Peter Dahlin wrote in his analysis for The Epoch Times in December 2022.

“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.’”

Dorothy Li and The Associated Press contributed to this report.