Communist China Establishes Global Presence Through Overseas Police Stations

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.”