The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has set up unofficial police “service stations” not just in Toronto, Ontario, but in other major cities across dozens of countries, an investigative report has found.
The report states that the operations “eschew official bilateral police and judicial cooperation” and display the rise of “transnational repression” and “long-arm policing” by the CCP in other countries as China now appears to be monitoring international dissidents.
The “110 Overseas: Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild” report was published in September by the Spain-based human rights NGO Safeguard Defenders. The report states that 30 Chinese surveillance stations were established in 25 cities across 21 countries at the start of 2022.
The surveillance stations are under the jurisdiction of the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau in Fujian Province, which falls under the Chinese Ministry of Public Security. They also go by “110 overseas,” named after the Chinese phone number for emergency services, 110.
The investigation, which is 20 pages in length, contains five “major” revelations.
The report revealed that between April 2021 and July 2022, Chinese police had “persuaded” 230,000 claimed fugitives to return to China “voluntarily,” with the report stating officials admitted that “not all the targets have committed any crimes.”
The country’s police also established “Nine forbidden countries, where Chinese nationals are no longer allowed to live unless they have ‘good reason,'” according to the report.
The investigation also revealed that new tools for “‘persuasion operations” were created, “including denying the target’s children in China the right to education, and other limitations on family members, punishing those without suspicion of any wrongdoing by ‘guilt by association,'” a pracitice similar to those in North Korea. Family members that don’t help Chinese police “persuade” their targets overseas “should be investigated and punished by either police or the internal Party police the CCDI”
The country has estavlished at least 54 police-run “overseas police service centers” across five continents, “some of which are implicated in collaborating with Chinese police in carrying out policing operations on foreign soil (including in Spain),” the report states.
The investigation also discovered a new law, adopted September 2 and going into effect on December 1, which establishes “full extraterritoriality over Chinese and foreigners globally for certain crimes (fraud, telecom fraud, online scams, etc.).”
