Recently arrested New York City Chinese “police station” operators are the tip of a global iceberg of Beijing’s overseas repression operations.
By PHELIM KINE, CRISTINA GALLARDO and JOSEPH GEDEON
04/19/2023 05:19 PM EDT
Updated: 04/20/2023 12:03 PM EDT
Beijing has been operating an overseas police
station in New York. And London. And Rome. And Tokyo. And Toronto.
The Department of Justice’s indictment of two
Chinese citizens this week for using the unlawful Chinese police station in
Manhattan to go after dissidents highlights the growing tentacles of Beijing’s
overseas operations, which it uses to harass and silence critics around the
world.
The network also shows the extent
to which Beijing has managed to conduct influence campaigns inside Western
countries and violate others’ sovereignty while mostly evading law enforcement.
Security agencies across Europe
and the Americas are investigating more than 100 facilities that an advocacy
organization exposed in September as overseas outposts of China’s security
apparatus. In the U.S., that includes at least two others besides the one
targeted this week.
“These secret police stations reveal the CCP’s
blatant disregard and disrespect for the American rules and privacy,” said
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chair of House Foreign Affairs
Committee, using the abbreviation for the Chinese Communist Party. McCaul urged
the Biden administration to “root out these encroachments on U.S. sovereignty.”
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of
the House Select Committee on China, said in a statement Tuesday that the
Chinese police outposts raise the risk of the U.S. becoming “a hunting ground
for dictators.”
Here’s what we know about the network of Chinese
police stations across the world:
It’s a sprawling network
The Spain-based nonprofit advocacy organization
Safeguard Defenders published
data from China’s Ministry of Public Security in September that revealed that Beijing had
announced its “first batch” of “30 overseas police service stations in 25
cities in 21 countries.” By December, Safeguard Defender’s tally of such
facilities had grown
to more than 100 in
countries including the U.S., Canada, Nigeria, Japan, Argentina and Spain.
The stations appear to provide civilian cover for
Chinese government operations deemed too risky for official Chinese diplomats
to pull off. They provide toeholds in neighborhoods with large ethnic Chinese
and Asian communities — the Manhattan facility was in Chinatown — that allow
those operatives to function with relative anonymity.
They’re a “perfect platform to advance operations
that are favorable to Chinese government interests, including misinformation
and disinformation,” said Heather McMahon, a former senior director at the
President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which monitors the intelligence
community’s compliance with the Constitution and relevant laws. Safeguard
Defenders has reported that one of the purposes of these stations has
been to
“persuade” Chinese citizens who are implicated in crimes to return to China.
Authorities in at least five countries have
confirmed that at least some of these are indeed Chinese government operations
that violate laws barring the activities of foreign police personnel inside
their borders. Investigations into other outposts are ongoing in countries
including the United Kingdom, Japan and the Netherlands, but there have been no
arrests of individuals connected with those operations.
It’s unclear how extensive the network is and
whether the Safeguard Defenders’ report — and follow-up by individual
governments confirming the existence of such outposts — has prompted Beijing to
scale back the program to avoid detection.
The European offensive is underway, and embattled
Revelations about dozens of unlawful Chinese
police facilities in Europe prompted Italian EU Parliament member Alessandra
Basso to ask the
European Commission in December if there was an EU-wide strategy “to close down these police
stations and put an end to their activities.” The response: EU member states
are on their own in probing “any alleged violation of their laws or … internal
security occurring on their territory,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell
said in a
statement published last month.
EU governments are doing precisely that, with limited
success. The
German government revealed last month that Beijing was refusing to comply with Berlin’s demands
for the shutdown of two unlawful Chinese police stations in the country. Greek
police announced in December that they were investigating a similar operation in downtown
Athens. Dutch
media reported in
October the existence of two unlawful Chinese police outposts, prompting
denials from Beijing and a Dutch government pledge to probe those allegations.
That same month the Irish government ordered
the closure of
a similar facility in Dublin.
But activists say that’s inadequate given the
scale of the problem. Many European governments are clearly “not taking this
issue seriously at all,” argued Safeguard Defenders Campaign Director Laura
Harth.
Harth criticized the “absence of a strong and
unified public message” from affected countries “on the illegality of these
operations and the measures or investigations in place to counter these
activities.”
Complicating the situation: Chinese law
enforcement has legal footholds in Italy, Croatia and Serbia through deals with
Beijing that allow for “the stationing and deployment of Chinese police
officers” in those countries, according to a 2020 EU
parliamentary declaration. Those Chinese
police deploy on joint patrols with local counterparts in areas that attract large numbers
of Chinese tourists. But that declaration — signed by EU lawmakers from
countries including Germany, France, Denmark and Estonia — urged EU countries
to reconsider such agreements “with a country disrespecting human rights, the
rule of law and democratic values.”
In the U.K., where at least three alleged Chinese
police stations are reportedly operating, police investigations continue, Home
Office Minister Chris Philp said Wednesday.
Alicia Kearns, a Conservative MP who chairs the
House of Commons foreign affairs committee, said she is “exasperated that six
months since this issue was first raised in the House, that members are still
needing to ask the government why Chinese police stations are operating in at
least three locations on U.K. soil.”
“These stations are a very real example of
transnational repression being conducted by an authoritarian state, and the
government must take action to shut down these stations immediately,” she
added.
U.S. officials and policymakers have been worried about American
outposts for awhile
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair
of the House Select Committee on China, said in a statement Tuesday that the
Chinese police outposts raise the risk of the U.S. becoming “a hunting ground
for dictators.” | Francis Chung/POLITICO
Gallagher, the House China committee chair,
held a press
conference outside
the now-abandoned Chinese police outpost in New York in February and warned of
“at least two more on United States’ soil.” Safeguard Defenders has reported
the existence of a second such facility in an unidentified location in New York City
and another in Los Angeles.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told a
Senate hearing in November that he was aware of such an
operation in New York City and was “very concerned” about it. That culminated
with the
arrest Monday of
Chinese nationals Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping for conspiring to act as Chinese
government agents.
That same day, the Department of Justice charged
44 individuals — including 40 members of China’s Ministry of Public Security
and two officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China — with
“transnational repression offenses targeting U.S. residents.” Those suspects
“created and used fake social media accounts to harass and intimidate PRC
dissidents residing abroad and sought to suppress the dissidents’ free speech,”
said a DOJ
statement published Monday.
It’s an issue north of the U.S. border, too
Safeguard Defenders has reported four such
locations in the Toronto area, three in the Vancouver area and two more were
found unlisted in the Montreal area. And allegations last month that Beijing
meddled in Canada’s federal elections in 2019 and 2021 have made China’s potential malign
activities in the country a hot-button issue.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have since begun
a nationwide investigation into foreign interference following the report’s
findings, including into the Wenzhou Friendship Society in British Columbia.
Canada, unlike the United States, doesn’t force
foreign agents to register with the government. But amid growing calls for
change following the recent bombshell reports of China’s alleged interference,
Canada’s Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino announced that the Liberal
government has started consultations running until early May to consider
establishing its own registry system.
Beijing is in denial mode
Beijing denies that it operates unlawful overseas police
outposts. Instead it insists it operates “service centers” where Chinese people
residing abroad can “get their driver’s licenses renewed and receive physical
check-ups,” the spokesperson for the U.S. embassy in Washington, D.C., Liu
Pengyu, said in
November.
On Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson
Wang Wenbin called
the U.S. allegations “slanders and smears … There are simply no so-called
‘overseas police stations.’”
The FBI is on the hunt for more such facilities
There are concerns on Capitol Hill that the existence
of such outposts goes beyond just one location in Manhattan.
“Today’s arrests are only the tip of the iceberg,”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla) tweeted on Monday.
The FBI is clearly not stopping at the arrests of
Chen and Lu in New York City’s Chinatown. The agency has a dedicated transnational
repression website where the public can report such unlawful activities.
“We’re increasingly conducting outreach in order
to raise awareness of how some countries harass and intimidate their own citizens
living in the U.S.,” the FBI said in a statement.
And the New York City and DOJ indictments Monday
suggest that the authorities are closing in on any remaining Chinese unlawful
police outposts.
Christopher Johnson, a former senior China analyst
at the CIA, argued that the investigations simply need to be allowed to run
their course.
The U.S. government should “not overly freak out
about these police stations — where we discover them we should roll them up and
prosecute,” said Johnson, now the head of the China Strategies Group political
risk consultancy. “But there’s no need to paint [them] as an existential threat
to U.S. freedom and democracy.”
Finding and shuttering these outposts is tricky
China’s unlawful police outposts aren’t easy to
find.
Beijing positions them inside what appear to be
legitimate businesses or organizations that provide them a front to conduct
their operations. They operate discreetly and don’t advertise their actual
purpose. Members of local communities who are aware of such facilities are
hesitant to contact authorities for fear of possible Chinese government
reprisals against them in the U.S. or against family members in China.
“I think there are definitely more, it’s just that
they’re not listed on some public website,” said Human Rights Watch senior
China researcher Yaqiu Wang.
Some in Europe hope the indictments in New York
will help spur more action globally.
Reinhard Bütikofer, chair of the European
Parliament’s China relations delegation, said Europe should “take advantage” of
the opportunity that the U.S. action in New York offers to rally democracies
together and “show China its limits.”
Erica Orden and Wilhelmine Preussen contributed to this report.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/19/china-police-state-outposts-00092913
2 men charged with
running covert Chinese ‘police station’ in Manhattan
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/17/china-police-station-nyc-arrests-00092395
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