China Runs 100 Cop Stations In 53 Nations To Harass Its Own Citizens

Beijing has set up more than 100 so-called overseas police stations across the globe to monitor, harass, and, in some cases repatriate Chinese citizens living in exile, using bilateral security arrangements struck with countries in Europe and Africa to gain a widespread presence internationally, a new report shared exclusively with Nina dos Santos of CNN alleges.

Photo Insert: China's National Security Law has become synonymous with harassment both at home and abroad.

Madrid-based human rights campaigner Safeguard Defenders says it found evidence China was operating 48 additional police stations abroad since the group first revealed the existence of 54 such stations in September.

Its new release – dubbed “Patrol and Persuade” – focuses on the scale of the network and examines the role that joint policing initiatives between China and several European nations, including Italy, Croatia, Serbia and Romania have played in piloting a wider expansion of Chinese overseas stations than was known until the organization’s revelations came out.

Among the fresh claims leveled by the group: A Chinese citizen was coerced into returning home by operatives working undercover in a Chinese overseas police station in a Paris suburb, expressly recruited for that purpose, in addition to an earlier disclosure that two more Chinese exiles have been forcibly returned from Europe – one in Serbia, the other in Spain.

Who runs the police stations? Safeguard Defenders, which combs open-source, official Chinese documents for evidence of alleged human rights abuses, said it has identified four different police jurisdictions of China’s Ministry of Public Security active across at least 53 countries, spanning all four corners of the globe, ostensibly to help expatriates from those parts of China with their needs abroad.

With the enactment of its National Security Law, China legitimized the arrest and prosecution of its citizens overseas. The same law curiously makes it possible to prosecute foreigners who criticize China in their home countries, making extraterritoriality an irrational feature of Xi Jinping’s law.

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