Over 100 secret Chinese police stations operating worldwide

Just days after the FBI busted up a secret Chinese police force operating in NYC, information has resurfaced documenting six more secret police stations being run in the US, and almost 100 more operating in major cities worldwide.

Safeguard Defenders, a small human rights group located in Madrid, has been documenting the presence of dozens of Chinese government-sponsored police stations across the globe since 2014.

The organization published several in-depth reports on the Communist regime’s secret stations in 2022.

Two reports, 110 Overseas: Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild and its follow-up Patrol and Persuade, both released this past fall, revealed a total of 102 clandestine Chinese police stations operating in 53 counties across the world.

The overseas locations include such major metropolitan western cities as Montreal, London, Dublin, Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Prague, Budapest, and Stockholm.

Many of the stations were said to have been recently set up during the Covid 19 pandemic.

The reports also identified a second unknown NYC location, as well as five other stations operating in the US, including in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, and cities in Nebraska and Minnesota.

Besides North America and Europe, stations were also found in Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceana, including Tokyo, Sydney and New Zealand.

The stations are known to operate under the direction of the People’s Republic of China through China’s national police force, Ministry of Public Security (MPS).

The PCR back stations are often established under the false pretenses of helping to provide supportive services to local Chinese residents living in the area.

But the real goal, according to reports, is to locate Chinese dissidents – considered “wanted fugitives” by the PRC – living abroad and force them to return to the homeland.

Often times this is accomplished through involuntary means, which can even include kidnapping, according to the Safeguard Defenders investigations.

Once a secret station is established in a foreign nation, the MPS officers will use any means to threaten, harass, and intimidate their targets.

“Sometimes Chinese nationals abroad are forced to return because the Embassy refuses their request to renew their passports, others are targeted via cyber-attacks and harassment,” according to the group’s January 2022 report, Involuntary Returns.

The clandestine operations are directly connected to the PRC’s “912 Special Project Working Group,” whose sole purpose is to target Chinese dissidents located throughout the world, including in the US.

The arrested New York City-based MPS officers are accused of creating thousands of fake online personas on social media sites, such as Twitter, using temporary email addresses to not only target dissidents but disseminate official PRC government propaganda.

The officers also attempted to recruit U.S. persons to act as unwitting agents of the PCR and go after the targeted individuals.

The FBI said the 44 defendants charged this week in New York City established the Chinatown-based police station in February 2022, the first overseas MPS police station set up in the US.

The lower Manhattan station was shut down by the fall of 2022 after those operating it became aware of the FBI’s investigation.

A spokesman for the China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the US charges “groundless accusations.”

“The relevant claims have no factual basis, and there is no such thing as an overseas police station,” spokesperson Wang Wenbin said following the FBI arrests.

The PCR missive, also known as Operation Fox Hunt, is carried out by the Chinese government “legally or illegally, with the host country’s permission or undercover,” the human rights report stated.

Operation Fox Hunt is also not new to the White House, according to the Safeguard Defenders report.

In 2015, Washington accused Beijing of regularly “sending Chinese agents to the US on tourist or business visas to covertly track down and repatriate fugitives on US soil.”

The report states that in 2015, one former Fox Hunt director was quoted as saying, “Whether or not there is an agreement in place, as long as there is information that there is a criminal suspect, we will chase them over there, we will take our work to them, anywhere.”

The PRC has claimed at least in Africa and Asia, the stations have been set up in explicit agreement with the host countries.

“These cases demonstrate the lengths the PRC government will go to silence and harass U.S. persons who exercise their fundamental rights to speak out against PRC oppression, including by unlawfully exploiting a U.S.-based technology company,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the US Justice Department’s National Security Division.

“These actions violate our laws and are an affront to our democratic values and basic human rights," Olsen said.

Safeguard Defenders is registered under the EU in Spain, but is considered a non-governmental organization.