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26-04-2023
STOCKHOLM/ LONDON: A hotel in Stockholm, an estate agent’s office in London and a space above a noodle shop in New York City’s Manhattan might seem like innocuous places, but they are among several locations around the world that have played host to alleged Chinese police stations.
With most of the identified facilities in Europe and North America, Chinese citizens who have fled repression at home fear they could now be ensnared by the increasingly long arm of Beijing’s law enforcement.
“People are afraid that it is becoming impossible to escape Chinese repression even in places like London,” said Simon Cheng, who was once detained in southern China and is the founder of London-based Hongkongers in Britain.
The existence of the police stations was revealed at the end of last year when Spain-based nongovernmental organization Safeguard Defenders revealed in two reports based on open-source research that at least 100 police stations had been established outside China by several different Chinese police jurisdictions since 2018.
Aside from a location in Dublin that had a plaque in front reading “Fuzhou Police Service Overseas Station”, most of the stations have operated clandestinely and outside public knowledge.
Among the diaspora communities from Chinese and Hong Kong dissidents to Tibetans and Uighurs, the stations stand as a warning that without concrete action by the democratic countries in which many of the alleged facilities are operating, there will be few places left in the world where they can be safe from the Chinese state.
After months of inaction, the United States announced its first arrests in connection with the Chinese police stations last week.
At a press conference on April 17, the Justice Department said it had arrested Liu Jianwang, 61, and Chen Jinping, 59, on charges of operating a police station on behalf of China, accusing them of engaging in transnational repression against members of the Chinese diaspora community in the US.
The department added that the two reportedly admitted to having deleted correspondence with a Chinese official once they realized they were under investigation. It did not confirm the location of the alleged police station, but the case is suspected to be linked to the Manhattan site, which closed towards the end of last year.
US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace sought to reassure those diaspora communities that have traditionally been targets of Chinese repression.
“My office and our law enforcement partners are here to protect you and your rights, and no foreign country will stop us from doing that,” he said at the press conference.
Other Western countries have yet to make progress on the issue, including the United Kingdom where Cheng was given political asylum in 2020. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
