CNN: China has over 100 police stations worldwide

Beijing has set up more than 100 so-called police stations worldwide to monitor, intimidate and to some repatriated Chinese citizens living in exile.

This is done through bilateral security agreements reached with states in Europe and Africa in order to have a broader international presence, a report that CNN owns said.

The Human Rights Organisation, Safeguard Defenders, headquartered in Madrid, said it found evidence that China was operating 48 additional police stations abroad, since this organisation for the first time discovered in September the existence of 54 such stations.
The new report focuses on the scale of the network and examines the role common police initiatives between China and several European states, including Serbia, Croatia, Romania and Italy, have played.

According to the new claims of the organisation, a Chinese citizen was reportedly forced to return home from operatives working secretly at a Chinese police station in the outskirts of Paris. The operatives were said to have been recruited for this purpose. Earlier, the organisation found that two Chinesemen in exile and others had been forcibly returned from Europe to one from Serbia, the other from Spain.

China has signed agreements on joint police patrols with Croatia and Serbia between 2018 and 2019 as part of its “Bresey initiative and” Street.

Chinese officers have been seen patrolling with their Croatian counterparts on the streets of Zagreb in July this year, Chinese media have reported. Meanwhile, a Zagreb police official has told the Xinhua agency that the patrols were essential “to protect and attract foreign tourists”.

Meanwhile, according to a 2019 report by the Reuters agency, it was said that Chinese officers had joined their Serbian counterparts on patrol in Belgrade to address the rise in the number of Chinese tourists. A Serbian police official had declared that Chinese officials do not have the power to make arrests.

Serbia's Ministry of Internal Affairs announced on December 4th that it is unaware of information that China has police stations in Serbia.

“We stress that based on the Memorandum of Understanding between Serbia's Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China, in terms of implementing joint police patrols signed on May 19, 2019, six Chinese police officers were present on joint patrols of Serbian and Chinese police for only one month, from September 17th to October 16th of 2019<1>, the report was said.

This ministry did not answer the questions of Radio Free Europe, sent on October 30th, to confirm or deny the existence of Chinese police stations in Serbia, as the organisation Safeguard Defenders had reported in the first report released in September of this year.

China is using these police networks to convince some of its inhabitants to return to China, even without their will, which according to official Chinese data, could be about a quarter of a million Chinese people worldwide, since Xi Jinping took power in China.

What we're seeing from China is increasing efforts to suppress discipline everywhere in the world, to threaten people, to molest them, to make sure they scare enough to remain silent or otherwise face return to China, against their” will, said Safeguard Defenders director Laura Harth.

Since the first publication of this organisation in September on this subject, there have been reactions in many countries.

Last month, Federal Bureau of Investigation director (FBI) Christopher Wray said before a national security committee that he was deeply concerned with the findings.
It's disturbing to think that Chinese police can set up stations, let's say in New York, without real coordination. This violates sovereignty and processes for co-operation among institutions of rank”, he said.

Ireland has closed down a Chinese police station that found it on its territory, meanwhile the Netherlands has taken similar measures to launch an investigation, as has Spain.

Harth from Safeguard Defenders said the organisation will likely find more such stations in the future.

“Kinna is not hiding what you're doing. They expressly say that they will expand these operations, so let's take seriously” these statements, she said. /rel