[CLIP] Inside China’s Secret Overseas Police Stations: Safeguard Defenders’ Laura Harth

You broke the story, your organization broke the story of the existence of these what they call Chinese police stations in all sorts of countries around the world. Most recently, in the fall of 2022, we learned of one such setup in Manhattan, Chinatown. So I want to start there because that's what people will remember, right? And so just give me the whole picture of the realities. What are these things? Why are they there? So Safeguard Defenders, we came across the existence of these so-called overseas police service stations, which is a setup between public security authorities in China in cooperation with United Front-linked groups around the world, right? Because what we uncovered was well over 100 such stations in at least 53 countries around the world. So this is a global endeavor. Now, we came across them because we had been tracking the CCP's illegal repatriation methods, right? So the illegal long-arm policing operations carried out by authorities from China, by CCP agents around the world to coerce people back to China, to bring people back to China against their will. And so the stations obviously played at least some role in this. Absolutely. And I'll just mention for the benefit of our audience, the United Front, of course, are the Chinese Communist Party's overseas influence operations, various different groups, like often student groups and so forth, that are operating here, working hand-in-hand with authorities from China. So why do these things exist? I mean, you have by far the most comprehensive reporting. So break it down for me. What happened is starting in 2016, or maybe going back a bit further, basically since Xi Jinping came to power, what we've really seen is an explosion, if you will, in these long-arm policing operations by the Chinese authorities, by the Chinese Communist Party around the world. And so we've been looking at the techniques, at the regulations and policies they've described to do this back in China. And what we see then in 2016 is we see local, provincial or city authorities in China kind of mimicking, looking at those national guidelines, national regulations and saying, hey, we can do this as well. Let's demonstrate how good we are. And so they start connecting actively with these United Front groups around the world. I mean, they had been connected, but they kind of start formalizing these bonds with those groups to use those existing networks of individuals and associations around the world to be better able to kind of execute, if you will, some of these operations. And I think one part of what they were doing, something that the Chinese authorities have not denied, is provide so-called consular services, administrative services, which renewing your passport, renewing your driver's licenses. Now, it's very important to point out that this in and of itself is already illegal. It may not necessarily be a criminal offense, but under international law, this is illegal. This is a violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. You can't just come in and set up your consular outposts wherever you want without the consent of the host government. So China had already been doing this. They've not been denying that they've been doing this. They've even been revindicating the fact that they've been doing this. But on top of that, what obviously concerned us at Safeguard Defenders was seeing that the central authority and kind of coordinating all those different services that they were offering were the public security authorities of these four specific locations in China. And we were able to tie, again, all exclusively on the basis of open source evidence, to tie those operations, to tie some of those stations directly to so-called persuasion-to-return operations. Now, a persuasion-to-return operation is the preferred method of the PRC authorities. And again, this has been described officially in a written legal interpretation in 2018. It is their preferred method to go after targets abroad and coerce them to go back to China. So it's persuasion, like heavy persuasion, right? It sounds very nice. It sounds like it's a gentle talk and invite. Obviously, it is not. It starts usually with threats and harassment, or even worse, punishment of family members back home, kind of pushing those family members and convincing their relatives overseas to either be silent, stop their activism maybe, or convince them to come back. And I think, for example, the Uyghur communities overseas, diasporas, have been talking about this a lot, right? A lot of them weren't able to talk to their family members for years. And then suddenly, maybe because they've spoken publicly, you know, they suddenly get a phone call from a family member or from a public security agent using their family member's phone to come back. So we kind of know that tactic. But others are, you know, threats and harassment, or worse, delivered directly to the target overseas. And that's obviously something where we've seen these police stations, so-called police stations, active in both on the basis of that open source evidence, which included a video of such an operation taking place in Spain, in Madrid. So where you had the people in Madrid, Spain, with the suspect, the target for repatriation in direct video meeting with the public security authorities back home in China, and who also had a family member of that target overseas with them. So you kind of saw it play out on video, and such a station was involved. And then obviously, we've seen the indictment coming out here in spring, in New York, against two people linked to the so-called Chinese overseas police station in New York, which again, alleges that these people were engaged in, you know, surveillance, harassment, threats against an individual on American soil at the behest of Chinese authorities. So those are the kind of things that we've seen, and that are obviously of grave concern, both for the human rights and freedoms of the people that are involved at the targets, but also just in terms of the violation, like the brazen violation of territorial sovereignty, and judicial sovereignty that we're seeing in these cases.