Why Is China Policing My City? | Opinion

The second he stepped off the plane at Madrid's Barajas airport in 2019, a Chinese citizen—identified as Liu by state-run media—breathed a sigh of relief. Wanted since February in his home county of Qingtian, in southeastern China, for an environmental misdemeanor, Liu had spent the eight-hour flight to Spain imagining a golden exile. The charge was severe, but Liu thought he had escaped it for good, aware that a Spanish judge would be unlikely to grant extradition. The two countries' 2006 treaty on the matter has been neutered since human rights groups began warning that standard guardrails against torture and the death penalty no longer held in China.

Any country that valued the rule of law would have let Liu's case rest at the mercy of the no-fly list. But China is no such country, and its prosecutorial ambitions reach far beyond what's allowed by international treaties. What ensued next depends on whom you ask. Per the state's press release, the Qingtian prosecutor worked through the Spanish chapter of the county's federation of overseas residents to provide "legal education" for Liu, who was "mobilized to participate in pollution control and environmental restoration" and in so doing "obtained leniency." The extraterritorial plea bargain worked: after investing an additional 5 million yuan in pollution mitigation, "Liu began to have the idea of returning to China to surrender," which he did in 2020. To law-abiders back home, the sequence must have looked like a white-glove, first-world maneuver. Potential wrongdoers likely got a different message: no matter where you flee, the long arm of the Chinese state will chase you down.

The latter reading is closer to reality, yet incomplete. As a fugitive facing communist justice, there is likely no amount of finessing that could have sat Liu in front of the prosecutor, let alone made him surrender and return. Instead, the full weight of China's police state was brought to bear on him through a so-called Chinese Overseas Home Association (COHA). Perhaps Liu built contacts among Madrid's vibrant expat community, who later crossed him. But more likely, the Madrid COHA, under the prosecutor's command, deployed a full-throttled policing operation that did everything short of kidnapping him to deliver Liu back to China. These kinds of para-judicial efforts tie into the "Fengqiao experience," which the China Media Project defines as a Mao-era (revived under Xi Jinping) "mythologized approach to social and political governance that essentially directed the masses themselves at the local level to carry out the on-site 'rectification' of so-called 'reactionary elements' in society."

Even worse, these transnational missions often (though not always) rely on overseas police stations, which the NGO Safeguard Defenders (SD) discusses in a recent report. While claiming to assist expats with standard bureaucratic paperwork such as renewing driver's licenses, these police stations operate in a legal no man's land, regularly breaching the host country's laws and territorial integrity. Although no exact worldwide count exists, SD sets a lower bound at 54 in 30 countries, with those of Fuzhou city alone (one of 10 provinces with them) at 38. The total number for China is likely in the hundreds. Although these stations mostly tackle petty crime—the regime touts having persuaded 230,000 nationals to return through 2021 to face charges—missions to return more serious offenders are likely to break local laws (who knows how they got hold of Liu?).

The regime's account of the mission served by these stations—to "persuade" suspects to return—is improbable. In October 2018, a theft suspect named Xia was tracked down in Belgrade by that city's station and, along with Qingtian's prosecutor, "persuaded to return" after rebuffing the station's attempts to contact her. How exactly—other than through policing methods deployed by the Belgrade station without Serbia's authorization—could police have gotten a recalcitrant suspect like Xia to return?

Per SD, these stations often employ guilt-by-association tactics, such as depriving the suspect's families of state benefits or school access back home. A notice issued by a station in Myanmar stated that Chinese nationals who were there illegally should return to China or there would be consequences for their loved ones.

Though in principle going after criminals alone, the evidence is fast piling up that these stations engage in politically repressive work against overseas dissidents. A story from May 2019 expressly referenced the Qingtian centers' role in the "collection of overseas Chinese sentiments, public opinions and policy information." Wang Jingyu, an asylum seeker in the Netherlands who fled reprisals for anti-government social media posts, claims he was threatened and sent harassing messages by the overseas station in Rotterdam, and that his parents back in China were targeted also. "One of the aims of these campaigns...is to crack down on dissent, is to silence people," said Laura Harth of Safeguard Defenders said in an interview with the Associated Press. "People that are being targeted, that have family members back in China, are afraid to speak out." Assisting Chinese expatriates is often a catch-all alibi for harassing dissidents.

In addition to the spotlight shone by Safeguard Defenders, the political response by the West has been building up but is so far insufficient. To begin with, those European countries that have engaged in joint operations with Chinese overseas stations—in Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Italy—should immediately halt them.

Shutting the stations down is the next step. In October, the Irish Ministry of Foreign Affairs ordered Dublin's overseas station to close. Faulting China for not alerting him of its launch through diplomatic means, Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra launched a probe into two stations in the Netherlands, and later similarly ordered them both shut in early November. Later that month, Canada summoned its Chinese ambassador and issued him a cease-and-desist warning concerning stations in its territory. These three countries are showing the way. Will the rest of the free world follow?

Jorge González-Gallarza (@JorgeGGallarza) co-hosts the Uncommon Decency podcast.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.