Non-China cities with Chinese police stations include:
> Amsterdam, Athens, Belgrade, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Budapest, Dublin, Florence, Frankfurt, Glasgow, Lisbon, London, Madeira, Madrid, Milan, New York City, Paris, Porto, Prague, Quito, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Sao Paulo, Slovakia, Stockholm, Rotterdam, Toronto, Tokyo, Valencia, Viña del Mar, Vienna.
> some countries where fugitives may have fled have either avoided signing extradition agreements with the PRC or have rescinded them following the introduction of the National Security Law to Hong Kong in 2020. These include Australia, Canada, Germany, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK, and the United States.
> ..PRC authorities ..use alternative means to apprehend fugitives. “Persuasion” has become a common tactic, which human rights groups have called “involuntary returns.” Such returns are achieved by threats against family members in the PRC, directly approaching and intimidating the fugitive overseas, or outright kidnapping ..Involuntary returns ..comprise a mix of genuine criminal fugitives, officials who have fallen out of favor with the CCP leadership, and others pursued for their religious or political beliefs.
Note that in Australia I know first hand of Chinese university students having their families back home threatened due to them participating in protests.
I have no doubt that this is not just about criminal activity but any activity that the PRC does not approve of.
So how does this work? Police stations are bases of operation for policemen. And policemen are people who need to have a lawful authority for what they do. These folks roleplaying as policemen have no such authority.
So what do they do? I can't imagine they are detaining people, giving out fines, etc. So what makes them police? Shouldn't we call them spies instead?
Also, one could imagine, these “Persuasion” tactics, might be more successful than, the Western approach of where extradition treaties exist.
Putting social (family?) pressure on someone probably more likely leads to a person giving in, than just being exposed to legal pressure that possibly can't reach them.
The Toronto one… seems like the CCP operatives absconded with the funding!
> All were in areas with large Chinese populations, but no one The Globe spoke to was aware of a police service station or had heard of the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau. One address in Markham was a private home, while the other was a mall full of small Chinese businesses and restaurants. The third property, in a business park near a highway, is owned by the Canada Toronto FuQing Business Association, a federally incorporated non-profit.
Don't suggest Chinese police overseas are doing covert action. It's silly, those stations are there for helping Chinese tourists, because there are so many in those places.
If Chinese want to do covert action overseas they don't send police to do it I think... It would not be covert.
This mushing together is like a racist smear fear mongering. It's bad.
Using "persuasion" in quotation marks is perhaps too nice.
It's coercion, if not worse.
Not that there is much we can do about it. Though limiting ability of Chinese authorities to operate outside china is fair. After all we don't permit organized crime either.
> a seemingly recent campaign to counter transnational telecom and online fraud (according to the official provincial statements)
The increase in telecom scamming activity is a real thing in China, with scammers operating from southeastern Asia countries. And operators are often Chinese citizens hired for what they originally thought would be "oversea job with good pay". The "persuaded to return" strategy might be targeted primarily at them.
Those scams are particularly bad -- maybe even worse than the telecom scams happening in the US and other wealthy English-speaking countries -- because taking personal loans is way too easy in China. A few clicks on a lender's app and you get cash transferred to your account instantly. And there are hundreds of such apps. Scammers can talk victims into maxing out their credit lines and wire the loaned cash away.
And the fact that there isn't "personal bankruptcy" laws in China also makes it worse. Such loans are rarely forgiven and victims often had to pay them off with their future income for years out of the fear that loan defaults can affect their credit score for life.
So I guess this is Chinese police's way of "do something about it". Of course they don't have jurisdiction overseas and should have gone with Interpol and/or local police first, except that hasn't been very effective. My 2 cents on the reasons behind this is:
1. Local police might be paid off;
2. No incentive for local police to prioritize their resource for cases like this -- there were no victims in their own countries;
3. There are just too many scammers;
Surely once this set up is in place it's possible to extend its coverage to harass/"persuade" political dissidents but CCP has already be doing it for years without it. If this oversea police "persuasion" program is getting local law enforcement's attention to the point that they can arrest both them and the scammers, I would see it as an absolute win.
> Since the end of November 2021, many notices have been issued to warn the Chinese public not to travel to nine countries with serious telecom and web crimes: Cambodia, the UAE, the Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Malaysia, Turkey and Indonesia. People who have no "strict necessity" or "emergency reason" to travel to or stay in those countries are required to return to China as soon as possible.
Not too sure about this one though... But the organization is too well aligned with American espionage goals to dismiss it as just a well-intentioned grassroots organization. Do you have any good pointers about how the org is being funded? (Usually the blatantly obvious ones have funding traces back to places like various alphabet-named agencies and other places like the Ford Foundation or the RAND institute.)
It would not surprise me if a large part of this is not driven by an attempt to control the drug trade (e.g., opium) that flows through the golden triangle and southwest China. Note that this trade is huge and is a problem in China.
I don’t want to sound like an apologist (not a fan of this line of action for a number of reasons), but the focus on the nine forbidden countries (mostly in Southeast Asia) and the number of folks repatriated from those countries makes me think that this is not a small part of the motivation behind these actions.
This is very unlikely related with drug trafficking but really to stop fraud activities.
The reason is really simple, crimes associated with drugs in China can lead to death penalties and the threshold is very low. So in most cases people caught with drug trafficking in China are popped, no matter of their nationalities.
Not sure if you guys ever received calls claiming that they were DHL/FedEx etc, and there was a package for you to pick up. More ridiculously, sometimes they even claim to be the Chinese Embassy and of course there was package for you to pick up.
Variety of illegal activities, from illegal telefraud to gambling designed to circumvent PRC gaming laws. Philippines just agreed to deport 40000 chinese workers involved in offshore gambling. Lots of low level crime out there host country wants to sort out but no extradition treaty due to geopolitics. PRC's most wanted big fish list is like 20 people.
Weird that this is downvoted; it is quite factual.
I think you're right about it being centered on Zomia:
> The majority of identified targets were located in northern Myanmar.
but your specific example of the illicit trade is slightly off: aiui, the relevance of the golden triangle as an opioid producer has actually fallen off since the early 2000s as a result of DEA pressure and market shifts, but the slack was taken up by amphetamines (mostly ya ba).
> A new report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) confirms that production and demand for opium has further declined as the region’s synthetic drug market continues to expand and diversify.
> The prevalence rate of heroin use decreased from 0.67% (0.63–0.73%) in 2011 to 0.57% (0.53–0.61%) in 2015, while the prevalence rate of methamphetamine use doubled from 0.20% (0.17–0.24%) in 2011 to 0.48% (0.46–0.50%) in 2015.
> Myanmar is believed to be the single largest supplier of China’s drug market. In 2013, 92.2 percent of the heroin and 95.2 percent of methamphetamine seized in China were traced to Myanmar.
All that said, Chinese in northern Burma also tend to be associated with other rackets:
> Solely in Wanding (畹町), a river port bordering Myanmar in Ruili city,Yunnan province, over 960 suspects of telecom fraud and over 100 suspects of cross-border gambling
Cross-border gambling is huge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mong_La is basically a city-sized casino, built directly across the border from Yunnan (which is incredibly porous due to the terrain, so just clamping down on crossings doesn't work). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangkham is the same deal but in Wa territory, not Shan.
The CCP really really hates cross-border gambling for a variety of reasons, including capital outflows and its nexus with domestic corruption:
There's also a lot of jade/amber/wildlife smuggling but the gambling thing really is astonishingly huge business in northern Burma. So, I see it as a "yes, and": there's a lot of reasons why the CCP would want to crack down on the behavior of Chinese in northern Burma, and the drug trade is a plausible one.
Time and again we see how every dictatorship eventually becomes a snake eating it's own tail, and succumbs to self-inflicted wounds...
How can they probably hope to build an advanced society treating their people like that? It will only push Chinese emigres abroad to break every tie with their home country, including relatives that stayed behind, reducing any positive impact on homeland of those people learning things and making money abroad.
I guess a bit like in the spy movies where American spies were free to roam everywhere, the superpower status (i.e. money and market access) of China means they get to swing their police truncheon around and most countries just stay quiet about it.
And they were even watching Xinjiang activists outside of China (Source [2]):
> [...] one of the officers shoved a photo under my nose. It was my daughter Gulhumar. She was posing in front of the Place du Trocadéro in Paris, bundled up in her black coat, the one I’d given her. In the photo, she was smiling, a miniature East Turkestan flag in her hand, a flag the Chinese government had banned. To Uighurs, that flag symbolises the region’s independence movement. The occasion was one of the demonstrations organised by the French branch of the World Uighur Congress, which represents Uighurs in exile and speaks out against Chinese repression in Xinjiang.
The drily-written post only talks about telecommunications fraud. Is that a big deal in China, are they doing something like Nigerian 419 scams? I suppose they'd be targeting mostly Chinese citizens, using e.g. WeChat, although that's probably a bad idea because how much do you want to bet WeChat can report home the user's GPS coordinates or even just their IP would be enough for country geo-locating.
Is this actually true? It says there is a chinese police station in NYC. Where? I looked at the NGO's pdf and didn't see an address.
It's unclear exactly what having a "police station" means. Has the NGO reported the CCP taking actions in foreign countries against Chinese nationals? The stories are all about getting at them by threatening family in China.
An example of mainland presence from one of the cities mentioned: https://nextshark.com/hong-kong-chinese-nationalists-superca...
Imo, the laurentians area (ottawa/quebec) political class basically hates the rest of the country because we represent their parochial origins, and so they figure they can just import new constituents who can be more easily bribed or with special protections for their money, as a way to keep themselves in power, without having to listen to the constituents they imagine themselves as having transcended and left-behind. Something similar is likely true in other countries with these bases as well.
I can't believe that I can say without an ounce of hyperbole that our representatitives made a deal with the devil, and now they have communist party secret police bases in their cities.
Canada made no special deal with “the devil” and the article you showed in no way demonstrates that.
All those secret polices offices in canada were visited by journalists and nobody was there. If China is sending spy, it’s definitely not under the agreement or through a special deal with the Canadian government.
People in the West rarely get to encounter situations such as these that make me thankful every day for the imperfect heaven we live in.
This is a daily experience for the families of those 230k. Imagine the horrors the families in places like Xinjiang are going through. Even if a small portion of these reports is factual, we're talking rape, torture, organ harvesting, despicable acts against human life everywhere.
What we have in the west isn't perfect, but God am i thankful to not have my family denied education or other social essentials because i decide to speak my mind.
> thankful to not have my family denied education or other social essentials because i decide to speak my mind
Ongoing vigilance is essential to preserve these freedoms, as evidenced in the recent US DOJ prosecution of eBay executives for intimidation of a journalist, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33049853
> A former eBay Inc. executive was sentenced on Thursday to almost five years in prison for leading a scheme to terrorize the creators of an online newsletter that included sending live spiders, cockroaches, a funeral wreath and other disturbing deliveries to their home.
In many cases, the families of some criminals are enjoying the benefit of the crimes. Actually that's how people from a same village can all go abroad participate in telecom scam activities. They see someone worked abroad and made a lot money, built a new house. The degree of such activities has became a major issue in China, that's why the whole operation was needed.
What's worse now is that there are areas in southeast Asia and Africa have became a hotbed for kidnapping, Chinese citizens being lured abroad, kidnapped, slaved. If you read Chinese, go on Telegram, you see people being sold all the time.
[+] [-] walterbell|3 years ago|reply
> Amsterdam, Athens, Belgrade, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Budapest, Dublin, Florence, Frankfurt, Glasgow, Lisbon, London, Madeira, Madrid, Milan, New York City, Paris, Porto, Prague, Quito, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Sao Paulo, Slovakia, Stockholm, Rotterdam, Toronto, Tokyo, Valencia, Viña del Mar, Vienna.
https://jamestown.org/program/future-global-policeman-the-gr...
> some countries where fugitives may have fled have either avoided signing extradition agreements with the PRC or have rescinded them following the introduction of the National Security Law to Hong Kong in 2020. These include Australia, Canada, Germany, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK, and the United States.
> ..PRC authorities ..use alternative means to apprehend fugitives. “Persuasion” has become a common tactic, which human rights groups have called “involuntary returns.” Such returns are achieved by threats against family members in the PRC, directly approaching and intimidating the fugitive overseas, or outright kidnapping ..Involuntary returns ..comprise a mix of genuine criminal fugitives, officials who have fallen out of favor with the CCP leadership, and others pursued for their religious or political beliefs.
Earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33049729
[+] [-] threeseed|3 years ago|reply
I have no doubt that this is not just about criminal activity but any activity that the PRC does not approve of.
[+] [-] Amfy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VectorLock|3 years ago|reply
Wow. Actual gangster tactics.
[+] [-] yreg|3 years ago|reply
So what do they do? I can't imagine they are detaining people, giving out fines, etc. So what makes them police? Shouldn't we call them spies instead?
[+] [-] Amfy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scoundreller|3 years ago|reply
> All were in areas with large Chinese populations, but no one The Globe spoke to was aware of a police service station or had heard of the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau. One address in Markham was a private home, while the other was a mall full of small Chinese businesses and restaurants. The third property, in a business park near a highway, is owned by the Canada Toronto FuQing Business Association, a federally incorporated non-profit.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-china-police-s...
[+] [-] timeon|3 years ago|reply
Is Bratislava too small?
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jccalhoun|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NonNefarious|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graderjs|3 years ago|reply
If Chinese want to do covert action overseas they don't send police to do it I think... It would not be covert.
This mushing together is like a racist smear fear mongering. It's bad.
[+] [-] jopsen|3 years ago|reply
It's coercion, if not worse.
Not that there is much we can do about it. Though limiting ability of Chinese authorities to operate outside china is fair. After all we don't permit organized crime either.
[+] [-] yogenpro|3 years ago|reply
> a seemingly recent campaign to counter transnational telecom and online fraud (according to the official provincial statements)
The increase in telecom scamming activity is a real thing in China, with scammers operating from southeastern Asia countries. And operators are often Chinese citizens hired for what they originally thought would be "oversea job with good pay". The "persuaded to return" strategy might be targeted primarily at them.
Those scams are particularly bad -- maybe even worse than the telecom scams happening in the US and other wealthy English-speaking countries -- because taking personal loans is way too easy in China. A few clicks on a lender's app and you get cash transferred to your account instantly. And there are hundreds of such apps. Scammers can talk victims into maxing out their credit lines and wire the loaned cash away.
And the fact that there isn't "personal bankruptcy" laws in China also makes it worse. Such loans are rarely forgiven and victims often had to pay them off with their future income for years out of the fear that loan defaults can affect their credit score for life.
So I guess this is Chinese police's way of "do something about it". Of course they don't have jurisdiction overseas and should have gone with Interpol and/or local police first, except that hasn't been very effective. My 2 cents on the reasons behind this is:
1. Local police might be paid off;
2. No incentive for local police to prioritize their resource for cases like this -- there were no victims in their own countries;
3. There are just too many scammers;
Surely once this set up is in place it's possible to extend its coverage to harass/"persuade" political dissidents but CCP has already be doing it for years without it. If this oversea police "persuasion" program is getting local law enforcement's attention to the point that they can arrest both them and the scammers, I would see it as an absolute win.
[+] [-] mannerheim|3 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/03/16/...
[+] [-] sva_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyber_kinetist|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justusw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csa|3 years ago|reply
I don’t want to sound like an apologist (not a fan of this line of action for a number of reasons), but the focus on the nine forbidden countries (mostly in Southeast Asia) and the number of folks repatriated from those countries makes me think that this is not a small part of the motivation behind these actions.
[+] [-] mrjin|3 years ago|reply
The reason is really simple, crimes associated with drugs in China can lead to death penalties and the threshold is very low. So in most cases people caught with drug trafficking in China are popped, no matter of their nationalities.
Not sure if you guys ever received calls claiming that they were DHL/FedEx etc, and there was a package for you to pick up. More ridiculously, sometimes they even claim to be the Chinese Embassy and of course there was package for you to pick up.
So that was that.
[+] [-] dirtyid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] livueta|3 years ago|reply
I think you're right about it being centered on Zomia:
> The majority of identified targets were located in northern Myanmar.
but your specific example of the illicit trade is slightly off: aiui, the relevance of the golden triangle as an opioid producer has actually fallen off since the early 2000s as a result of DEA pressure and market shifts, but the slack was taken up by amphetamines (mostly ya ba).
https://www.unodc.org/roseap//en/2021/02/myanmar-opium-surve...
> A new report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) confirms that production and demand for opium has further declined as the region’s synthetic drug market continues to expand and diversify.
That change in drug profile appears to also be true in Yunnan: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.0025...
> The prevalence rate of heroin use decreased from 0.67% (0.63–0.73%) in 2011 to 0.57% (0.53–0.61%) in 2015, while the prevalence rate of methamphetamine use doubled from 0.20% (0.17–0.24%) in 2011 to 0.48% (0.46–0.50%) in 2015.
However, you are absolutely correct that even accounting for trends, Burma is the source of most of both opioids and amphetamines: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/a-peopl...
> Myanmar is believed to be the single largest supplier of China’s drug market. In 2013, 92.2 percent of the heroin and 95.2 percent of methamphetamine seized in China were traced to Myanmar.
All that said, Chinese in northern Burma also tend to be associated with other rackets:
> Solely in Wanding (畹町), a river port bordering Myanmar in Ruili city,Yunnan province, over 960 suspects of telecom fraud and over 100 suspects of cross-border gambling
Cross-border gambling is huge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mong_La is basically a city-sized casino, built directly across the border from Yunnan (which is incredibly porous due to the terrain, so just clamping down on crossings doesn't work). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangkham is the same deal but in Wa territory, not Shan.
The CCP really really hates cross-border gambling for a variety of reasons, including capital outflows and its nexus with domestic corruption:
https://agbrief.com/news/china/09/04/2021/chinas-cross-borde...
https://www.asgam.com/index.php/2022/02/17/china-vows-to-acc...
There's also a lot of jade/amber/wildlife smuggling but the gambling thing really is astonishingly huge business in northern Burma. So, I see it as a "yes, and": there's a lot of reasons why the CCP would want to crack down on the behavior of Chinese in northern Burma, and the drug trade is a plausible one.
[+] [-] walterbell|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaaaaaaaaaab|3 years ago|reply
lol, are we back to the 19th century?
[+] [-] anovikov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netsharc|3 years ago|reply
I guess a bit like in the spy movies where American spies were free to roam everywhere, the superpower status (i.e. money and market access) of China means they get to swing their police truncheon around and most countries just stay quiet about it.
And they were even watching Xinjiang activists outside of China (Source [2]):
> [...] one of the officers shoved a photo under my nose. It was my daughter Gulhumar. She was posing in front of the Place du Trocadéro in Paris, bundled up in her black coat, the one I’d given her. In the photo, she was smiling, a miniature East Turkestan flag in her hand, a flag the Chinese government had banned. To Uighurs, that flag symbolises the region’s independence movement. The occasion was one of the demonstrations organised by the French branch of the World Uighur Congress, which represents Uighurs in exile and speaks out against Chinese repression in Xinjiang.
The drily-written post only talks about telecommunications fraud. Is that a big deal in China, are they doing something like Nigerian 419 scams? I suppose they'd be targeting mostly Chinese citizens, using e.g. WeChat, although that's probably a bad idea because how much do you want to bet WeChat can report home the user's GPS coordinates or even just their IP would be enough for country geo-locating.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/09/secret-deal-re... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/12/uighur-xinjian...
[+] [-] miohtama|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flerovium|3 years ago|reply
It's unclear exactly what having a "police station" means. Has the NGO reported the CCP taking actions in foreign countries against Chinese nationals? The stories are all about getting at them by threatening family in China.
[+] [-] motohagiography|3 years ago|reply
I can't believe that I can say without an ounce of hyperbole that our representatitives made a deal with the devil, and now they have communist party secret police bases in their cities.
[+] [-] jeromegv|3 years ago|reply
All those secret polices offices in canada were visited by journalists and nobody was there. If China is sending spy, it’s definitely not under the agreement or through a special deal with the Canadian government.
You are imagining a lot of things.
[+] [-] o0-0o|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] visiblink|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] harpiaharpyja|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DisjointedHunt|3 years ago|reply
This is a daily experience for the families of those 230k. Imagine the horrors the families in places like Xinjiang are going through. Even if a small portion of these reports is factual, we're talking rape, torture, organ harvesting, despicable acts against human life everywhere.
What we have in the west isn't perfect, but God am i thankful to not have my family denied education or other social essentials because i decide to speak my mind.
[+] [-] walterbell|3 years ago|reply
Ongoing vigilance is essential to preserve these freedoms, as evidenced in the recent US DOJ prosecution of eBay executives for intimidation of a journalist, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33049853
> A former eBay Inc. executive was sentenced on Thursday to almost five years in prison for leading a scheme to terrorize the creators of an online newsletter that included sending live spiders, cockroaches, a funeral wreath and other disturbing deliveries to their home.
[+] [-] powerapple|3 years ago|reply
What's worse now is that there are areas in southeast Asia and Africa have became a hotbed for kidnapping, Chinese citizens being lured abroad, kidnapped, slaved. If you read Chinese, go on Telegram, you see people being sold all the time.
[+] [-] rmbyrro|3 years ago|reply