China’s diaspora crackdown reaches deep into Europe, report finds

THE HAGUE — Beijing is overseeing nearly 1,250 overseas policing outposts in more than 90 countries to crack down on dissidents, according to a report by a human rights advocacy organization.

The report described Europe as a hotspot with hundreds of Beijing’s policing offices across some two dozen European countries, which it said exposed China’s growing attempts to control its diaspora.

Researchers at the Spain-based organization, Safeguard Defenders, gathered open-source evidence from the Chinese Party-state to examine the extent to which the Chinese diaspora is monitored, surveilled and policed around the world.

These policing outposts “act as the Chinese Communist Party operatives for community surveillance and enforcement abroad,” according to the report.

The report lands at an awkward time for Europe’s trade officials. Ditte Juul Jørgensen, head of the EU’s trade department — which has been working to balance the trade relationship with Beijing — will meet with China’s Vice Minister of Commerce Ling Ji in Brussels on Thursday.

Europe is attempting to walk a fine line with its relations with Beijing. EU legislation proposed in January seeks to kick risky Chinese suppliers out of Europe’s most critical industries over cybersecurity concerns, while supply chain dependencies and political coercion remain ongoing challenges. The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas has also raised concerns about what she said was China’s enabling of Russia’s war in Ukraine and credible reports of China training Russia’s military.

Overseas outposts

The report builds on initial revelations from Safeguard Defenders in 2022 that identified more than 100 facilities around the world, which the NGO described as overseas outposts of China’s security apparatus. Back then, that report said Beijing announced its “first batch” of “30 overseas police service stations in 25 cities in 21 countries.”

Following the revelations, some governments denounced the overseas police stations as illegal, and some pursued criminal investigations, the NGO said in its latest report. In response, Beijing claimed the stations had been closed, it added.

“Far from closing, the evidence shows expansion: today more than 10 police forces from five Chinese provinces work through a global network of Chinese Communist Party operatives abroad,” the new report says.

The latest paper was presented at a conference hosted by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), a gathering of 52 cross-party lawmakers from 30 countries that campaigns for a more coordinated response to the Chinese Communist Party. Policymakers raised numerous concerns at the event in The Hague earlier this month — about what they considered security threats of critical infrastructure, trade dependencies and potential risks from a future conflict between China and Taiwan that would disrupt shipping.

The Chinese foreign ministry and state media have previously called IPAC an “anti-China” group and accused it of spreading disinformation and interfering in China’s internal affairs, particularly over Taiwan.

China’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs and its European Union mission didn’t respond to requests for comment on the report. China has previously denied running overseas police stations and says it doesn’t interfere in other countries’ internal affairs and that it respects international law.

In 2023, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson rejected the term “police stations,” saying the “institutions helped overseas Chinese who could not return to China due to the pandemic, renew their driving licence and perform physical examination.”

Tip of the iceberg

These 1,250 offices were “the tip of the iceberg,” according to the NGO, which said it was conservative in how it mapped and linked them to China’s policing system. To be counted, they had to be officially connected to China’s police or prosecutors and have open-source evidence of overseas activities, report author Laura Harth said. This meant broader influence or interference operations were excluded.

“All of them serve to control and instill fear in diaspora communities … all of them represent a standing national security risk,” she said.

Slovakian MEP Miriam Lexmann, who is part of the European Parliament’s trade committee and China delegation — lawmakers tasked with maintaining and managing legislative ties between the EU and China — said people needed to become more aware of the security threats posed by China.

“It means that our free countries are no longer free anymore for everyone because they are not able to guarantee freedom of speech, freedom of behavior to people who are in our country,” she told POLITICO in reference to the operations.

China’s surveillance through facial recognition and interference in communications was “the exact behavior of the former Soviet Stasi,” she said, but worse since the technology is now much more sophisticated.

The main concern expressed by lawmakers attending the IPAC conference was China’s relationship with Russia, and its help in propping up the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine. Their discussions included what this could mean for a future conflict and war on two fronts if Beijing were to try and take Taiwan militarily while NATO countries were attacked by Russia.

“The road to escalation in the Taiwan Strait can run right through what’s happening in Ukraine and in Kyiv,” said Dutch lawmaker Jan Paternotte, who co-chaired the IPAC conference.