The Chinese Communist Party is operating a secret police station on Croydon High Street, part of a global network intended to control and intimidate former nationals who have made their homes outside China.
Secret policeman’s balls-up: Xi Jinping has set up a ‘service station’ on Croydon High Street
Beijing claims that almost a quarter of a million “suspects” were “persuaded” to return to China in a 15-month period as a result of the work of these secret police stations.
Britain has three Chinese police stations – the others are in Hendon and Glasgow.
The serious incursion into British national territory by a foreign power prompted an urgent question in the House of Commons this afternoon where Sarah Jones, MP for Croydon Central, expressed her surprise and alarm that such an organisation should be found in the town centre.
In Ireland, the government has already ordered the closure of a Chinese police station in Dublin, which even featured a sign advertising its presence as the “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station.”
In this country, under Home Secretary Suella Braverman and where Chris Philp is the policing minister, the government has described the presence of Chinese police stations as “very concerning”.
A civil liberties group based in Spain has alerted the world to the presence of this global network of undeclared police hubs, which are used to silence dissenters and force them to return home.
Researchers identified possible outposts in London and Glasgow after their addresses were among 54 published by Chinese police agencies in the Fuzhou and Qingtian provinces. Click here for their full report.
Safeguard Defenders claims that Chinese police forces have been running “overseas police service stations” in “dozens of countries” across five continents since 2018.
According to the Chinese register, Croydon’s Chinese police station shares office space with a food delivery business based on the High Street. The Hendon station is based in an estate agents, the one in Glasgow in a Chinese restaurant.
Beijing claims the outposts are to combat “transnational fraud” by Chinese people living overseas, and to provide diplomatic services, including the renewal of driving licences.
Closed: Dublin’s Chinese secret police station has already been closed
Chinese officials said 230,000 fraud suspects were “persuaded to return” to China from April 2021 to July this year.
“This creates tremendous fear among the overseas Chinese community,” Jing-Jie Chen, a Paris-based researcher for Safeguard Defenders, told Vice Magazine.
“You finally escape an authoritarian regime but you’re still not free still.”
Chen said the undeclared police “service stations” were a clear violation of the sovereignty of the countries where they were operating, and represented a dangerous incursion of China’s police state into free, democratic societies.
The Chinese Embassy in London said that the so-called police stations were “in fact overseas Chinese service centres.”
Last month, Spanish newspaper El Correo quoted an unnamed Chinese diplomat as acknowledging the “persuasion operations”, saying that bilateral extradition treaties with European countries were “very cumbersome and Europe is reluctant to extradite to China. I don’t see what is wrong with pressuring criminals to face justice”.
Speaking in the House of Commons today, Security Minister Tom Tugendhat said such activities “must be stopped,” stressing it would be “unacceptable” for any foreign government to attempt to operate a security apparatus on British territory.
Global network: how the Madrid-based civil rights group Safeguard Defenders has traced and mapped the secret Chinese police stations
The British government will step up work to prevent “transnational repression” as police investigate reports of undeclared Chinese “police stations” around the country, Tugendhat said.
“It is clear that we can and must do more. I have therefore asked officials to step up the work to ensure that our approach to transnational repression is robust and I have asked our department to review our approach to transnational repression as a matter of urgency,” Tugendhat said.
Tugendhat said the upcoming National Security Bill will strengthen the government’s powers to deal with “transnational repression, coercion, harassment or intimidation linked to a foreign power”.
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