China opens police stations in Nigeria, 20 countries

The Chinese government has established police stations in Nigeria and over 20 other countries across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa in what is described as an effort to combat the growing cases of fraud and telecommunication crimes by Chinese nationals living abroad.

This is contained in an investigative report titled, ‘110 OVERSEAS: Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild’. The police stations are created to bring “down on all kinds of illegal and criminal activities involving overseas Chinese.

Apart from Nigeria, Lesotho and Tanzania are the two other African countries that have Chinese police stations.

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The Chinese Police Station known as ‘Service Station’  is located in Benin City in Nigeria and in two other countries in Africa including Maseru in Lesotho, Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

Others include 35 service stations in 16 European countries, 10 service stations in six American countries, and five service stations in five Asian countries.

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According to an investigation report by Safeguard Defender, the Chinese authorities claimed that from April 2021 to July 2022, 230,000 nationals had been “persuaded to return” to face criminal proceedings in China.

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“Rather than cooperating with local authorities in the full respect of territorial sovereignty, it prefers…to cooperate with (United Front-linked) overseas ‘NGOs’ or ‘civil society associations’ across the five continents, setting up an alternative policing and judicial system within third countries, and directly implicating those organisations in the illegal methods employed to pursue ‘fugitives,” the report by Safeguard Defender said.

The report noted that the Chinese government developed and established overseas Chinese police “service stations” and national police emergency phone numbers through the campaign which started in 2018.

The report quoted the Minqing County Procuratorate, Fujian, Li Riqin, as saying, “The procuratorial work involving overseas Chinese is long-term. The procuratorial and overseas Chinese should cooperate closely and strengthen interaction to normalize the mechanisms such as information exchange, legal publicity, joint visits, and joint meetings.

“They should give full play to the ‘four major procuratorial’ functions of the procuratorial organs in criminal, civil, administrative and public interest litigation.”

China’s official statements clarified the use of depriving suspects’ children of the right to education back in China and other actions against relatives and family members in a full-on “guilt by association” campaign.

The rights group revealed that China selected nine countries as having serious fraud, telecom fraud, and web crimes, and Chinese nationals were no longer allowed to stay in those countries without “good reason.”

“While establishing these operations to hunt down those accused of fraud and telecommunications fraud, China identified nine countries particularly prone to hosting Chinese nationals engaging in such criminal activities, the ‘nine forbidden countries’,” the Safeguard stated.

However, the setting up of overseas police ‘service stations’ was a worldwide phenomenon, with the majority of such being in western democratic nations, with a particular focus on Europe, and not in the ‘nine forbidden countries’.

The group also noted that forsaking any “pretext of due process or the consideration of suspects’ innocence until proven guilty, targeting suspects’ children and relatives in China as ‘guilty by association’ or ‘collateral damage’, and using threats and intimidation to target suspects abroad, is now itself becoming an endemic problem.”

“Whether the targets are dissidents, corrupt officials or low-level criminals, the problem remains the same: The use of irregular methods — often combining carrots with sticks — against the targeted individual or their family members in China undermines any due process and the most basic rights of suspects.”