Above a noodle shop in New York’s Chinatown, agents of the Chinese communist government reportedly operated an overseas police station for years. There are more than one hundred of them worldwide. They might not look like police stations. They may only be the back room to a restaurant, but they’re staffed by Chinese government officials.
The police stations along with so-called “aid stations” across the U.S. are used by the Chinese government to harass and threaten pro-democracy Chinese immigrants to stop speaking out against the regime and go back to China, even kidnapping them if necessary.
Pro-Democracy Activists Attacked by Chinese Agents on US Soil
One of their targets is Lijian Jie, a pro-democracy activist who was repeatedly tortured in Chinese psychiatric hospitals before he was able to flee to the U.S. where the persecution has continued.
Jie told us Chinese government hit-men in the Los Angeles area have tried to kill him three times, twice with a car and once by stabbing him in the neck, calling him a traitor as they fled the scene.
Chinese government agents and their supporters regularly film and disrupt pro-democracy demonstrations in American cities. They warn protesters that they are being reported to Beijing and that their family back home will be arrested.
The world has known about these police stations for many months now. A key question for the U.S. government is why almost nothing has been done about it.
FBI Appears to Do Little About It
A recent New York Times report made it look like the FBI is on the case, highlighting a raid on the police station in New York’s Chinatown. But that raid happened last fall. And the FBI didn’t shut it down. It only gathered evidence.
When we asked the FBI if it has closed any of the police stations across the U.S. or brought charges against anyone, it declined comment, saying that FBI director Christopher Wray’s testimony to the Senate Homeland Security Committee last year would serve as the agency’s statement on the matter.
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Wray told the committee, “We are aware of the existence of these stations. I have to be careful about discussing our specific investigative work. But suffice it to say, I can tell you from an FBI Director’s perspective, I’m deeply concerned about this. And I’m not going to just let it lie.”
Laura Harth, with the Spanish group Safeguard Defenders that uncovered the extent of these overseas police stations, says it has been a struggle to get governments to do anything about the problem.
“I don’t think most of them knew about the police stations. Obviously, that’s clear from their response. We had a response in the U.S. We had some response in Australia, some in Canada where the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had come out saying, ‘Oh yes, we know that. This is an issue and we will act on it.’ Yet nothing happened.”
Chinese-American Living Under Police Protection in the Netherlands
Chinese democracy activist Jingyu Wang is a U.S. resident now living under police protection in the Netherlands, where Chinese agents regularly harass and threaten him. He was imprisoned for two months in Dubai at the request of Chinese authorities.
He’s had to fight off a knife attack in the Netherlands. Chinese embassy officials in Europe have also tried to get him arrested by telling police he had a bomb. The Chinese government also imprisoned his parents back home to try to force him to return to China.
Wang says Chinese officials in the Netherlands, “Asked me to go to a Chinese overseas police station for surrender. And they asked me to go back to China. They asked me to think about my parents. From 2022 February to 2022 April, almost every day they made over a hundred phone calls to me. Every day, at 3 a.m., 4 a.m., and kept making phone calls to me.”
China’s Massive Campaign to Control Its Citizens Abroad
The overseas police stations are only one part of a massive campaign to control Chinese citizens living in other nations. The communist government has also used what it calls Operation Fox Hunt and Operation Sky Net to apprehend citizens abroad under the guise of stopping financial crimes.
Harth told us, “The police stations are really just the tip of the iceberg of what we’re looking at when we talk about the transnational repression and policing campaigns coming from the Chinese Communist Party, to return people to China at all costs, and by all means.”
Harth says the Chinese government has reportedly forced the return of an incredible 230,000 Chinese back to the mainland between April 2021 and August last year.
US Elites Refuse to Face Up to Danger of ‘the China Threat’
“The Chinese Communist Party is attempting to impose its control in every country around the world,” according to China expert Bradley Thayer at the Center for Security Policy.
Thayer says one reason for the inaction by the Justice Department has been a failure by American leaders to face up to the China threat, “The lack of responsiveness regarding the China threat is something which has plagued us for decades. This lack of concern, which plagues American elites, and that would be universities, media, so many of our political leaders, Wall Street, Silicon Valley…”
The FBI recently asked the Chinese-American community to report any harassment by Chinese government agents, which Thayer agreed was odd, since the FBI with its vast spying powers probably knows who the agents are.
Lijian Jie wishes the FBI would do something. He told CBN News he reported the attempts against his life to the FBI, but it never responded.
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