CHINA WATCHReports of China's Overseas 'Police Stations' Spark Controversy

By Akos Keller-Alant Mila Djurdjevic Reid Standish

Published 11 November 2022

Recent allegations of China operating 54 overseas “police stations” to pressure its citizens — including dissidents — to return home have sparked controversy and led to a number of investigations into their activities across Europe and North America.

Recent allegations of China operating 54 overseas “police stations” to pressure its citizens — including dissidents — to return home have sparked controversy and led to a number of investigations into their activities across Europe and North America.

But in Hungary and Serbia — two countries where Beijing is said to operate such facilities and whose governments prize their warming political and economic ties with China — the new findings are being met with swift denials by authorities despite a growing array of evidence and calls for probes.

[These] Chinese overseas police [stations] usually just offer their help [to citizens], but they’re also signaling that Chinese surveillance is present even here,” Marton Tompos, a Hungarian lawmaker from the opposition Momentum party, told RFE/RL.

Tompos made headlines in October when he investigated the locations of two alleged Chinese police stations in Budapest following a September report by the Spain-based NGO Safeguard Defenders that detailed 21 overseas Chinese stations — most of them in Europe.

According to the report, the stations are overseas operations of the public security bureaus from two Chinese provinces and are used to persuade citizens to return to China, including through pressure on family members at home. While most of those involved appear to be suspected of crimes such as telecommunications fraud or corruption, dissidents have also reported that the stations have been used to monitor and threaten them.

Fourteen governments have already launched investigations into the overseas police stations, and the Dutch and Irish governments have ordered China to shut down the facilities in their countries.

In Budapest, Tompos visited two stations in the Hungarian capital operating in areas home to the city’s sizable Chinese diaspora.

In a video, he documented one building that had three large billboards that had the name and logo of the Qingtian Overseas Police Station, one of the Chinese regions mentioned in the Safeguard Defenders report. Tompos says he was unable to contact personnel at either station and when he visited again several days later that the sign had been removed.

The fact that they have put three large billboards on one of their offices shows they were not afraid of being exposed,” Tompos said.