Officers with federal law enforcement have reportedly carried out a raid into a New York building located in Chinatown near the end of last year in what seems to have been a part of the FBI’s efforts to try and pull to heel a secretive Chinese police force that stands accused of trying to collect intelligence about Chinese diaspora and of harassing dissidents.
A report from the New York Times explained that the third floor of a large six-story office building had been converted into a Chinese outpost which the feds state was being used as a base to conduct policing operations outside of its jurisdiction and without any sort of diplomatic approval from U.S. officials.
This raid, carried out by groups of FBI counterintelligence agents, was carried out alongside the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn as part of the U.S. government’s extreme crackdown against communist China and its well-known efforts to spy on their own people while attempting to hunt down any dissidents overseas and try to force them to come back to China.
The global effort being carried out by China, which has been spotted throughout a number of countries all over the world, has been titled “Operation Fox Hunt.”
Being very well known for openly making obviously false statements, China tried to downplay what these police centers actually do and made the suggestion that it was just a few volunteers who helped people obtain things such as a driver’s license.
The Times went over a number of reports from China that highlighted that Chinese officials have been bragging about the overall effectiveness of their use of these “overseas police service centers,” which gather intelligence for the officials of the Chinese government. A number of the reports were quickly taken down and stricken from the Chinese internet.
“It’s extremely worrying from the human rights perspective. We’re essentially allowing the Chinese diaspora to be controlled by [communist China] rather than subject to our national laws,” explained one adviser to a Slovakian member of the European Parliament, Igor Merheim-Eyre. “That obviously has a huge impact — not only for our relations with the Chinese diaspora across Europe, but also has huge implications for national sovereignty.”
A prime example of the Chinese attempting to try and hide their actions was obvious when a Hungarian lawmaker said he visited a Chinese police center that had been marked as “Qingtian Police Overseas Service Station.” After the legislator spoke out about what he had witnessed, all of the signs were quickly taken down or hidden.
“The Chinese government wants to have more influence and to extend their transnational policing,” stated Chen Yen-ting, a researcher based out of Taiwan. “It’s a long-arm power to show their own citizens inside China that their government is so strong. We have the power to reach globally, and even if you go out, you’re still under our control.”
On Chinese dissident located in Europe explained to the outlet that he was “extremely anxious” about just what China was trying to do regarding these secret police offices because “there’s nothing we can do about it.”
