China Establishes Clandestine Police Stations Abroad: Immigration Law Responses
By Dan Cadman on November 18, 2022
News media throughout the world have recently brought into focus the existence of clandestine police stations being operated throughout the world by the People's Republic of China (PRC). See, e.g., here, here, and here. The media exposure follows a report outing these stations by an organization, Safeguard Defenders, which monitors disappearances, forced return of dissidents, and other untoward activities of the PRC.
Governments in at least 14 of the countries in which their existence has become known have reacted with outrage and, according to Safeguard Defenders, promptly launched investigations into this foreign police intrusion into their sovereign territories. That list of 14 allegedly includes the United States, although so far the U.S. Departments of State and Justice have been surprisingly mum about what, exactly, is being done. Irritated Republican lawmakers have written a letter to the Secretary of State and Attorney General demanding answers – not only into what's being done but how such stations could have come into existence in the first place. These are two important, interrelated-but-distinct, questions and both deserve answers.
How did they come into being? There are two likely ways the stations could have been established. Either the policemen and women staffing them arrived under diplomatic cover as consular officials, economic advisors, or the like – in other words, relatively low-level functionaries who nonetheless possess diplomatic status. Alternatively, they are what the intelligence community refers to as “NOCs”, people who arrive under non-official cover, without diplomatic status. NOCs (spies really, in any normal sense of the word) pose as nonimmigrant businessmen, students, scholars; they might even have arrived as tourists who later overstayed their visas and melded into the illegal populations of the country. It's hard to say which occurred, although some media reports describe the stations as being in unlikely places like a Chinese restaurant, which suggests at least some of them are operating without diplomatic cover. Quite likely though, there may be a mix of NOCs and thinly veiled “diplomatic” functionaries.
https://cis.org/Cadman/China-Establishes-Clandestine-Police-Stations-Abroad-Immigration-Law-Responses
