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Here is the full report: A Formula for Repression – China’s Global Grid for Community Control (pdf)
In 2022, Safeguard Defenders published 110 Overseas and Patrol & Persuade: two reports detailing the activity of over 100 overseas Chinese police stations operating in more than 50 countries.
After the report was published, many of the countries affected denounced the stations’ illegal operations. Some pursued criminal investigations. Beijing responded by claiming they had closed.
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Now a new report exposes Beijing’s claim to be false. Far from closing, the evidence shows expansion.
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Today, more than ten police forces from five Chinese provinces are engaged in the work of a global network of Chinese Communist Party operatives abroad. The police involvement is only the beginning, and these are not isolated initiatives by a few local governments in China.
Since late 2024, five new national policies instruct authorities across China to expand designated liaison activities abroad. The core aim is to export the domestic system of grid management to control the diaspora.
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In China, the Party divides every city, town and village into grids, each square representing a few hundred households, and each with a grid manager who reports upward. The manager has ten tasks, nine of which have to do with surveillance and control. There is a file on every resident.
Anything seen as a threat to Party rule is escalated to a hub where enforcement stands ready to act.
Internationally, this system of mass surveillance, control and suppression is projected through a global grid of united front affiliated organizations or designated liaisons. They are run by the Party's "bridge and bond" to the diaspora: the Overseas Chinese Federation.
These Party liaisons provide the infrastructure other Chinese authorities - police, prosecutors, courts, justice bureaus and others - simply plug into. Or, as the Party calls it: through which they "extend their tentacles".
How the 'grid' extends abroad
The authorities sometimes use the word “grid” themselves when talking about overseas functions. In May 2019, eight months after opening their first “police-overseas-Chinese stations” [警侨驿站] abroad, the Qingtian county police, in Zhejiang Province, reported to the national police newspaper that they had hired 135 diaspora association leaders and chairs as center directors, deputies and liaison officers, and “put together an overseas grid-service informant corps of more than 1,000” [组建了1000余人的海外网格服务信息员队伍] ...
[The report describes how the Chinese grid of police stations extends abroad. It is fairly impossible to paraphrased what the report calls "The machinery: 1 + n + X + Y(y)". Everyone is stronglu encouraged to read the report (pdf).]
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In its new report, the NGO Safeguard Defenders finds nearly 1,250 formally designated liaisons in at least 91 countries which exist to carry out domestic grid functions abroad.
This number is based on a conservative methodology, and a likely underrepresentation of actual activity. The Party numbers its affiliated
associations abroad in the tens of thousands, every one of them a potential grid liaison in the waiting.
Included in this number are the very liaison stations Safeguard Defenders exposed years ago and were told "merely" provided services to the diaspora community. Yet the functions of service and control cannot be separated, as the official policies and public statements that form the basis for this report make clear. In fact, the power to provide or deny services directly adds to the Party liaisons’ ability to exercise control.
Every liaison designated and every task carried out by them are breaches of sovereignty. They are transnational repression embodied, affecting entire communities around the world. Their standing order to carry out any task as required by the Party represents an active national security threat.
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Beneath it all sits one structure: the Party’s united front, and its global network of affiliated associations.
The names given to such designated liaisons may change; the underlying structure does not.
Policymakers must urgently devise strategies to confront this superstructure of CCP interference if the stations and their activities are to be shut down for good.
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