by Christian Gomez
On December 18, 2024, Chen Jinping, 60, a Manhattan resident and U.S. citizen, pleaded guilty “to conspiring to act as an illegal agent of the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in connection with opening and operating an undeclared overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan,” according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The illegal police station was covertly operating for the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), which oversees Communist China’s roughly 1.9 million law-enforcement officers, including the People’s Police, its national police force.
Of Chen’s arrest, then-Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the DOJ’s National Security Division said, “Today’s guilty plea holds the defendant accountable for his brazen efforts to operate an undeclared overseas police station on behalf of the PRC’s national police force — a clear affront to American sovereignty and danger to our community that will not be tolerated.” He added, “The Department of Justice will continue to pursue anyone who attempts to aid the PRC’s efforts to extend their repressive reach into the United States.”
“Today’s acknowledgment of guilt is a stark reminder of the insidious efforts taken by the PRC government to threaten, harass, and intimidate those who speak against their Communist Party,” said Robert Wells, executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch (NSB), according to the DOJ press release. “These blatant violations will not be tolerated on U.S. soil. The FBI remains committed to preserving the rights and freedoms of all people in our country and will defend against transnational repression at every front.”
The news of an undeclared Communist Chinese police station secretly operating in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood and the subsequent guilty plea by one of its operators brought nationwide attention to just how far the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will go to remind its country’s citizens and dissidents living abroad to not speak ill of, or take action against, the ruling party.
More than five years earlier and roughly 2,800 miles southwest in Santa Ana, California, the California Highway Patrol (CHP) responded “to several complaints regarding a male Asian driver driving a black Audi in the city of Irvine impersonating the Chinese National Police.” According to the CHP-Santa Ana’s Facebook post about the incident, “The Audi had Chinese Police symbols and the Chinese National Seal. The driver was arrested and charged with impersonating a peace officer and for forging/possessing a fraudulent public seal.”
The Chinese cop car had allegedly been stopping and intimidating Chinese drivers in the area. Regardless of whether the suspect was an actual overseas Chinese police officer illegally operating more than 6,000 miles outside of his jurisdiction in an accurately marked Chinese police car, it fits an overall pattern of overseas law enforcement by Communist China.
Overseas Network
In mainland China, the CCP holds a tight grip over its population of 1.4 billion through its Ministry of Public Security. It also keeps a watchful eye over Chinese nationals abroad and other critics of the regime through a clandestine network of “overseas service stations” and police illegally operating in foreign countries, such as the one uncovered in New York City.
It’s no secret that the CCP regime does not tolerate dissent or criticism domestically. Now it seems that even its national borders are no obstacle to extending its reach and influence — establishing more than 100 illicit overseas outposts in at least 53 countries, including the United States, without the permission of those countries’ governments. These overseas Communist Chinese police stations (also called “service stations”) are covertly run behind the façade of restaurants, travel agencies, small businesses, and private residences. From these stations, the CCP’s overseas police track down, stalk, intimidate, and harass critics, especially Chinese nationals who have fled the mainland. The CCP’s message is clear: No matter how far you go from China, we are there.
The news of the existence of Communist China’s clandestine transnational police network was first broken in a report titled 110 Overseas: Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild, published in September 2022 by Safeguard Defenders, a not-for-profit human-rights NGO based in Madrid, Spain, that monitors disappearances in China and the involuntary return of overseas Chinese nationals back to the mainland. The number 110 refers to mainland China’s police emergency service number, similar to 911 in the United States. Communist China’s overseas police “service stations” are often referred to as “110 Overseas.”
In mainland China, official CCP websites and television news reports publicly boast about how one can reach Chinese police emergency services overseas. In fact, one article posted on the website of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on January 14, 2022, is titled with the following question and answer: “Can you call 110 overseas? Fuzhou police answer you: Yes!”
According to the article, “On January 10, 2022, … Public Security Bureau of Fuzhou City, Fujian Province took the lead in the country to open the Overseas 110 alarm service desk, providing high-quality services for the vast number of Chinese from Fuzhou living overseas to call the police for help.” Fuzhuo is the capital city of Fujian province in China. The city boasts a population of more than 8.2 million, according to China’s Seventh National Population Census, conducted in 2020. And according to the CCP article, “Currently, there are more than 4.3 million overseas Chinese from Fuzhou all over the world.” The Public Security Bureau of Fuzhou, also referred to as the Fuzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau, is essentially the main police station for the city. And it, like all other public-security bureaus in Communist China, is administered by the Ministry of Public Security.
The CCP claims this service will ensure the “safety” of Fuzhou Chinese residents living abroad. Chen Xiaole, the executive director of the Spain Changle Hometown Association was quoted in the article, saying: “The launch of ‘Overseas 110’ will help curb the occurrence of criminal incidents and ensure that overseas Chinese can live a more worry-free and safer life.” Changle is one of six urban districts in Fuzhou. The stations are also promoted for providing emergency and consular services to its citizens living abroad. The article explains:
For domestic emergency situations outside the Fuzhou area, “Overseas 110” will immediately coordinate with local public security organs through police cooperation to handle them; for emergency situations in foreign countries, “Overseas 110” will guide the caller to report to the police in the place where the situation occurred, as well as the local embassy or consulate or the Consular Protection Center of the Consular Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and report to the Ministry of Public Security according to the situation.
These services are only a phone call away. The article announced that “overseas Chinese from Fuzhou can call 0086-591-110 for help through landlines or mobile phones” to reach the Public Security Bureau of Fuzhou.
Given the language barrier that many Chinese citizens face overseas and the difficulties they may experience navigating their way in a foreign country, especially if they encounter a legitimate emergency requiring help from public authorities, the news of these services may not seem alarming. If that were the full extent of China’s overseas activities, it would likely be no serious cause for concern. However, according to Safeguard Defenders’ groundbreaking report, “On 22 January 2022, Liu Rongyan, Director of the Overseas Chinese Police Office of the Public Security Bureau in Fuzhou City, Fujian Province, announced that the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau had opened its ‘first batch’ of 30 overseas police service stations in 25 cities in 21 countries.”
Providing over-the-phone guidance to overseas citizens is one thing, but covertly opening police stations in other countries is an entirely separate matter — one that local law enforcement in the United States and other countries ought to, at the very least, be keenly aware of.
The Chinese police station secretly operating in New York City was just one of those locations run by the Fuzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau of the MPS. Other MPS public-security bureaus in mainland China have opened their own batches of “110 Overseas” police service stations. For example, Safeguard Defenders’ 2022 report identified at least 22 overseas police service stations run by the Qingtian Public Security Bureau. Additionally, the public-security bureaus of Nantong and Wenzhou were first to announce opening “110 Overseas stations.” However, the full number and location of all the MPS’s overseas police stations is unknown.
“There is no complete list of such ‘110 Overseas’ police service stations available, but the initial list, along with further stations identified by Safeguard Defenders via government announcement, provides a clue to how it looks worldwide, even though the number is undoubtable [sic] larger and such stations more widespread,” according to the Safeguard Defenders report.
Victor Gao, a former foreign-affairs diplomat for China, insists that the overseas stations are solely to help overseas Chinese citizens remotely renew their Chinese driver’s licenses, file for divorce, and obtain other administrative services. “I would say that the demand for such services are very legitimate and very normal. For example, what about a divorce or asset disposal and kid’s education going to school,” Gao said in a 2023 interview with Australia’s 60 Minutes. “In China you do need to have access to the Ministry of Public Security or the provincial municipal bureaus to get certificates for example in order to make sure that your daily lives are not disrupted.”
But according to Safeguard Defenders, “The ‘110 Overseas stations’, both in their online and physical overseas form, also serve a more sinister goal as they contribute to ‘resolutely cracking down on all kinds of illegal and criminal activities involving overseas Chinese.’” The report quoted from an article posted on the website of the CCP’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission on July 29, 2022. The article boasts about how Fuzhou’s “110 Overseas” stations have arrested overseas Chinese scammers and brought them back to Communist China for trial.
Resistance is Futile
Laura Harth, the campaign director for Safeguard Defenders, claims that the “110 Overseas” stations and undercover MPS agents abroad are executing a systematic campaign of transnational repression against dissenters and critics of the CPP and the involuntary return of overseas Chinese nationals. “The Chinese Communist Party has set up a true whole of society effort to exert control over diaspora communities worldwide and silence dissent,” Harth said in her testimony to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), on September 12, 2023. “While not new, the scale on which PRC authorities are coercing individuals to return to China to face prosecution has exploded over the course of the past decade, with official — yet partial — numbers released annually claiming well over ten thousand returns from over 120 countries in the world between … 2014 and October 2022.”
“Threats and harassment — or worse — against family members back home or direct threats and harassment of individuals overseas by covert PRC agents” are the most common “persuasion to return” methods the CCP uses, according to Harth. “These efforts clearly undermine the most fundamental freedoms of targeted communities, severely infringe the rights and due process of individuals coerced into returning and constitute a grave violation of the territorial and judicial sovereignty of other nations.”
According to Freedom House’s recently released “Ten Findings from Ten Years of Data on Transnational Repression,” posted on its website on February 6, 2025, “The Chinese government remains the most prolific perpetrator, committing 272 incidents, or 22 percent, of recorded cases.” Freedom House identifies Chinese Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim Turkic ethnic group from northwest China, as a major target for transnational repression by the CCP.
However, anyone, whether Chinese or not, who actively participates in or publicly promotes any one of the following topics becomes a potential target for the “110 Overseas” stations and MPS agents:
- Criticism of the Communist Party;
- Tibetan independence;
- Taiwanese independence;
- Hong Kong independence; and
- the CCP’s treatment of ethnic and religious minorities, including Chinese Christians, Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs Muslims, and Tibetan Buddhist monks.
Safeguard Defenders reports that in “the first three-quarters of 2021, some 88,000 applications were made by Hongkongers under the British National Overseas passport scheme for resident visas to resettle in the UK.” Chinese Christians fleeing persecution in Hong Kong now make up “by far the fastest-growing sector of the Church,” according to a report published in 2023 by the British & Foreign Bible Society. If this growing Christian community speaks out against the treatment of their Christian brothers and sisters in Hong Kong and mainland China or criticize the CCP, they are likely to face repression or persecution from a “110 Overseas” station. Safeguard Defenders identified three such stations in the United Kingdom: two in London and one in Glasgow.
Safeguard Defenders has also identified at least one service station in Australia, operated by the Public Security Bureau of Nantong — a city of more than 7 million in Jiangsu, China — and a “contact point” in Sydney working for the Public Security Bureau of Wenzhou, a city of more than 9.5 million in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, China.
No Escape Down Under
In 2023, Australia’s 60 Minutes documented the cases of Australian citizens who dared to speak out against the CCP and subsequently came under repression. One of those it spoke to was Andrew Phelan, an Australian journalist and media commentator who exposed the CCP’s propaganda about the origin of Covid-19. One day, Victoria police barged into Phelan’s home in Melbourne, seized his phone, and arrested him. While being interrogated at the local police station, he learned that he was accused of sending an email to a female Chinese journalist in Australia threatening to rape her and cut her throat if she didn’t leave the country. According to Phelan, he had never heard of the Chinese woman he was accused of sending the violent emails to, and he had no knowledge of the email address used to send the message. Following the interrogation, police were convinced he did not send the email and let him go. “I believe that this has been done under the auspicious of the MSS, China’s Ministry of State Security…. I believe they are targeting Westerners that are being critical of the CCP in the public square,” he told 60 Minutes.
Another interviewee was Kevin Carrico, a senior lecturer in Chinese studies at Monash University in Melbourne; the author of books critical of the CCP, Two Systems, Two Countries: A Nationalist Guide to Hong Kong and The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today; and the translator of Tibet on Fire: Self-Immolations Against Chinese Rule into English. He was also accused of sending sexually offensive and violent emails to a Chinese journalist in the United Kingdom. Other emails were sent in his name to members of his academic department claiming he was resigning. As in Phelan’s case, the emails were sent from a fake email address. Both claimed the emails were sent to discredit them and protect the CCP from criticism.
The CCP also targeted Drew Pavlou, a 24-year-old human-rights activist from Australia. In 2022, while protesting outside the Chinese Embassy in London, he was arrested because of an email that police received, sent in his name, threatening to bomb the embassy. He faced up to 12 years in prison if convicted. Police concluded that he didn’t send the email, but in the six months that followed, he received more than 40 emails threatening to kill him. One email discussed how he would be chopped up into tiny pieces.
The day after he participated in his first protest against the CCP’s repression of Hong Kong, as a student at the University of Queensland, his Facebook page was flooded with death threats, the Sydney Herald reported. “I will hire a killer through deep web and then kill your family,” one message said. “Your mother will be raped till dead.”
60 Minutes host Tara Brown asked former Chinese diplomat Victor Gao, “If you are a dissident or an activist or a protestor in Australia making those claims about Tibet, Taiwan, the Uyghurs, are you safe or are you unsafe?” Gao bluntly responded, “That’s a violation of the One China policy.” And those who “violate” the policy, according to Gao, “They will be very much looked at.” Warning, “Don’t violate the Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity, otherwise there will be no free haven anywhere in the world. Because if you do that then sooner or later justice may be served.”
If You See Something, Say Something
While the full extent of Communist China’s “110 Overseas” police service stations and associated contact points remains largely hidden — known only to the higher echelons of the CCP, MPS, and MSS — one fact is unmistakable: Their exposure, including of the illegal Chinese MPS police station in New York City, reveals a disturbing and expanding pattern of transnational repression carried out by the CCP. This network, hidden in plain sight under the guise of overseas administrative support, is part of a wider campaign to surveil, coerce, and control Chinese nationals, dissidents, and critics abroad — even those living under the protection of free or democratic governments.
For law-enforcement professionals in the United States and other countries, the implications are clear and urgent: sovereignty is being subverted, individual liberty and constitutional protections are being violated, and local communities may be unknowingly in the center of a foreign totalitarian regime’s global reach. The use of intimidation tactics, digital impersonation, and even false criminal accusations to silence dissenters reveals a sophisticated and multi-pronged approach to suppress free speech far beyond Communist China’s borders.
This is not just a matter of foreign policy — it is a domestic law-enforcement concern that demands vigilance, a deep understanding of the CCP’s objectives, and countermeasures to expose and stop Communist Chinese espionage and coercion. Agencies ought to monitor signs of transnational repression, guarantee the freedom and safety of persecuted communities, and uphold the principles of justice and due process.
As sworn protectors of our nation’s laws and liberties, law-enforcement officers must stand united against such threats lurking in secret. We must not allow fear, coercion, or foreign intimidation to take root in our neighborhoods. Freedom and the rule of law must prevail — here at home.