Two men have been arrested in New York for running a Chinese overseas police station

The US Justice Department announced the arrest of two suspects on Monday. “On at least one occasion, a Chinese police officer asked one of the defendants, a US citizen, to help locate a democracy activist living in California,” said Brien Pease, US attorney for the District of New York.

Breon Peace, the US district attorney for New York, told a news conference that the two suspects had been arrested in connection with a search by the Federal Police Bureau of Investigation of a secret Chinese “police station” designed to monitor and pressure dissidents.
Prosecutors said the cases “further illustrate the Chinese government’s extension of its authoritarian worldview into this city.

In the first investigation, U.S. prosecutors in New York arrested two men suspected of running Chinese police stations overseas.
In a third investigation, ten other suspects, including “eight Chinese government officials” and “a former executive of an American telecommunications company working in China,” were charged with online surveillance of dissidents, AFP reported.

In early 2023, the FBI raided several mundane businesses on a busy street in New York’s Chinatown, including an engineering firm, an acupuncture studio and an accounting firm. A suspected Chinese overseas police service station operating without jurisdiction or diplomatic approval. There are more than 100 such agencies around the world, and they unnerve diplomats and intelligence officers.

FBI counterintelligence agents raided the building last fall as part of an ongoing criminal investigation by the United States Attorney’s office in Brooklyn, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Officials in Ireland, Canada and the Netherlands have called on China to stop policing operations in their countries. The FBI raid is the first known case in which authorities have seized material from such a police station.
The people briefed on the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the F.B.I. search.

But Chinese state news media reports reviewed by The New York Times, which referred to police officers and local Chinese officials by their real names, painted a very different picture of such operations. They tout the efficiency of these offices, which are often called overseas Police Service centers. Some reports say China’s overseas police stations “gather intelligence” and crack foreign crimes while bypassing local police. These public statements make it hard to guess who actually runs these offices. Sometimes they are called volunteers; Other times it was a staff member, in at least one case a director.