China opens police station in NIgeria

As part of efforts to tackle criminal activities of its citizens abroad, the Chinese government has opened police stations in Nigeria and in over 20 countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa.

This was contained in an investigative statement titled, ‘110 Overseas Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild.’

It was widely reported that the police stations are created to bring “down on all kinds of illegal and criminal activities involving overseas Chinese.”

Apart from NIgeria, Lesotho and Tanzania are the two other African countries that have Chinese police stations.

The report by Safeguard Defender revealed, “Rather than cooperating with local authorities in the full respect of territorial sovereignty, it prefers…to cooperate with (United Front-linked) overseas ‘NGOs’ or ‘civil society associations’ across the five continents, setting up an alternative policing and judicial system within third countries, and directly implicating those organisations in the illegal methods employed to pursue ‘fugitives’.”

It further said that as part of a massive nationwide campaign to combat fraud and telecommunication fraud by Chinese citizens living abroad, Chinese authorities claimed that from April 2021 to July 2022, 230,000 nationals had been, “persuaded to return” to face criminal proceedings in China.

The rights group revealed that China selected nine countries as having serious fraud, telecom fraud and web crimes, and Chinese nationals were no longer allowed to stay in those countries without “good reason.”

“While establishing these operations to hunt down those accused of fraud and telecommunications fraud, China identified nine countries particularly prone to hosting Chinese nationals engaging in such criminal activities, the ‘nine forbidden countries’,” the Safeguard explained.