Introduction
In an era where authoritarian regimes increasingly assert their influence beyond national borders, repression is no longer confined to domestic spaces. In addition to the traditional practices of prosecuting dissidents upon their return to the homeland, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) establishment of “secret overseas police stations” abroad demonstrates its use of evolving transnational tactics to suppress dissent and shape the narrative. The Chinese government formally denies the existence of these “secret overseas police stations” and frames them as benign “overseas service centres,” refuting the claim that they might infringe on other nations’ sovereignty(海外服務站).[1] However, evidence suggests that these stations do much more than provide Chinese nationals abroad with administrative services like “renewing their driver’s license.”[2]
Using Canada and the Greater Toronto Area as a case study, this paper examines how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leverages “secret overseas police stations” to monitor, intimidate, and coerce targeted dissidents abroad. The success of these stations hinges on the three following mechanisms: first, merely acknowledging the existence of these stations alone would prompt self-censorship in the overseas Chinese diaspora; second, harassment from liaison officers, proxies, other intermediaries or even embassy and consulate staff,; third, by utilizing “persuasion to return” operations. By extending its authoritarian reach beyond its borders, China challenges the sovereignty of host nations while eroding the fundamental freedoms that political exiles seek abroad.
The Panopticon Effect: Surveillance-Induced Self-Censorship
China’s “secret overseas police stations” (hereafter referred to as “stations”) incite fear of surveillance and targeted harassment, which encourages a normative form of self-censorship among overseas nationals. This environment of constant surveillance greatly discourages individuals from risking open criticism or opposition against the Chinese government. Currently, reports identify a total of 102 stations operating across 53 countries globally, including five in Canada, highlighting the extensive reach of China’s monitoring efforts.[3] By establishing these stations worldwide, especially within close proximity to diaspora communities, the PRC has created an environment of perpetual fear for overseas dissidents. Specifically, the feeling of being monitored—or believing you are being monitored—imposes a psychological burden that discourages dissent. For instance, Chinese diaspora communities in Canada now often avoid discussing politically-sensitive topics in public for fear of being reported by possible informants.[4] Studies on authoritarian surveillance systems have shown that the mere perception of being watched can be just as effective as actual monitoring in controlling one’s behaviour—a phenomenon referred to as the “panopticon effect.”[5] This panopticon effect ensures individuals regulate their own actions out of fear of consequences, and as Foucault once said in his work, Discipline and Punish:
He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.[6]
For Chinese nationals abroad, the psychological effects and fear are omnipresent. Despite the Canadian government’s ongoing investigations aiming to address the sinister nature of these stations, the findings thus far merely underscore the larger issues of extraterritoriality and transnational repression employed by the PRC.[7] The Canadian government must pursue a robust and proportionate response to address these blatant violations of sovereignty and democratic rights in order to prevent further fear and self-censorship. The physical distance of these stations from official Chinese government agencies provides the regime with plausible deniability while achieving the aim of instilling fear and promoting self-censorship beyond China’s borders.[8]
Outsourced Repression: Use of Non-State Actors to Silence Dissent Abroad
Furthermore, dissidents abroad are increasingly subjected to intimidation not only from official Chinese government entities, but also from a vast network of non-state actors—liaison officers, proxies, and nationalist loyalists who operate on behalf of the PRC. These individuals and organizations, often embedded within overseas Chinese communities, allow the Chinese government to evade legal and diplomatic scrutiny while maintaining an effective system of transnational repression. Many of these non-state actors operate through ethnic hometown associations, business groups, and community organizations that serve as unofficial extensions of the CCP’s influence. In Canada, these stations are mostly located in communities with a large population of mainland Chinese and Hong Kong residents, such as in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). For instance, there are three stations located in the cities of Markham and Scarborough in the GTA. These stations list themselves as the headquarters of the “Canada Toronto Fuqing Business Association” as a front for the CCP’s covert operations.[9]
One of the key reasons the PRC relies on non-state actors is to increase their plausible deniability. Instead of deploying official Chinese law enforcement, the regime recruits local proxies like community leaders, private investigators, and even associates of the target to apply pressure through harassment, threats, and coercion.[10] A notable example is the case of Xie Weidong in 2017, where two individuals repeatedly rang the doorbell of Xie, a former Chinese judge, at 2:00 A.M. in Toronto before fleeing. One of the two individuals was later identified as the wife of Xie’s family lawyer in China. Though Chinese officials claimed that they had only been trying to recruit Xie’s associates to “speak with him,” Xie believed that they were there to threaten and kidnap him back to China.[11] This underscores how the PRC leverages personal relationships and utilizes non-state actors to intimidate and control dissidents overseas.
By outsourcing repression to non-state actors, the CCP effectively circumvents legal restrictions that would otherwise prevent Chinese law enforcement from operating on foreign soil. This strategy allows the regime to suppress dissent while maintaining plausible deniability, shifting the burden onto proxies who lack formal affiliations with the Chinese government. Consequently, dissidents in liberal democracies like Canada, who should theoretically enjoy protection under the rule of law, remain vulnerable to persistent surveillance, intimidation, and coercion, all orchestrated through unofficial channels acting on behalf of an authoritarian state.
“Persuasion to Return” and Forced Repatriations
China’s “persuasion to return” procedures represent one of the most direct and coercive methods of transnational repression, using intimidation, harassment, and threats to force political dissidents back to China. These “persuasion to return” methods play an integral part in China’s “Operation Fox Hunt,” which is run by China’s Ministry of Public Security.[12] Operation Fox Hunt was initiated to pursue “high-value targets,” such as prominent, outspoken dissidents who have fled overseas.[13] This operation is formally tied to Xi Jinping’s signature “anti-corruption” campaign, thus justifying its extraterritorial operations.[14] The PRC claims that Operation Fox Hunt targets corrupt officials or hardened criminals, but in reality, the main targets are political dissidents. Moreover, such operations are always conducted under the “guilt by association” method.[15] In a traditional legal context, “guilt by association” is traditionally understood as a principle that “permits the government to incarcerate persons based not on their involvement in past illegal conduct, and not even on their involvement in planning future crimes, but on the basis of their affiliation or association with others who have engaged in illegal conduct.”[16] However, in the context of these PRC operations, the targets’ families living in China are approached directly to “encourage the return of the target to China to face justice, ‘or else.’”[17]
One of the main methods of “persuasion” is tracking down the target’s family in China to pressure them, whether that is through means of harassment, intimidation, detention, imprisonment, or causing huge disruptions to their everyday lives so the family members themselves will exert pressure on the overseas target to “voluntarily” return.[18] Official statements from the Chinese government detail how these methods exert pressure on its targets by depriving their children of the right to education in China and limiting their family’s access to all social services.[19] They could ban the target’s children from enrolling in public schools, suspend their medical insurance and subsidies, and confiscate passports—thereby forbidding the target’s relatives from leaving the country.[20] They can also label these members as “dishonest persons,” banning them from the high-speed rail and planes, preventing them from booking accommodations in hotels, and refusing all applications for policy subsidies at the county level or above.[21] These measures effectively make the targets’ families in China “guilty by association,” and are used to suppress opposition abroad and subsequently prosecute the dissidents once they are successfully “persuaded” to “voluntarily return to China to face justice.” When the target does return to China, they are placed in a highly prejudicial scenario within the Chinese legal system, where a fair trial is virtually impossible.[22] Their forced repatriation effectively strips them of their presumption of innocence. From the PRC government’s perspective, the methods used to pressure the dissident’s family in China alongside the overseas operations via personnel associated with the stations are indicative that the state has already decided the targets were guilty before any trial.[23] Hence, when they are arrested and repatriated, their “conviction rate at criminal trials already stands at 99.95% to 99.96%.”[24] These “persuade to return” methods under Operation Fox Hunt are yet another example of China’s ever-evolving authoritarian mechanisms to suppress dissent.
Conclusion
The PRC’s establishment and operation of covert “secret overseas police stations” represent a troubling evolution in transnational repression, undermining the sovereignty and democratic freedoms of host countries like Canada. By examining these stations’ mechanisms—self-censorship induced by the existence of such stations, direct harassment and threats from proxies and non-state agents, and the coercive “persuasion to return” operations—it is evident that China’s strategy to suppress dissent extends far beyond its own borders. Ultimately, the persistence and widespread use of these operations signal the urgent need for a robust international response. This international response should aim to prioritize accountability, safeguard the rights of individuals targeted by the CCP, and uphold the democratic values China so desperately seeks to erode.
Calleigh Pan is a Guest Author for Synergy’s 2025-2026 cycle. She is a research assistant at the China Governance Lab and a compliance director at the G7 Research Group, where she leads compliance analysis on democracy commitments addressing transnational repression. Her broader research interests include authoritarianism, international security, global governance, and the greater China region. She is currently studying at the University of Toronto, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy as a President’s Scholar.
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Footnotes
Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Canada.Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin’s Regular Press Conference on May 15, 2023,(Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Canada, 2023)http://ca.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/lcbt/wjbfyr/202305/t20230515_11077925.htm. ↑
Associated Press. “What Are China’s Alleged ‘Secret Overseas Police Stations’?,”. PBS News, April 18, 2023. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-are-chinas-alleged-secret-overseas-police-stations. ↑
Safeguard Defenders, Patrol and Persuade – A Follow-Up on 110 Overseas Investigation,= (Safeguard Defenders, 2022) 2, https://safeguarddefenders.com/en/blog/patrol-and-persuade-follow-110-overseas-investigation. ↑
Yaqiu Wang, “Opinion: Why Some Chinese Immigrants Living in Canada Live in Silent Fear,” The Globe and Mail, February 25, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-why-some-chinese-immigrants-living-in-canada-live-in-silent-fear/. ↑
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, [1975] 1995), 202. ↑
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202. ↑
Yvonne Lau, “How China’s Censorship Machine Feeds on Fear”, The Strategist, November 9, 2022, XX, https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/how-chinas-censorship-machine-feeds-on-fear/. ↑
Freedom House, China: Transnational Repression Origin Country Case Study (Freedom House, 2021), 17, https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2021-02/FH_TransnationalRepressionReport2021_rev020221_CaseStudy_China.pdf. ↑
Tristin Hopper, “It’s ‘Entirely Illegal’ for China to Open Police Stations Here, Says Ottawa,” National Post, October 7, 2022, https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/its-entirely-illegal-for-china-to-open-police-stations-here-says-ottawa. ↑
Kennedy Chi-Pan Wong, “Sowing Hate, Cultivating Loyalists: Mobilizing Repressive Nationalist Diasporas for Transnational Repression by the People’s Republic of China Regime,” American Behavioral Scientist 68, no. 12 (2024): 1663, https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642241267931. ↑
Safeguard Defenders, Involuntary Returns: China’s Covert Operation to Force ‘Fugitives’ Overseas Back Home (Safeguard Defenders, 2022), 41, https://safeguarddefenders.com/sites/default/files/pdf/INvoluntary%20Returns.pdf. ↑
Safeguard Defenders, 110 Overseas: Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild (Safeguard Defenders, 2022), 9, https://safeguarddefenders.com/sites/default/files/pdf/110%20Overseas%20%28v5%29.pdf. ↑
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Safeguard Defenders, Patrol and Persuade, 4. ↑
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David Cole, “Terror Financing, Guilt by Association and the Paradigm of Prevention in the ‘War on Terror,’” in Counterterrorism: Democracy’s Challenge, ed. A. Bianchi and Alexis Keller (Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works, 2008), 233, https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/442. ↑
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