The Chinese government has established police stations in Nigeria and in over 20 other countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa, in its effort to tackle the growing cases of fraud and telecommunication crimes of its citizens living abroad. This was disclosed via an investigative statement titled, ‘110 Overseas Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild.’ There are only three African countries that have Chinese police stations, with Nigeria being one while Lesotho and Tanzania are the two other African nations. According to the report by Safeguard Defender; “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’.” The investigation report noted that the 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 report also revealed that China established the overseas Chinese police “service stations” and created national police emergency phone numbers through the campaign which started in 2018. The Minqing County Procuratorate, Fujian, Li Riqin, was also quoted as saying; “The procuratorial work involving overseas Chinese is long-term. The procuratorial and overseas Chinese should cooperate closely and strengthen interaction to normalize the mechanisms such as information exchange, legal publicity, joint visits and joint meetings. “They should give full play to the ‘four major procuratorial’ functions of the procuratorial organs in criminal, civil, administrative and public interest litigation.” “Through the establishment of overseas service centers, Qingtian County Police has made breakthroughs in its overseas pursuit of fugitives. Since 2018, the Qingtian police have detected and solved six criminal cases related to overseas Chinese, successfully arrested a red notice fugitive, and persuaded two suspects to surrender under the assistance from the Overseas centers”. The investigative report further disclosed that, China has designated nine countries as having serious fraud, telecom fraud and web crimes, and Chinese nationals are no longer allowed to stay in those countries without “good reason.”
