CCP Network Expands Overseas Surveillance of Diaspora

Safeguard Defenders says the Chinese Communist Party’s overseas “police stations” remain open and are expanding. It identified 1,247 designated liaison points across at least 91 countries. According to the report, 74 Chinese authorities and CCP bodies operate the network, monitoring Chinese diaspora communities at the direction of the CCP’s United Front Work Department.

The report, titled A Formula for Repression: China's Global Grid for Community Control, was released Friday at the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China's (IPAC) annual summit in the Netherlands. Its central finding challenges Beijing’s claim that the overseas stations had closed: the apparatus still operates, and the report says the number of sites likely understates the activity.

A network behind the label

More than 10 police forces from five Chinese provinces take part in the global network of CCP operatives, Safeguard Defenders said. The report describes a system that reaches beyond offices labeled police stations, using a grid of organizations affiliated with the “united front” or designated as liaison offices.

Those organizations provide infrastructure for other Chinese authorities, including police, prosecutors, courts and justice bureaus. According to the report, the Overseas Chinese Federation runs most of them. It called each designated liaison office and task carried out through them a breach of sovereignty, “transnational repression embodied” and an “active national security threat.”

Safeguard Defenders published two reports in 2022 detailing more than 100 overseas stations in more than 50 countries. The reports prompted affected countries to denounce the operations, and some opened criminal investigations. China later said the stations had closed. The new report says that claim was false.

Since late 2024, five new national policies have instructed authorities across China to expand these activities abroad, the report says. Their stated aim is to export the domestic grid-management system to control the Chinese diaspora. The report describes that system as mass surveillance, control and suppression carried out through the overseas network.

Diaspora communities in the crosshairs

Laura Harth, Safeguard Defenders' lead on transnational repression and the report's author, said the operations shouldn't be called police stations anymore, but a “network system.” She said they have continued to expand under the guise of legitimate community services, threatening other countries’ sovereignty, undermining democratic institutions and subjecting diaspora communities to widespread surveillance and coercion.

Harth said the CCP’s definition of the Chinese diaspora reaches back as far as 10 generations. Anyone of Chinese descent overseas could be included, including people from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and could become a target of surveillance, she said. The report says the system creates fear among the communities it monitors.

Registration proposals, not enacted protections

IPAC warned that overseas interference and transnational repression in democratic countries were becoming increasingly widespread, pervasive and harmful. IPAC cofounder and executive director Luke de Pulford called on democracies to introduce foreign agent registration systems and impose criminal liability for violations. He said organizations affiliated with the United Front Work Department should have to register based on those affiliations, whatever changes they make to their public names.

De Pulford also called for public notices detailing CCP and United Front Work Department activities, strategies, objectives and targets, alongside annual national reports on Chinese interference. He urged governments to create reporting channels for affected diaspora communities and engage directly with isolated communities and groups. These are proposals, not measures already in place.

He also urged democratic governments and parliaments to resist CCP persecution of specific groups, expand formal meetings with Taiwanese elected representatives, pro-democracy dissidents, human rights advocates and vulnerable diaspora communities, and publicly confront CCP officials who try to suppress them. De Pulford said those steps would defend national sovereignty and improve democratic resilience.