Eight hundred and fifty years ago, the merchant Michele Dagomari made the dangerous journey home from Jerusalem to the small town of Prato in Italy, with the greatest of all treasures. Each night, the angels of heaven would gather over his bed, to guard the green girdle, ornamented with gold thread and tassels, that had once been worn by the Virgin herself. The one thief who dared to steal it, legend holds, was captured after he become enveloped in a mysterious fog, The thief’s hand was amputated, before he was tied to an ass’s tail, and burned at the stake.
Five minutes walk away, on the Via Degli Orti del Pero, a darker kind of angel now guard the secrets of Prato. The Fuzhou Overseas Police Station, operated by the People’s Republic of China—one of over 100 unofficial centres human rights monitors fear are being used to coerce dissidents and spy on immigrant communities—works from a nondescript office, outside the framework of the law.
Eleven of these illegal police stations are in Italy alone—the only member of the Group of Seven advanced economies, which signed on to President Xi Jinping’s controversial Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Earlier this year, a report by Spanish NGO Safeguard Defenders found that Fuzhou police stations were running from Barcelona to Buenos Aires, sparking investigations by 14 governments.
The Fuzhou Overseas Police Station, operated by the People’s Republic of China works from a nondescript office, outside the framework of the law.
First Italian police stations became a model for the establishment of similar centres in other countries and over time began to carry out illegal operations aimed at "harassing, threatening, intimidating and pushing particular targets back to China."
Fuzhou police stations were running from Barcelona to Buenos Aires, sparking investigations by 14 governments.
There's a pattern, a nefarious one, to all the BRI-related initiatives. First, the agreements, then the Chinese workers, and then the Chinese troops to 'protect' the interests of Chinese citizens in foreign countries.
China’s Brazen Flouting Of Local Laws
European countries such as Italy, France, Germany the Netherlands, Spain, Croatia, Serbia, and Romania are still to make a decision on what to do—but Canada has already ordered Fuzhou to shut down its operations.
According to the website of the Central United Front Work Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, as of August 2016, the Wenzhou Public Security Bureau had established 3 contact points between police and overseas Chinese, adding Paris and Prato. Two years later, in December 2018, China News Service also reported on Qingtian Procuratorates' establishment of 6 overseas liaison stations in Italy: in Prato, Rome, Milan, Bolzano, and Sicily.
Chinese 'Joint Patrols’ In Italy
The opening of the illegal police stations in Italy has been linked, Politico reports, to a 2015 Ministry of Public Security bilateral agreement on joint police patrols with the Italian government. This led to the establishment of European “pilot” stations in Milan in 2016, by Wenzhou police, and 2018, by Qingtian police. The memorandums were presented as part of the "fight against terrorism, international organized crime, illegal immigration and human trafficking".
The Italian daily Il Foglio, which has doggedly pursued the story, says "Fuzhou police is not just an administrative office, but it may also work as an intelligence-gathering and criminal report office directly involving the Chinese police."
Joint patrols with Chinese police in Italy were to take place only in areas "of tourist interest to Chinese tourists,” like Rome, Florence, Milan, and Venice. Then, in 2017, a bilateral security cooperation agreement was signed by the Italian government with a delegation from the Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China.
The exact content of the agreement has never been disclosed. According to an Il Foglio investigation: “Following the third patrol conducted in Italy from 28 May to 18 June 2018, Euro Chinese Daily wrote that "in addition to protecting the safety of Chinese tourists, China hopes to learn from the Naples model and introduce the Chinese community police model in Prato".
These patrols began to operate in cities such as Prato, or Padua, outside the traditional Chinese tourist circuits but in areas with a very high density of Chinese immigration. Chinese law enforcement operations in Prato, in particular, received a lot of attention in the Chinese media. In a YouTube video relaunched by the Chinese in Italy channels, policemen can be seen in the streets of Prato—always accompanied by their Italian colleagues—telling that they are very reassuring to the Chinese, who "are afraid of Moroccans" especially if they have a lot of cash in their pockets.
The joint patrols were discontinued in 2020, in line with measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
Does China Lie About These Police Stations?
But, according to Safeguard Defenders, those first Italian police stations became a model for the establishment of similar centres in other countries and over time began to carry out illegal operations aimed at "harassing, threatening, intimidating and pushing particular targets back to China."
The method would involve "initially phone calls, then threats to relatives remaining in China, and finally the use of undercover agents abroad, which may even extend to solicitation and kidnapping practices". The report points to at least one proven case of intimidation that allegedly led to the return of a Chinese national, avoiding the legal channels of extradition. This would be a worker accused of embezzlement and residing in Italy for 13 years: after returning to China, his trail was lost.
According to Beijing, those offices, almost always empty, are not 'police stations' but 'service centres' for petty administrative chores like renewing driver's licenses or providing bureaucratic support to Chinese across the border.
Testimony gathered by Safeguard Defenders, though, suggests more than 210,000 Chinese all over the world have been "convinced" to return to China. To date, the report adds, despite Italy having the largest number of liaison outposts on its territory, the Italian government "is among the very few European countries that have not yet publicly announced an investigation into overseas Chinese police stations or declared their illegality".
Nefarious Pattern To China’s BRI-Related Activities
Even so, these desks are illegal because they act as parallel consular offices, in violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. These stations pose a threat to the security and territorial sovereignty of the countries in which they are located.
As reported by the Spanish NGO report, back in May 2019 the People's Public Security News featured the "innovative establishment of overseas police service centres" of the Qingtian County Public Security Bureau, which provide "convenient services for the vast number of overseas Chinese" in 21 cities in 15 countries, and for which "135 Qingtian-born overseas Chinese leaders and leaders of overseas Chinese groups" were hired, "building a team of more than 1000 people" coordinated by a "domestic liaison centre".
Laura Harth, campaign director of Safeguard Defenders, said: "The Italian government, like other governments, should declare these stations 'illegal' by imposing their immediate closure”. There's a pattern, a nefarious one, to all the BRI-related initiatives. First, the agreements, then the Chinese workers, and then the Chinese troops to 'protect' the interests of Chinese citizens in foreign countries. Once more, somebody should take history books and remember how the East India Company took power in South Asia.
(Francesca Marino is a journalist and a South Asia expert who has written ‘Apocalypse Pakistan’ with B Natale. Her latest book is ‘Balochistan — Bruised, Battered and Bloodied’. She tweets @francescam63. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for his reported views.)
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