ASIAN WISCONZINE ONLINE
DECember 2022 ISSUE
The Expanding International Reach of China’s Police
By Jordan Link
(Part 1)
Introduction and summary
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS), its national police service and domestic security force, across the globe in ways that threaten U.S. national security interests by influencing security sector governance to undermine respect for the rule of law and human rights. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the MPS has significantly expanded its overseas activities, increasingly using security cooperation as a tool to expand its influence and shape global norms.
While the U.S. foreign policy community has focused attention on the military-to-military security cooperation activities of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), there is little public understanding of how the MPS’ overseas activities directly compete with U.S. security cooperation programs.
The MPS is a novel tool of CCP foreign policy used to shape in its own favor what the CCP refers to as the “global security governance system.” From Beijing’s perspective, the United States and other liberal democracies have played an outsize role in designing global institutions, rules, and norms. Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Wang Yi said in 2021 that “China did not participate in the development [of the rules-based international order], so why should we comply with [the rules-based international order]?”
The MPS’ global efforts to implement the CCP’s directive to “actively build a law enforcement security cooperation system with Chinese characteristics” pose significant challenges to the United States and other liberal democracies:
The MPS conducts transnational repression operations such as kidnapping and threatening political dissidents, human rights activists, journalists, ethnic and religious minorities, and former officials accused of corruption.
The MPS operates under the CCP’s own definitions of the rule of law and terrorism, which depart from globally established norms, simultaneously eroding shared recognition of these concepts while creating the pretext for a wide-ranging authority to act abroad.
MPS norm-breaking behaviors may also encourage other authoritarian regimes to act in similar ways. These activities stand in sharp contrast to U.S. security cooperation programs that aim to advance U.S. foreign policy interests by bolstering the capacity of partners to counter shared threats while adhering to international law and liberal democratic norms.
This report maps the universe of MPS overseas activities, which fall into three broad categories: .
Unilateral actions: transnational repression and illegal rendition campaigns .
Bilateral engagement: bilateral meetings, formal agreements, capacity building activities, material assistance, and extraterritorial joint security patrols. This report provides an original data set of the MPS’ global bilateral activities to establish a baseline understanding of MPS activity outside the PRC’s borders .
Multilateral engagement: creation of new international institutions and activities within established bodies such as Interpol
The threats that the MPS’ activities pose to U.S. national interests merit a comprehensive approach. The Center for American Progress recommends the United States respond with the following four-part strategy to reinforce strong security sector governance principles and norms, limit MPS activity within the United States, counter MPS conduct in multilateral organizations, and deepen official and public understanding of MPS malign activities: .
The United States, together with allies and partners, should drive a rule-of-law vision for security sector governance cooperation to draw attention to MPS challenges to the rule of law and human rights while reinforcing alternatives to MPS engagement for international partners. .
Washington should counter transnational repression occurring in the United States by crafting new legislation to deter such activities, fully implementing existing sanctions, and focusing on helping individuals targeted by the institution.
The United States should elevate its engagement in Interpol and other multilateral institutions to shape the environment in which the MPS acts. It could, for example, reform Interpol, offer alternative candidates for leadership roles in international organizations, and track the MPS’ use of global anti-corruption platforms. .
The United States should build a knowledge base of MPS activity through increased monitoring of and reporting on the MPS, sharing that information with other governments, and pressing for increased transparency of partner governments’ engagement with the MPS.
These policies would help reaffirm the foundations of recognized security sector governance norms in concert with allies and partners counter and deter the worst of the MPS’ global activities abroad protect those targeted by the MPS on U.S. soil and work to set acceptable, transparent standards for security sector activities that respect human rights. This report comprises four sections: 1) an overview of the MPS and Beijing’s vision for its role abroad 2) the types of MPS overseas activities 3) the threats of MPS international activities to U.S. interests and 4) recommendations for U.S. policymakers.
The MPS and Beijing’s vision for its role abroad
The Ministry of Public Security is the People’s Republic of China’s national police service and domestic security force its day-to-day responsibilities encompass law enforcement and criminal justice work, from traffic enforcement to countering violent crime. The MPS falls under the State Council, the PRC’s equivalent of a cabinet. While the MPS is a PRC government institution, it is de facto controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The PRC is a party-state, meaning that the ruling CCP holds a monopoly over political power and the levers of government. The party “sits atop the political system, controlling appointments to government and legislative posts, and ensuring its policy priorities are enacted into law and implemented.” The MPS, as the primary overseer of domestic security, is one of the party’s main tools to maintain its grip on power. The MPS is also a core part of the CCP’s coercive apparatus, tasked with maintaining stability and social order according to the dictates of CCP leadership.
The MPS’ mandate
The MPS’ primary mandate is to uphold CCP rule. When police officers are sworn in, they pledge allegiance first to the CCP, second to the country, third to the people, and only fourth to uphold the law. The institution’s priorities include political policing such as “stability maintenance” (维稳 wéiwěn), a euphemism for controlling protests, riots, and other forms of dissent.8 The MPS is also an “information management bureaucracy” responsible for securing the PRC’s computer networks and surveillance assets. It conducts mass surveillance and data collection throughout China, using “tens of millions of surveillance cameras throughout the country to monitor the general public.” The MPS operates the Golden Shield Project, the PRC’s internet surveillance system, which enables online censorship and monitoring. The MPS has extended the PRC’s DNA collection campaign from Tibet and Xinjiang across the country, collecting DNA from millions of boys and men in order to “manage and control society.” Finally, the MPS has an international mandate to organize exchanges and collaborate with international police and security apparatuses, the topic of this report. The expansion of the MPS’ international police cooperation activities is driven by two main motivations. First, the MPS is working to advance the overseas security interests of the PRC such as combating terrorism, countering drug trade, and protecting Chinese nationals and companies in foreign countries. Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong has called for the MPS to strengthen law enforcement cooperation to “effectively resolve overseas security risks.”
MPS overseas activity is expanding in tandem with the expansion of the PRC’s overseas interests, most notably in support of President Xi’s main foreign policy initiative, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). At the BRI Security Cooperation Dialogue in 2017, then-MPS Minister Guo Shengkun expressed his hope that “all [BRI participants] will establish common security and cooperative security concepts, establish and improve the ‘Belt and Road’ security cooperation mechanism.” At the same conference, former MPS Minister Meng Jianzhu called for BRI participants to “deepen law enforcement and security cooperation.”
Second, the MPS’ global activities are driven by Beijing’s discontent with the current international liberal democratic order, often characterized by “limits to state authority, such as binding international law and unalienable individual rights.” Instead, President Xi’s vision for a global order is one that would permit unchallenged CCP domestic power and create the conditions for the CCP’s governance model to coexist with democracies by rejecting universal values such as respect for the rule of law and the protection of human rights. To achieve this vision, Beijing has advocated for the supreme authority of the state to determine its own political and economic system while also pushing back against any perceived infringement upon its own sovereignty such as international monitoring and sanctioning.
Beijing has been clear about its intent to assert greater influence over global security norms and the MPS’ role in achieving this vision. In his keynote speech at the 2017 Interpol General Assembly, President Xi declared that “the current global security governance system has many incompatibilities and should be reformed and improved.” That same year, the PRC’s National Public Security International Cooperation Work Conference—a convening of the PRC’s top public security and legal officials—gave the MPS a broad international mission mandate, calling on it to “grasp the new characteristics of the internationalization of public security work.” In 2019, then-MPS Minister Zhao Kezhi directed the MPS to grow its international profile to enhance its power to influence global security norms, calling for the ministry to build a “new system of public security international cooperation work” to ensure that CCP foreign policies are implemented. These calls to action are clear directions to the MPS to be more active abroad.
CCP goals dictate the MPS’ international work. In 2018, then-MPS Minister Zhao issued requirements for the MPS’ international cooperation activities, which included “maintaining absolute loyalty” to the party as officers carry out their work. Liao Jinrong, director of the MPS’ International Cooperation Bureau, stated in a 2017 interview that Beijing would expand the “tentacles” of international police force cooperation wherever the CCP perceives that PRC national interests are in danger.
The MPS’ international activities
The Ministry of Public Security’s global activities fall into three categories: unilateral actions, such as transnational repression campaigns bilateral engagements such as meetings, formal agreements, capacity building activities and material assistance to peer security apparatuses, and extraterritorial joint security patrols and multilateral engagement, including creating new, alternative international institutions and activities within established institutions such as Interpol.
What is transnational repression?
According to Freedom House: The term transnational repression describes the ways a government reaches across national borders to intimidate, silence, or harm an exile, refugee, or member of diaspora who they perceive as a threat and have a political incentive to control. Methods of transnational repression include assassinations, physical assaults, detention, rendition, unlawful deportation, unexplained or enforced disappearance, physical surveillance or stalking, passport cancellation or control over other documents, Interpol abuse, digital threats, spyware, cyberattacks, social media surveillance, online harassment, and harassment of or harm to family and associates who remain in the country of origin.
Unilateral action: Transnational repression and rendition campaigns
The MPS plays a key role in the CCP’s ongoing, global campaign of transnational repression, most notably through its rendition campaigns but likewise through other actions to pressure and control individuals or communities beyond the PRC’s borders. Freedom House highlights three distinct characteristics of the CCP’s transnational repression efforts: First, the campaign targets many groups, including multiple ethnic and religious minorities, political dissidents, human rights activists, journalists, and former insiders accused of corruption. Second, it spans the full spectrum of tactics: from direct attacks like renditions, to co-opting other countries to detain and render exiles, to mobility controls, to threats from a distance like digital threats, spyware, and coercion by proxy. Third, the sheer breadth and global scale of the campaign is unparalleled. Freedom House’s conservative catalogue of direct, physical attacks since 2014 covers 214 cases originating from China, far more than any other country.
The MPS has implemented two major global rendition campaigns: Operation Fox Hunt (猎狐行动 lièhú xíngdòng) and Operation Sky Net (天网行动 tiān wǎng xíngdòng). Operation Fox Hunt is an initiative launched in 2014 to locate and extradite alleged Chinese fugitives who fled overseas. In 2015, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection launched Operation Sky Net, to coordinate rendition efforts across multiple PRC government agencies. Operation Fox Hunt is now subsumed under Sky Net. In addition to using these campaigns to root out real corruption, President Xi and the CCP have used them to purge political rivals, silence critics, and eliminate perceived foreign intelligence risks.
Renditions represent some of the MPS’ most egregious norm-breaking behavior. MPS authorities have conducted Operation Fox Hunt missions overseas without informing the local country’s legal or law enforcement apparatus, and in contradiction with local and international law. These renditions are among the MPS’ most clandestine activities and therefore extremely difficult to track.
Nonetheless, substantial evidence has emerged of Fox Hunt and Sky Net operations spanning the globe, including in the United States. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) alleged that from 2016 to 2019, multiple PRC officials directed individuals to “engage in efforts to coerce” a Chinese citizen living in the United States to return to the PRC as part of Operation Fox Hunt. This campaign included coercing the target’s father to travel to the United States from the PRC to encourage the target to return to the PRC, sending harassing messages over social media to the target’s daughter and her friends, and leaving a threatening note on the target’s door that read, “If you are willing to go back to mainland and spend 10 years in prison, your wife and children will be all right. That’s the end of this matter!”
In March 2022, in a different case, the DOJ alleged that Sun Hoi Ying, who is still at large in the PRC, acted and conspired to act in the United States as an unregistered PRC government agent while conducting an Operation Fox Hunt mission. According to the charging documents, Sun allegedly surveilled and pressured an ethnic-Chinese U.S. citizen to return to the PRC as part of an anti-corruption investigation. The target’s daughter, a U.S. citizen, was allegedly held against her will in the PRC for eight months after visiting family, in an effort to pressure the target to return to the PRC. The DOJ says that Sun Hoi Ying, the same PRC agent, while pursuing a different target, coordinated and co-conspired with an unnamed local U.S. law enforcement officer to threaten and pressure the latter target to return to the PRC.
Under Operation Fox Hunt, MPS officers captured more than 6,000 targets in more than 120 countries from 2014 to 2020, according to the Global Times, a CCP-aligned newspaper.36 CCP media is candid about the success and reach of these operations: China Daily reported that 213 targets were captured in Southeast Asia in 2015, and additional PRC media report that Operation Fox Hunt missions have been conducted in the United States, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Italy, Malaysia, Spain, South Korea, and Vietnam. When expanded to include Operation Sky Net, more than 8,000 individuals were arrested from 2015 to 2020.
Some foreign governments have coordinated with the PRC government on these missions, according to PRC government sources. For example, the governments of Argentina, France, and Malaysia have cooperated with the MPS to help it arrest individuals targeted by Fox Hunt operations.39 Foreign government coordination on potential Operation Fox Hunt missions requires careful due diligence given the MPS’ practice of pursuing criminal charges for political activities.
The extralegal kidnapping of Gui Minhai
The case of Gui Minhai is the most notorious of the MPS’ global rendition campaigns. Gui, an ethnic-Chinese naturalized Swedish citizen, worked in Hong Kong at Causeway Bay Books, which published and sold books with unflattering stories about the political elite in Beijing, including stories about President Xi Jinping’s wife. In 2015, Gui disappeared while staying at his vacation home in Thailand. Three months later, Gui resurfaced in China, confessing on PRC official state television to a decade-old, alleged hit-and-run case. Many experts have contended that his confession was a false product of coercion.
Gui was one of five individuals connected to the bookstore who were detained in late 2015 but the only one to be kidnapped on foreign soil. Official PRC state media confirmed MPS involvement in the case, although the PRC government claims Gui surrendered himself to the MPS. Thai government statements indicate MPS officers acted without the Thai government’s knowledge. Gui was released after two years in prison but forced to remain in the PRC and required to report to local police regularly. Then, in 2018, Gui was seized and taken away by plainclothes police officers while traveling by train to Beijing with Swedish diplomats. He was charged with meeting with the Swedish diplomats illegally and passing them secret information.46 In 2020, a PRC court sentenced Gui to jail for 10 years for “illegally providing intelligence overseas,” a sentence he is still serving.
Bilateral police diplomacy
As top MPS officials pursue stronger government-government relationships, their bilateral engagement typically occurs with their institutional equals but also with heads of state and other officials in charge of national security, defense, and internal affairs.
From 1997 to 2021, senior MPS officials held 114 bilateral meetings with foreign counterparts.48 The frequency of bilateral engagements generally increased over that period, with more than 60 percent of all identified MPS bilateral exchanges occurring during President Xi’s time in power. The outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 significantly decreased exchanges starting in that year, and the trend continued in 2021 as the PRC remained effectively in lockdown. he topic of “stability maintenance” (维稳 wéiwěn), an MPS domestic priority and a euphemism for controlling protests, riots, and other forms of dissent, is a central theme of MPS bilateral public security exchanges. Topics such as maintaining stability (including social stability, regional stability, and national stability), and managing large-scale events such as protests and riots were mentioned in at least different bilateral meetings with officials from 18 different countries. Most of these 18 countries were designated as “partly free” or “not free” under Freedom House’s Global Freedom Status framework. Since President Xi assumed power in 2013, stability maintenance has doubled as a topic of discussion during MPS bilateral meetings, indicating that an increasing number of foreign governments seem interested in engaging with the MPS on issues such as controlling protests, riots, and other forms of political dissent.
Counterterrorism was the most discussed topic in bilateral exchanges, aligned with the MPS’ role as the PRC’s lead organization responsible for counterterrorism matters. Other common topics in bilateral discussions have included transnational crime, counter-drug efforts, law enforcement cooperation and capacity building, and border security.
The MPS has focused its bilateral outreach on Asia. Governments in Asia were involved in 60 percent of bilateral exchanges, and almost half of those involved countries that border China. The MPS’ bilateral exchanges with European governments made up 13 percent, governments across Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa both accounted for around 10 percent each, and North America just more than 4 percent. The MPS held two bilateral exchanges with Middle Eastern governments. Fiji was the only country in Oceania to hold a bilateral exchange with the MPS.
Formal agreements
The MPS signs formal documents with foreign governments to institutionalize and foster future international police cooperation. These agreements are most often signed at bilateral meetings between the MPS and foreign counterparts. Some MPS agreements raise transparency concerns. In 2015, the MPS and Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) signed a secret readmission agreement—a binding arrangement to return non-nationals to another country. Both the Swiss parliament and foreign affairs committee were not aware of the agreement at the time of its signing. Switzerland has concluded about 50 similar agreements with other foreign governments and published their contents, but the MPS agreement did not come to light until 2020 when NZZ am Sonntag, a Swiss newspaper, reported about the agreement and its potential renewal five years after it was signed. Later that same year, Safeguard Defenders, a human rights advocacy group, published the text of the agreement.
The agreement states MPS officials “will be invited …without official status” to Switzerland for up to two weeks in order to interview alleged Chinese citizens overstaying their visas, evaluate if they are Chinese citizens, and then submit reports to the Swiss government on each individual interview conducted.57 The Swiss agreement also committed to keeping the identity of the MPS agents confidential and contained no clauses regarding supervising MPS agents outside their work functions with SEM.58 According to professor Margaret Lewis, an expert on Chinese criminal justice and human rights, it is unusual that the PRC would send officials abroad to interview low-level targets such as individuals overstaying their visas.59 Rather, she argues that it is more likely that MPS agents would travel abroad to interview “people who are … of interest to the PRC government.”60 Given that MPS agents would be invited to Switzerland without official status, they could in turn potentially travel to the 26 other countries within the Schengen Area. SEM stated that the agreement resulted in one MPS visit to Switzerland in 2016.61 That same year, 13 individuals were returned to China from Switzerland.
An April 2022 security agreement between the PRC and Solomon Islands has reinforced concerns in Washington and among allies in the region about the military-to-military security cooperation activities of the People’s Liberation Army. In fact, the potential domestic security-related cooperation between the PRC and Solomon Islands also merits close attention, and considered U.S. policy engagement with Solomon Islands’ authorities. A leaked draft of the security agreement stated that “Solomon Islands may, according to its own needs, request China to send police, armed police, military personnel and other law enforcement and armed forces to Solomon Islands to assist in maintaining social order.”
The PRC’s public security cooperation with Egypt demonstrates the potential downstream human-rights-related consequences of formal security cooperation agreements. In June 2017, the Egyptian government announced the signing of an MPS-Ministry of Interior cooperation agreement, which would address “the spread of terrorism and extremist ideologies.” Weeks later, Egypt detained more than 200 Uyghurs residing in Egypt, a step some suspect came in response to a request from Beijing. Egypt is also one of the largest recipients of U.S. security cooperation, to the tune of more than $50 billion since 1978. To date, it is unclear if the U.S. government has evaluated whether or how U.S. and MPS assistance activities, including for training and equipment for Egyptian law enforcement entities, have overlapped and potentially run counter to U.S. security assistance objectives.
Capacity building cooperation
The MPS devotes significant resources to capacity building efforts with foreign public security apparatuses. President Xi announced at the 2017 Interpol General Assembly that the MPS would seek to “train 20,000 law enforcement officers in developing countries.” According to PRC state media, the MPS has since achieved this goal.68
In total, CAP identified 77 MPS training sessions for foreign public security forces. The overwhelming majority—73 of the 77—have occurred during President Xi’s time in power, with a noticeable spike from 2017 to 2018, likely coinciding with the policy directive from the 2017 speech at the Interpol General Assembly. Asia received the most training sessions—almost 40 percent. Africa received the next-largest share at 35 percent. Latin America and the Caribbean received 12 percent. Oceania and Europe received 8 percent and 4 percent, respectively. In the Middle East, only Qatar received MPS training. In North America, Mexico took part in one MPS training.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS), its national police service and domestic security force, across the globe in ways that threaten U.S. national security interests by influencing security sector governance to undermine respect for the rule of law and human rights. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the MPS has significantly expanded its overseas activities, increasingly using security cooperation as a tool to expand its influence and shape global norms.
While the U.S. foreign policy community has focused attention on the military-to-military security cooperation activities of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), there is little public understanding of how the MPS’ overseas activities directly compete with U.S. security cooperation programs.
The MPS is a novel tool of CCP foreign policy used to shape in its own favor what the CCP refers to as the “global security governance system.” From Beijing’s perspective, the United States and other liberal democracies have played an outsize role in designing global institutions, rules, and norms. Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Wang Yi said in 2021 that “China did not participate in the development [of the rules-based international order], so why should we comply with [the rules-based international order]?”
The MPS’ global efforts to implement the CCP’s directive to “actively build a law enforcement security cooperation system with Chinese characteristics” pose significant challenges to the United States and other liberal democracies:
The MPS conducts transnational repression operations such as kidnapping and threatening political dissidents, human rights activists, journalists, ethnic and religious minorities, and former officials accused of corruption.
The MPS operates under the CCP’s own definitions of the rule of law and terrorism, which depart from globally established norms, simultaneously eroding shared recognition of these concepts while creating the pretext for a wide-ranging authority to act abroad.
MPS norm-breaking behaviors may also encourage other authoritarian regimes to act in similar ways. These activities stand in sharp contrast to U.S. security cooperation programs that aim to advance U.S. foreign policy interests by bolstering the capacity of partners to counter shared threats while adhering to international law and liberal democratic norms.
This report maps the universe of MPS overseas activities, which fall into three broad categories: .
Unilateral actions: transnational repression and illegal rendition campaigns .
Bilateral engagement: bilateral meetings, formal agreements, capacity building activities, material assistance, and extraterritorial joint security patrols. This report provides an original data set of the MPS’ global bilateral activities to establish a baseline understanding of MPS activity outside the PRC’s borders .
Multilateral engagement: creation of new international institutions and activities within established bodies such as Interpol
The threats that the MPS’ activities pose to U.S. national interests merit a comprehensive approach. The Center for American Progress recommends the United States respond with the following four-part strategy to reinforce strong security sector governance principles and norms, limit MPS activity within the United States, counter MPS conduct in multilateral organizations, and deepen official and public understanding of MPS malign activities: .
The United States, together with allies and partners, should drive a rule-of-law vision for security sector governance cooperation to draw attention to MPS challenges to the rule of law and human rights while reinforcing alternatives to MPS engagement for international partners. .
Washington should counter transnational repression occurring in the United States by crafting new legislation to deter such activities, fully implementing existing sanctions, and focusing on helping individuals targeted by the institution.
The United States should elevate its engagement in Interpol and other multilateral institutions to shape the environment in which the MPS acts. It could, for example, reform Interpol, offer alternative candidates for leadership roles in international organizations, and track the MPS’ use of global anti-corruption platforms. .
The United States should build a knowledge base of MPS activity through increased monitoring of and reporting on the MPS, sharing that information with other governments, and pressing for increased transparency of partner governments’ engagement with the MPS.
These policies would help reaffirm the foundations of recognized security sector governance norms in concert with allies and partners counter and deter the worst of the MPS’ global activities abroad protect those targeted by the MPS on U.S. soil and work to set acceptable, transparent standards for security sector activities that respect human rights. This report comprises four sections: 1) an overview of the MPS and Beijing’s vision for its role abroad 2) the types of MPS overseas activities 3) the threats of MPS international activities to U.S. interests and 4) recommendations for U.S. policymakers.
The MPS and Beijing’s vision for its role abroad
The Ministry of Public Security is the People’s Republic of China’s national police service and domestic security force its day-to-day responsibilities encompass law enforcement and criminal justice work, from traffic enforcement to countering violent crime. The MPS falls under the State Council, the PRC’s equivalent of a cabinet. While the MPS is a PRC government institution, it is de facto controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The PRC is a party-state, meaning that the ruling CCP holds a monopoly over political power and the levers of government. The party “sits atop the political system, controlling appointments to government and legislative posts, and ensuring its policy priorities are enacted into law and implemented.” The MPS, as the primary overseer of domestic security, is one of the party’s main tools to maintain its grip on power. The MPS is also a core part of the CCP’s coercive apparatus, tasked with maintaining stability and social order according to the dictates of CCP leadership.
The MPS’ mandate
The MPS’ primary mandate is to uphold CCP rule. When police officers are sworn in, they pledge allegiance first to the CCP, second to the country, third to the people, and only fourth to uphold the law. The institution’s priorities include political policing such as “stability maintenance” (维稳 wéiwěn), a euphemism for controlling protests, riots, and other forms of dissent.8 The MPS is also an “information management bureaucracy” responsible for securing the PRC’s computer networks and surveillance assets. It conducts mass surveillance and data collection throughout China, using “tens of millions of surveillance cameras throughout the country to monitor the general public.” The MPS operates the Golden Shield Project, the PRC’s internet surveillance system, which enables online censorship and monitoring. The MPS has extended the PRC’s DNA collection campaign from Tibet and Xinjiang across the country, collecting DNA from millions of boys and men in order to “manage and control society.” Finally, the MPS has an international mandate to organize exchanges and collaborate with international police and security apparatuses, the topic of this report. The expansion of the MPS’ international police cooperation activities is driven by two main motivations. First, the MPS is working to advance the overseas security interests of the PRC such as combating terrorism, countering drug trade, and protecting Chinese nationals and companies in foreign countries. Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong has called for the MPS to strengthen law enforcement cooperation to “effectively resolve overseas security risks.”
MPS overseas activity is expanding in tandem with the expansion of the PRC’s overseas interests, most notably in support of President Xi’s main foreign policy initiative, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). At the BRI Security Cooperation Dialogue in 2017, then-MPS Minister Guo Shengkun expressed his hope that “all [BRI participants] will establish common security and cooperative security concepts, establish and improve the ‘Belt and Road’ security cooperation mechanism.” At the same conference, former MPS Minister Meng Jianzhu called for BRI participants to “deepen law enforcement and security cooperation.”
Second, the MPS’ global activities are driven by Beijing’s discontent with the current international liberal democratic order, often characterized by “limits to state authority, such as binding international law and unalienable individual rights.” Instead, President Xi’s vision for a global order is one that would permit unchallenged CCP domestic power and create the conditions for the CCP’s governance model to coexist with democracies by rejecting universal values such as respect for the rule of law and the protection of human rights. To achieve this vision, Beijing has advocated for the supreme authority of the state to determine its own political and economic system while also pushing back against any perceived infringement upon its own sovereignty such as international monitoring and sanctioning.
Beijing has been clear about its intent to assert greater influence over global security norms and the MPS’ role in achieving this vision. In his keynote speech at the 2017 Interpol General Assembly, President Xi declared that “the current global security governance system has many incompatibilities and should be reformed and improved.” That same year, the PRC’s National Public Security International Cooperation Work Conference—a convening of the PRC’s top public security and legal officials—gave the MPS a broad international mission mandate, calling on it to “grasp the new characteristics of the internationalization of public security work.” In 2019, then-MPS Minister Zhao Kezhi directed the MPS to grow its international profile to enhance its power to influence global security norms, calling for the ministry to build a “new system of public security international cooperation work” to ensure that CCP foreign policies are implemented. These calls to action are clear directions to the MPS to be more active abroad.
CCP goals dictate the MPS’ international work. In 2018, then-MPS Minister Zhao issued requirements for the MPS’ international cooperation activities, which included “maintaining absolute loyalty” to the party as officers carry out their work. Liao Jinrong, director of the MPS’ International Cooperation Bureau, stated in a 2017 interview that Beijing would expand the “tentacles” of international police force cooperation wherever the CCP perceives that PRC national interests are in danger.
The MPS’ international activities
The Ministry of Public Security’s global activities fall into three categories: unilateral actions, such as transnational repression campaigns bilateral engagements such as meetings, formal agreements, capacity building activities and material assistance to peer security apparatuses, and extraterritorial joint security patrols and multilateral engagement, including creating new, alternative international institutions and activities within established institutions such as Interpol.
What is transnational repression?
According to Freedom House: The term transnational repression describes the ways a government reaches across national borders to intimidate, silence, or harm an exile, refugee, or member of diaspora who they perceive as a threat and have a political incentive to control. Methods of transnational repression include assassinations, physical assaults, detention, rendition, unlawful deportation, unexplained or enforced disappearance, physical surveillance or stalking, passport cancellation or control over other documents, Interpol abuse, digital threats, spyware, cyberattacks, social media surveillance, online harassment, and harassment of or harm to family and associates who remain in the country of origin.
Unilateral action: Transnational repression and rendition campaigns
The MPS plays a key role in the CCP’s ongoing, global campaign of transnational repression, most notably through its rendition campaigns but likewise through other actions to pressure and control individuals or communities beyond the PRC’s borders. Freedom House highlights three distinct characteristics of the CCP’s transnational repression efforts: First, the campaign targets many groups, including multiple ethnic and religious minorities, political dissidents, human rights activists, journalists, and former insiders accused of corruption. Second, it spans the full spectrum of tactics: from direct attacks like renditions, to co-opting other countries to detain and render exiles, to mobility controls, to threats from a distance like digital threats, spyware, and coercion by proxy. Third, the sheer breadth and global scale of the campaign is unparalleled. Freedom House’s conservative catalogue of direct, physical attacks since 2014 covers 214 cases originating from China, far more than any other country.
The MPS has implemented two major global rendition campaigns: Operation Fox Hunt (猎狐行动 lièhú xíngdòng) and Operation Sky Net (天网行动 tiān wǎng xíngdòng). Operation Fox Hunt is an initiative launched in 2014 to locate and extradite alleged Chinese fugitives who fled overseas. In 2015, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection launched Operation Sky Net, to coordinate rendition efforts across multiple PRC government agencies. Operation Fox Hunt is now subsumed under Sky Net. In addition to using these campaigns to root out real corruption, President Xi and the CCP have used them to purge political rivals, silence critics, and eliminate perceived foreign intelligence risks.
Renditions represent some of the MPS’ most egregious norm-breaking behavior. MPS authorities have conducted Operation Fox Hunt missions overseas without informing the local country’s legal or law enforcement apparatus, and in contradiction with local and international law. These renditions are among the MPS’ most clandestine activities and therefore extremely difficult to track.
Nonetheless, substantial evidence has emerged of Fox Hunt and Sky Net operations spanning the globe, including in the United States. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) alleged that from 2016 to 2019, multiple PRC officials directed individuals to “engage in efforts to coerce” a Chinese citizen living in the United States to return to the PRC as part of Operation Fox Hunt. This campaign included coercing the target’s father to travel to the United States from the PRC to encourage the target to return to the PRC, sending harassing messages over social media to the target’s daughter and her friends, and leaving a threatening note on the target’s door that read, “If you are willing to go back to mainland and spend 10 years in prison, your wife and children will be all right. That’s the end of this matter!”
In March 2022, in a different case, the DOJ alleged that Sun Hoi Ying, who is still at large in the PRC, acted and conspired to act in the United States as an unregistered PRC government agent while conducting an Operation Fox Hunt mission. According to the charging documents, Sun allegedly surveilled and pressured an ethnic-Chinese U.S. citizen to return to the PRC as part of an anti-corruption investigation. The target’s daughter, a U.S. citizen, was allegedly held against her will in the PRC for eight months after visiting family, in an effort to pressure the target to return to the PRC. The DOJ says that Sun Hoi Ying, the same PRC agent, while pursuing a different target, coordinated and co-conspired with an unnamed local U.S. law enforcement officer to threaten and pressure the latter target to return to the PRC.
Under Operation Fox Hunt, MPS officers captured more than 6,000 targets in more than 120 countries from 2014 to 2020, according to the Global Times, a CCP-aligned newspaper.36 CCP media is candid about the success and reach of these operations: China Daily reported that 213 targets were captured in Southeast Asia in 2015, and additional PRC media report that Operation Fox Hunt missions have been conducted in the United States, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Italy, Malaysia, Spain, South Korea, and Vietnam. When expanded to include Operation Sky Net, more than 8,000 individuals were arrested from 2015 to 2020.
Some foreign governments have coordinated with the PRC government on these missions, according to PRC government sources. For example, the governments of Argentina, France, and Malaysia have cooperated with the MPS to help it arrest individuals targeted by Fox Hunt operations.39 Foreign government coordination on potential Operation Fox Hunt missions requires careful due diligence given the MPS’ practice of pursuing criminal charges for political activities.
The extralegal kidnapping of Gui Minhai
The case of Gui Minhai is the most notorious of the MPS’ global rendition campaigns. Gui, an ethnic-Chinese naturalized Swedish citizen, worked in Hong Kong at Causeway Bay Books, which published and sold books with unflattering stories about the political elite in Beijing, including stories about President Xi Jinping’s wife. In 2015, Gui disappeared while staying at his vacation home in Thailand. Three months later, Gui resurfaced in China, confessing on PRC official state television to a decade-old, alleged hit-and-run case. Many experts have contended that his confession was a false product of coercion.
Gui was one of five individuals connected to the bookstore who were detained in late 2015 but the only one to be kidnapped on foreign soil. Official PRC state media confirmed MPS involvement in the case, although the PRC government claims Gui surrendered himself to the MPS. Thai government statements indicate MPS officers acted without the Thai government’s knowledge. Gui was released after two years in prison but forced to remain in the PRC and required to report to local police regularly. Then, in 2018, Gui was seized and taken away by plainclothes police officers while traveling by train to Beijing with Swedish diplomats. He was charged with meeting with the Swedish diplomats illegally and passing them secret information.46 In 2020, a PRC court sentenced Gui to jail for 10 years for “illegally providing intelligence overseas,” a sentence he is still serving.
Bilateral police diplomacy
As top MPS officials pursue stronger government-government relationships, their bilateral engagement typically occurs with their institutional equals but also with heads of state and other officials in charge of national security, defense, and internal affairs.
From 1997 to 2021, senior MPS officials held 114 bilateral meetings with foreign counterparts.48 The frequency of bilateral engagements generally increased over that period, with more than 60 percent of all identified MPS bilateral exchanges occurring during President Xi’s time in power. The outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 significantly decreased exchanges starting in that year, and the trend continued in 2021 as the PRC remained effectively in lockdown. he topic of “stability maintenance” (维稳 wéiwěn), an MPS domestic priority and a euphemism for controlling protests, riots, and other forms of dissent, is a central theme of MPS bilateral public security exchanges. Topics such as maintaining stability (including social stability, regional stability, and national stability), and managing large-scale events such as protests and riots were mentioned in at least different bilateral meetings with officials from 18 different countries. Most of these 18 countries were designated as “partly free” or “not free” under Freedom House’s Global Freedom Status framework. Since President Xi assumed power in 2013, stability maintenance has doubled as a topic of discussion during MPS bilateral meetings, indicating that an increasing number of foreign governments seem interested in engaging with the MPS on issues such as controlling protests, riots, and other forms of political dissent.
Counterterrorism was the most discussed topic in bilateral exchanges, aligned with the MPS’ role as the PRC’s lead organization responsible for counterterrorism matters. Other common topics in bilateral discussions have included transnational crime, counter-drug efforts, law enforcement cooperation and capacity building, and border security.
The MPS has focused its bilateral outreach on Asia. Governments in Asia were involved in 60 percent of bilateral exchanges, and almost half of those involved countries that border China. The MPS’ bilateral exchanges with European governments made up 13 percent, governments across Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa both accounted for around 10 percent each, and North America just more than 4 percent. The MPS held two bilateral exchanges with Middle Eastern governments. Fiji was the only country in Oceania to hold a bilateral exchange with the MPS.
Formal agreements
The MPS signs formal documents with foreign governments to institutionalize and foster future international police cooperation. These agreements are most often signed at bilateral meetings between the MPS and foreign counterparts. Some MPS agreements raise transparency concerns. In 2015, the MPS and Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) signed a secret readmission agreement—a binding arrangement to return non-nationals to another country. Both the Swiss parliament and foreign affairs committee were not aware of the agreement at the time of its signing. Switzerland has concluded about 50 similar agreements with other foreign governments and published their contents, but the MPS agreement did not come to light until 2020 when NZZ am Sonntag, a Swiss newspaper, reported about the agreement and its potential renewal five years after it was signed. Later that same year, Safeguard Defenders, a human rights advocacy group, published the text of the agreement.
The agreement states MPS officials “will be invited …without official status” to Switzerland for up to two weeks in order to interview alleged Chinese citizens overstaying their visas, evaluate if they are Chinese citizens, and then submit reports to the Swiss government on each individual interview conducted.57 The Swiss agreement also committed to keeping the identity of the MPS agents confidential and contained no clauses regarding supervising MPS agents outside their work functions with SEM.58 According to professor Margaret Lewis, an expert on Chinese criminal justice and human rights, it is unusual that the PRC would send officials abroad to interview low-level targets such as individuals overstaying their visas.59 Rather, she argues that it is more likely that MPS agents would travel abroad to interview “people who are … of interest to the PRC government.”60 Given that MPS agents would be invited to Switzerland without official status, they could in turn potentially travel to the 26 other countries within the Schengen Area. SEM stated that the agreement resulted in one MPS visit to Switzerland in 2016.61 That same year, 13 individuals were returned to China from Switzerland.
An April 2022 security agreement between the PRC and Solomon Islands has reinforced concerns in Washington and among allies in the region about the military-to-military security cooperation activities of the People’s Liberation Army. In fact, the potential domestic security-related cooperation between the PRC and Solomon Islands also merits close attention, and considered U.S. policy engagement with Solomon Islands’ authorities. A leaked draft of the security agreement stated that “Solomon Islands may, according to its own needs, request China to send police, armed police, military personnel and other law enforcement and armed forces to Solomon Islands to assist in maintaining social order.”
The PRC’s public security cooperation with Egypt demonstrates the potential downstream human-rights-related consequences of formal security cooperation agreements. In June 2017, the Egyptian government announced the signing of an MPS-Ministry of Interior cooperation agreement, which would address “the spread of terrorism and extremist ideologies.” Weeks later, Egypt detained more than 200 Uyghurs residing in Egypt, a step some suspect came in response to a request from Beijing. Egypt is also one of the largest recipients of U.S. security cooperation, to the tune of more than $50 billion since 1978. To date, it is unclear if the U.S. government has evaluated whether or how U.S. and MPS assistance activities, including for training and equipment for Egyptian law enforcement entities, have overlapped and potentially run counter to U.S. security assistance objectives.
Capacity building cooperation
The MPS devotes significant resources to capacity building efforts with foreign public security apparatuses. President Xi announced at the 2017 Interpol General Assembly that the MPS would seek to “train 20,000 law enforcement officers in developing countries.” According to PRC state media, the MPS has since achieved this goal.68
In total, CAP identified 77 MPS training sessions for foreign public security forces. The overwhelming majority—73 of the 77—have occurred during President Xi’s time in power, with a noticeable spike from 2017 to 2018, likely coinciding with the policy directive from the 2017 speech at the Interpol General Assembly. Asia received the most training sessions—almost 40 percent. Africa received the next-largest share at 35 percent. Latin America and the Caribbean received 12 percent. Oceania and Europe received 8 percent and 4 percent, respectively. In the Middle East, only Qatar received MPS training. In North America, Mexico took part in one MPS training.
