The things mentioned in the article aren’t police stations, Chinese or otherwise, nor are they secret.
That is the exactly the crux of the conflict, when does a citizen service station abroad that maintains communications with province-level PSBs and performs functions that the PSB would perform domestically need to seek approval from a host country? And why would the volunteers burn comms after the FBI started snooping in there were no secret dealings behind the scenes in the non-secret, totally-above-board hukou and drivers license operation? Beyond that, the testimonials from diaspora Chinese in the US are hard for me to handwave away. To be clear, I don’t intend to take any moral stance on this, I just think it is a bit naive to assume China wouldn’t do that or hasn’t done that, even without considering the weight of the claims on either side, diaspora community/Biden DOJ and Zhao Lijian/the MFA.
It seems you’ve done more research than me, and have more incentive to, having lived in China, so you tell me.
It’s doubtless that China has spy networks, as all countries do, and if some or all of these “police station” locations have connections to them, that wouldn’t surprise me. But “secret police station” implies that China is extraordinarily renditioning people or locking them up in secret prisons in Toronto, New York, Amsterdam, etc. Even if they are part of a spy network, they’re still not “police stations.”
Yes, I lived in China for almost a decade.
That is the exactly the crux of the conflict, when does a citizen service station abroad that maintains communications with province-level PSBs and performs functions that the PSB would perform domestically need to seek approval from a host country? And why would the volunteers burn comms after the FBI started snooping in there were no secret dealings behind the scenes in the non-secret, totally-above-board hukou and drivers license operation? Beyond that, the testimonials from diaspora Chinese in the US are hard for me to handwave away. To be clear, I don’t intend to take any moral stance on this, I just think it is a bit naive to assume China wouldn’t do that or hasn’t done that, even without considering the weight of the claims on either side, diaspora community/Biden DOJ and Zhao Lijian/the MFA.
It seems you’ve done more research than me, and have more incentive to, having lived in China, so you tell me.
It’s doubtless that China has spy networks, as all countries do, and if some or all of these “police station” locations have connections to them, that wouldn’t surprise me. But “secret police station” implies that China is extraordinarily renditioning people or locking them up in secret prisons in Toronto, New York, Amsterdam, etc. Even if they are part of a spy network, they’re still not “police stations.”