A Chinese police station in New York that reportedly was affiliated with aggressive Chinese policing tactics has been closed amid concerns expressed by several members of Congress.

The Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, a Chinese police station in New York, has closed. | Darndale/Pixabay

The Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, located inside the America ChangLe Association in New York, was closed following an FBI raid, The Epoch Times reported on Feb. 2.

“The facility and more than 100 others like it form a network of covert facilities from which experts believe that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is conducting a campaign of transnational repression,” The Epoch Times reported.

U.S. Rep. Jim Banks (R-Indiana) was among several members of Congress who wrote an Oct. 7, 2022, letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Attorney General Merrick Garland expressing “concern over reports of the law enforcement presence of the People’s Republic of China in New York City” in the establishment of the Fuzhou Police’s overseas service station.

It was among the “first batch” of 30 stations opened in 25 cities in 21 countries and hosted at the America ChangLe Association.

“It is deeply troubling that the Chinese government could use these service stations as its long arm policing abroad,” the letter said.

Chinese policing tactics include Operation Fox Hunt, “a shadowy fugitive-apprehension program,” launched in 2014, ProPublica reported. Through Operation Fox Hunt, China sends covert teams abroad to bring back people who supposedly committed financial crimes, but some include dissidents or whistleblowers.

“They use pressure, leverage, threats against family, they use proxies,” FBI deputy assistant director Bradley Benavides, chief of the China branch of the bureau’s counterintelligence division, told ProPublica. “Certainly, they are good at getting what they want.”

Operation Fox Hunt and the Operation Sky Net program reportedly caught over 8,000 international fugitives.

American private investigators have unknowingly become accomplices with Operation Fox Hunt, The New York Times reported.

One 55-year-old retiree of the New York Police Department, Michael McMahon, became a private investigator. He was contacted through his website by a woman who claimed she was helping a client from China find someone living in New Jersey who had stolen from a Chinese construction company. The woman claimed to own a translation company. 

She paid the private investigator, who conducted surveillance on the target five times in 2016 and 2017. He was arrested in October 2020 and accused of being part of Operation Fox Hunt and charged with “acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government, stalking and two conspiracy counts,” The New York Times said. McMahon denies he committed a crime.

Banks said he is glad that the Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station in New York is closed but that the Biden administration should stand up to the Chinese Communist Party.

“…It shouldn’t fall only to Republican lawmakers to combat malign Chinese influence,” Banks said. “These Communist Party officials were almost certainly breaking immigration and sanctions laws and never should’ve been allowed into our country to begin with.” 

The U.S. Department of State said in a Jan. 11 letter that it is concerned about allegations pertaining to overseas police service stations of the People’s Republic of China located in the U.S. because it affects “U.S. sovereignty and would circumvent standard judicial and law enforcement cooperation processes.” It didn’t invite or approve of the Fuzhou police establishing its presence in New York.

“It is important to note that the underlying issues related to these reports are not new, but a part of broader PRC transnational repression efforts, where they reach outside their borders to harass, surveil, and threaten individuals, whom the PRC deems a threat, including in the United States,” the letter said.

The Department of State will consider several policy responses, for example, not issuing visas to People’s Republic of China “nationals for the purposes of performing government duties at the alleged overseas service station in New York City.”