But under Xi Jinping, the Chinese authorities have also been gradually extending their global reach to ensnare suspects (activists, scammers, fraudsters) in different countries.
In recent years, the Chinese government has been increasingly aggressive in its efforts to bring individuals it deems to be “criminals” back to China to face justice.
Operation Fox Hunt
According to a report in The Economist, Chinese authorities have been skirting formalities to nab thousands of criminals abroad and the scale of their global reach is now “staggering”.
China’s global efforts to bring back fugitives for “justice” have led to a phenomenon known as “Operation Fox Hunt” which was launched in 2014.
Under Fox Hunt, the Chinese government uses a variety of means to track down and apprehend individuals it believes have fled the country after committing crimes.
Fox Hunt was later expanded in 2015, under the name “Operation Sky Net”, to cover those involved in financial crimes as well.
Sky Net has secured the capture of well over 10,000 people, The Economist reported citing official data.
But the methods used by the authorities to capture suspects are highly controversial and often involve violating the laws of other countries.
In 2022, FBI director Christopher Wray accused the Chinese government of resorting to “blackmail, threats of violence, stalking and kidnappings” to repatriate its citizens.
In fact, Wray said that China actually engaged criminal organisations in US and “offered them bounties” in hopes of successfully taking targets back to home.
According to indictment papers against those arrested for these offences in US, China has been covertly sending government agents to America to carry out Fox Hunt operations.
The charges suggest that the agents sent by China likely used a variety of surrogates to do the dirty work of spying on, harassing and threatening fugitives, The Economist report said.
It said that the agents recruited by the Chinese government may have \sought the help of private detectives, relatives and friends of the “target”, as well as Chinese expatriates keen to show loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.
Quanfan techniques
According to the report, many of the cases involve a technique that China calls “quanfan”, or “persuading to return”.
It includes a range of measures to coax or trick the target to return home, ranging from putting pressure on relatives in China to the deployment of goons to threaten suspects in the countries where they live.
According to figures reported by Chinese state news agency Xinhua, over half of those targeted overseas were ensnared using quanfan techniques.
In a report by Safeguard Defenders, a human-rights group based in Spain, the Chinese police have been setting up numerous “service stations” abroad whose declared role is to help Chinese expatriates talk to police in China about bureaucratic matters.
However, the human rights group said that some of these service stations have been involved in quanfan operations.
In response to the controversy, some countries have begun to push back against Chinese efforts to apprehend individuals on their soil.
The Dutch and Irish governments have already ordered the closure of offices with alleged links to Chinese police in their countries.
Last year, the FBI raided one such police station in New York amid fears that they are being used to track and harass dissidents.
Currently, China has ratified extradition treaties with 45 countries, with another 14 countries where either both or one party need to complete ratification to bring them into effect, according to Safeguard Defenders
‘Guilt by association’
The Economist reported that China has started using quanfan techniques against scammers who use telephones or the internet to dupe people in China.
The methods used to secure their return are overtly brutal, it said.
“Police in several parts of China have threatened draconian measures against family members of those staying in, or returning from, blacklisted areas abroad who fail to co-operate with investigations,” the report said.
It cited an example of the Chinese authorities using harsh tactics in the island province of Hainan, under which the children of suspects were not allowed to attend any kind of school.
The authorities warned that the family members of the suspects would be stripped of health-insurance benefits for major medical treatments and none of their direct relatives would be allowed to work for the state.
“In many places officials have spray-painted the homes of suspects’ relatives with words such as ‘fraudster’s family’,” it said.
In China, murmurs of discontent with quanfan methods occasionally surface with critics calling the punishment of relatives “guilt by association”.
The Economist cited in an article in 2021 written two scholars from Jilin University who warned that pressure on police to achieve success in the repatriation of fugitives could easily lead to the use of “inappropriate” methods, including “threatening and terrorising” suspects and putting pressure on their relatives.
“Such behaviour had affected China’s ‘rule-of-law image’ abroad,” they wrote.
However, the issue of Operation Fox Hunt is likely to remain a contentious one for years to come as China continues to assert itself on the global stage and seeks to bring its citizens back home to face justice.