This is disturbing to say the least. A Chinese police force on our soil to spy on Chinese citizens and dissidents (and quite possibly us) and run by some sham company. WTF?
GOP lawmakers demand explanation for 'deeply troubling' Chinese police station in New York City
I won’t dismiss this story out of hand, but I am going to need some more unbiased sources on it than the House Republican Study Committee and the New York Post before I get up in arms.
Same. I tried to look it up and all the sources are Fox News, Daily Mail, NewsMax, Epoch Times, Washington Times and related right-wing rags.
If those are the only sources, I am comfortable dismissing it out of hand.
To whatever extent there might be anything real behind the hysterical stories, the truth is doubtless three days’ steep hiking above the version we’ve been given.
Here’s an older article about the same type of facility here in Canada:
China has been doing this for a little while now worldwide. They tell the host nations oh hey we just want to set up some Chinese police in your city so they can help out Chinese tourists who don’t speak perfect English. But in reality they are tagging and deporting people (dissidents) who have fled china.
If you say “Hey they don’t have power to deport anyone”. They do it with leverage. “Speak to your nephew on the phone. He’s at our police station right now. Terrible things could happen to him if you don’t do what we want.”
I’m speculating the Republicans aren’t upset about the seventy-eight FBI offices that are based in foreign countries.
The FBI office in China is in the US embassy in Beijing, where you would expect it to be. I don’t think there are any US cops operating in China.
This has been happening in Canada, too. It’s a real deal.
The devil is in the details. By “offices,” what’re we talking about? Is it an FBI guy whose job it is to liase with local law enforcement as needed? What is the nature of their relationship with the host government? If the FBI has an office in the USA embassy in Ottawa to work with the RCMP and such, that makes perfect sense. China is credibly accused of opening police branches without the host government’s knowledge and operating secretly. That’s not at all the same thing.
Are there any Chinese copes operating in America? From what I can tell, these police officers have no power to make an arrest or detain anyone in America. All they can do is observe. Which is the exact same thing American FBI agents can do in China.
So the United States has law enforcement officials observing people in China and China has law enforcement officials observing people in America. Why is one a normal activity and the other a sinister plot?
This has all the signs of the usual Republican attempt to make something out of nothing in order to scare voters.
I’m no fan of RW propaganda. But
There can be a significant difference between one and the other in the results of that similar observation.
If indeed one of the main activities of the Chinese agents is to apply extortionary pressure on legal migrants to “voluntarily” return to China to face harassment or arrest, that’s not quite the same as whatever the FBI does in China.
I’m not one of these folks who thinks the USA is all White Hat Good Guys. Our various agencies do some very morally and legally questionable shit every day in pursuit of US hegemony.
But at least in this matter we almost certainly occupy a higher moral plane than do the agencies of an at least semi-totalitarian government.
It is telling that here in the USA there is a thriving business in scammy robo-calls delivered in Mandarin that tell the caller that they’ve violated some emigration law in China and they need to stay on the phone to speak to a police rep to pay a fine (or “fine” = bribe) to make the problem go away.
An American in China receiving a similar call in English purportedly from the FBI would be laughing, not paying.
Yet we have literally thousands of people coming into our stores and buying iTunes, other gift cards or transferring money to people because they believe that the IRS, FBI or some other LEO has their child or grandchild and will do bad things to them if they don’t cough up.
Tells you everything you need to know about American law enforcement, doesn’t it?
Or about many Americans’ gullibility. But overall your point is well-taken. The fact those scams work is showing that something is very wrong in the USA.
It tells me how gullible people are. It’s true that the IRS will.do bad things to you if they believe you’re evading taxes. However unless you get a notice in the mail it’s unlikely you’re being audited.
That’s a valid point. I certainly agree that the Chinese government is worse than the American government.
But I don’t feel this originated as a complaint about the Chinese government. It’s a group of Republican politicians trying to gain political advantage by stirring up some domestic paranoia. Their only concern about what the Chinese government is doing is how they can spin it to make it look like the Democrats are to blame.
Agree completely. The basis of the RW’s motivation for publishing this is not good; this is simply propaganda. But once in a while their propaganda is not entirely fabricated; there happens to be a tiny kernel of truth inside the ginormous rolling snow-boulder of bullshit.
Sure, any good propaganda has to have some truth in it.
So the Republicans make a big issue by shouting “Look, China has its police working here in America!”
What they don’t say is “Dozens of countries have police working in the United States. And the United States has American police working in dozens of other countries. This is just a normal procedure that has been going on for decades. None of these police have any powers outside of their own country.”
Which is why we need a reputable source that digs into the details before we should conclude, well, anything at all about this situation.
So much whattaboutism in one thread. Keep up the good work, I guess.
You got nothin’ I guess.