Chinese Service Centers in US Contacting China’s Police

The Chinese Communist Party’s intelligence agency is operating “Overseas Chinese Service Centers” in various U.S.-based nonprofits in seven cities, and all have been in contact with their country’s national police authority, according to government records. 

The CCP’s United Front Work Department, characterized by at least one U.S. agency as a state “intelligence service,” has centers in San Francisco; Houston; Omaha, Nebraska; Salt Lake City; St. Louis; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Charlotte, North Carolina, according to an investigation by the Daily Caller News Foundation. 

The centers, identified as OCSCs, were officially set up to assist Chinese citizens living abroad and to promote the Chinese culture, according to records from the Chinese government. But state media reports and other sources show that during a 2018 trip to China, U.S.-based OCSC representatives met with officials from the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), who demonstrated how they are leveraging new technology to conduct remote justice services. 

The MPS is often referred to as “China’s FBI,” and the U.S. Department of Justice says it often conducts intelligence operations far beyond the borders of China, including on U.S. soil.

While there is no evidence pointing to the U.S. service centers operating as secret police stations, their association with the Chinese United Front system and their contact with MPS is causing concern. 

“The national security threat is real,” Will Mackie, a career federal prosecutor and former trial attorney for the counterintelligence section of the DOJ’s National Security Division, told the Daily Caller. “We should know which foreign government agents — including ‘unofficial’ actors — are operating in our country for whatever reason.”

Lawmakers are also worried about the centers operating in the United States. 

Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, said the centers don’t exist to “help people get a business license or help resolve a domestic dispute,” but are open “to pressure, to use coercion and to use malicious influence.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., meanwhile, said it is a “direct violation of our nation’s sovereignty” that the CCP would “set up shop on our soil to threaten, surveil, and kidnap Chinese American citizens with a dissenting opinion.”

The centers are part of a CCP global influence strategy first announced in a 2014 speech by Qiu Yuanping, then the director of the Chinese government’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Office. According to Chinese government documents, the UFWD took over the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office in 2018.

The U.S.-China Economic Security and Review Commission says the agency is responsible for coordinating foreign and domestic influence operations and aims while overseas to “co-opt ethnic Chinese individuals and communities living outside China, while several other key affiliated organizations guided by China’s broader United Front strategy conduct influence operations targeting foreign actors and states.”

OCSCs have been placed in 60 locations worldwide since 2014, according to multiple reports from the Chinese news service Qiaowang, whose reports also revealed the efforts to open the service centers in U.S. cities. 

Meanwhile, in 2018, when the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office convened an OCSC conference in Beijing, representatives from all seven of the U.S.-based OCSCs attended the event, according to multiple reports and photographs. 

On the third day of the conference, OCSC representatives met with MPS officials in the Zhejiang province, including the representatives from all seven of the U.S.-based centers. While there, the OCSC officials had pictures taken with uniformed MPS officers and participated in a demonstration of an MPS-developed “internet + law enforcement” platform.

The OCSC delegation also visited an “Extraterritorial Video Trial Court” that specialized in domestic affairs, according to the Zhejiang court’s social media account.