More Than a Dozen Chinese ‘Liaison’ Points in Canada Tied to Police and Other CCP Functions: Report

China is operating more than a dozen policing and judicial offices through liaison points in Canada, according to a report by the human rights organization Safeguard Defenders.

The report, entitled “A Formula for Repression: China’s Global Grid for Community Control,” details 1,247 liaison points worldwide where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) monitors the Chinese diaspora, gathers intelligence, suppresses dissent, and aids Chinese judicial authorities and law enforcement.

“Far from closing, the evidence shows expansion,” the report says of overseas liaison and policing facilities that were first widely exposed in 2022.

The Spain-based non-governmental organization adds that these organizations form part of a wider network of Chinese community associations in 91 countries linked to the CCP’s United Front Work Department. The department oversees a network of interconnected Party-affiliated organizations through which the regime extends its influence abroad.

“Beneath it all sits one structure: the Party’s united front, and its global network of affiliated associations,” reads the report.

In addition to allowing Chinese authorities to “extend their tentacles” overseas, these liaison points offer and engage in legal assistance, dispute mediation, administrative services, and assisting in pressuring or trying to find individuals wanted by Chinese authorities, according to the report.

While Safeguard Defenders’ previous reports focused on exposing secret overseas Chinese police stations, the organization’s latest report notes that the CCP uses these “liaison” organizations not only to carry out the functions of the previously identified police stations, but also to perform work on behalf of other Party organs, including prosecutors, courts, justice bureaus, and others.

Report author Laura Harth told The Epoch Times that the new report “is about the growing system and expanding policies by which the CCP aims to control and surveil the diaspora.”

“Police authorities are but one of those plugging into the network at the heart of it all: the united front and its ‘bridge and bond” to the diaspora — the Overseas Chinese Federation,” Harth said.

“The Canadian liaison points — as for any other country — in the report are united front affiliated associations or individuals that over the course of the past decade and a half or so were designated by authorities in China operating the grid-based management system abroad that is at the heart of the report.”

The conclusions in the Oct. 27 report build on two previous investigations by Safeguard Defenders published in September and December 2022 that identified at least 102 suspected Chinese overseas policing facilities in 53 countries.

This included five suspected Chinese policing facilities in Canada, specifically three in the Greater Toronto Area and two in the Vancouver area.

Testifying before a special parliamentary committee on Canada–China relations in March 2023, Safeguard Defenders’ representative Harth said the group had also confirmed two more Chinese police stations in Montreal, bringing the total in Canada to at least seven. Harth also testified that Chinese authorities issued threats against family members in China and intimidation via intermediaries overseas in order to pressure wanted individuals to go back to China.

A committee report submitted to the House of Commons on Nov. 29, 2023, stated that the locations identified by Safeguard Defenders were being used to monitor the Chinese diaspora in Canada, as well as to collect intelligence and help Chinese authorities pressure individuals who were abroad and wanted for various reasons to return to China.

RCMP said in October 2022 it launched an investigation into the suspected Chinese police operations in Canada, while Ottawa also raised its objections with Beijing.

In June 2023, then-acting RCMP Commissioner Michael Duheme testified at committee that authorities had disrupted various activities being carried out at several of the Chinese liaison points.

However, the recently released report from Safeguard Defenders cautioned that the investigations against the policing work done at some of these liaison points only focused on one visible part of a much larger apparatus that still stayed in operation.

The report says it is particularly important to note that Chinese authorities have increasingly used associations and individuals other than police to perform the liaison activities they wish to carry out instead of keeping police stations open overseas, while other organizations previously linked to police stations have shifted to become community organizations while continuing to carry out operations for China.

Numerous organizations set up with a focus on cultural activities or business, or as social organizations, are often at the same time being used as points of contact for Chinese state agencies, according to the report.

The report states that these changes shifting away from straightforward police operations have been undertaken to disguise the nature of the liaison points, not as part of desisting from the work they do, which is actually expanding.

As community services and political surveillance is blended together in many liaison points, Safeguard Defenders says “the functions of service and control cannot be separated,” and notes that some organizations may withhold or offer services to community members in order to gain more influence in the community.

Safeguard Defenders says the liaison points connect Chinese community associations overseas with state and CCP authorities, including police forces, prosecutors, courts, and the judiciary, helping Beijing monitor and control the diaspora.

The researchers also describe arrangements involving dispute mediation, legal assistance, administrative services, and efforts to locate or pressure individuals wanted by Chinese authorities.

The over a dozen liaison points identified in Canada include in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Montreal, and Brossard, Que., as well as several entries for Canada that don’t denote a specific Canadian city or location.

Chinese paramilitary police officers patrol on Tiananmen Square before the opening session of the National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 5, 2025. Pedro Pardo/AFP via Getty Images

The report notes that multiple liaison services can operate via the same association and that a single organization may also operate from more than one location. It also does not verify that every identified association or liaison activity involves unauthorized law enforcement activities on Canadian soil.

Numerous police forces from various Chinese provinces are tied to the international liaising system, which is also used by other state agencies to carry out activities abroad and monitor, control, pressure, and communicate with the Chinese diaspora.

The report states that the primary objective of the CCP as spelled out in a 2018 amendment to the Chinese Constitution is having Communist Party leadership “above all else,” and putting the party above even the state of China itself.

As such, the party seeks to satisfy its ever-expanding definition of national security and political security, according to the report, including via its liaison and policing points, which form part of a goal of “maintaining stability,” preventing “hidden danger,” countering “false ideological trends,” and cracking down on “evil cults” who don’t accept CCP control over their spiritual or religious tradition.

As the report notes, “maintaining stability” is a broad term and can refer to “stopping anything – a protest, a petition, a land dispute, a rumor, a gathering – from growing into a challenge to Party rule, which is why it is preferably done ‘at the source’: grassroots preventive control rather than reactive response.”

A “hidden danger,” meanwhile is defined in the report as “anything that could become a problem for the Party’s grip on power before it does – and the objects screened include people, beliefs, and grievances,” while ideological trends to be countered include “Western constitutional democracy”, “universal values,” “civil society” (outside the control of the Party-run state), “neoliberalism,” “the Western view of journalism,” and “historical nihilism,” which questions the CCP’s version of history.

The report draws a parallel to China’s domestic system of monitoring and controlling citizens, whereby neighbourhoods are divided into small administrative zones that are then monitored by designated officials who report any concerns to higher authorities.

The system of overseas liaison and policing stations operates similarly, according to the report, by identifying potential threats or disruptions to China and the CCP, including political dissent or risks to public safety and social stability, with similar principles being used for different united front groups, including the CCP’s Overseas Chinese Federation and the United Front Work Department.

Safeguard Defenders cites several of the Chinese regime’s publications and statements describing how overseas contacts are used to surveil political activities and individuals, as well as to aid Chinese law enforcement to get information it wants on individuals living abroad without having to formally cooperate with foreign police agencies such as the RCMP.

In such a way, Beijing is able to repress political opposition inside China from democracy supporters, dissidents, and groups it persecutes including Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Falun Gong practitioners.

The Epoch Times reached out to the RCMP, Public Safety Canada, and Global Affairs Canada for comment but didn’t hear back by time of publication.