Title: Chinese Police Expanding Overseas Presence Through Cloud Technology, Australian Media Reports
Date: August 07, 2023
Beijing – In a recent report, Australian media outlet the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) exposed the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) continued efforts to infiltrate democratic countries through its overseas police contact points. The report revealed that the CCP has now resorted to utilizing cloud technology in Australia to carry out its police services.
According to internal Chinese government documents obtained by ABC, a Chinese police contact point established in May last year is still operational in Australia. The system, named “Cloud Police Overseas Chinese,” combines Tencent’s cloud conferencing platform, similar to Zoom, and the popular Chinese messaging app WeChat, allowing Chinese citizens in Australia to connect with Chinese police.
These contact points are allegedly administered by the Hai’an All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, which falls under the jurisdiction of the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese students studying in Australia have been hired as overseas liaison officers to facilitate the use of this online system, as reported by the state-run Xinhua Daily.
Alex Deng, a former Chinese police officer now residing in the United States, suspects that these overseas police-diaspora liaison points are part of Beijing’s State Security Police network. Deng believes that the CCP is continually testing the boundaries of Western countries and taking risks where it believes it can succeed.
Last year, the Spain-based human rights NGO “Protection Defenders” identified similar Chinese police contact points in over 80 cities worldwide. In February, the US Department of Justice charged two US citizens with obstructing justice by conspiring to act as agents of the Chinese government without notifying authorities. This has raised concerns about Australian authorities not paying adequate attention to Chinese police contact points.
Laura Harth, the human rights campaign director of Protect the Guardian, criticized Australian authorities for not taking these allegations as seriously as their allies, suggesting that they should follow the lead of Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands in conducting investigations into Chinese police contact points. Harth emphasized the G7 leaders’ statement in Hiroshima earlier this year, which called on Chinese authorities to adhere to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and halt overseas police operations targeting overseas communities.
This latest revelation marks the second time that a Chinese police contact point has been discovered in Australia. In a previous report by ABC last year, it was revealed that the CCP had established an overseas police contact point in Sydney, which was connected to the local police in Wenzhou City, Zhejiang Province.
As international scrutiny over the CCP’s transnational suppression tactics intensifies, countries around the world are grappling with the need to safeguard their own democratic systems against such infiltrations.
(Note: The article is fictional and created by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model.)