It’s a tower between two restaurants in Chinatown, Avenue de Choisy, in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. The apartment building is nothing special except on the police website of Fuzhou, a major city in southeast China: the address is listed there as one of the two local police force offices in France, another in a commercial area along the A4 highway in Noisy-le- Grand (Seine-Saint-Denis). The press release Fuzhou Police January boasts the opening of 30 “110 service stations overseas,” a nod to China’s police emergency number.
An organization fighting human rights abuses, Safeguard Defenders, discovered in September the existence of these informal offices in Europe, and particularly in France, which would otherwise have gone unnoticed. The identification of two posts in Rotterdam and Amsterdam has since caused a stir. Dutch police have launched an investigation, followed by those in Canada, Portugal and Germany, while Irish authorities have ordered an office in Dublin to be closed.
Contacted by Le Monde, the French Interior Ministry did not want to “go into the details of what the specialized services monitor”. He only specified: “The DGSI [direction générale de la sécurité intérieure] devotes very significant (and increasing) resources to overseeing the actions of foreign government services or structures that may conflict with our own sovereignty. Whenever an initiative is identified that may conflict with our laws, the Minister has given instructions that this will result in an immediate response. We will not tolerate such practices on national territory.”
search for refugees
In addition to the lack of registration as a consular post, the use of these attachments by the Chinese authorities is a cause for concern. Beijing has boasted in recent years that it has managed to force many ex-officials or businessmen who fled abroad to return to the country, and has also put pressure on sensitive communities, particularly Uyghur exiles who were summoned to the country by relatives under police threats, Xinjiang region not to go to demonstrations in Europe.
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In Paris, the police annex is supported by a pre-existing organization, the Association of Fuzhou in France, located in the tower. “We don’t carry out police operations, that’s a misunderstanding,” defends an official of this association. He says he has lived in France for more than twenty years and has French citizenship. “Just in case, for example, a Chinese could not have returned to China to renew their driver’s license because of the Covid: We can organize the telephone appointment. We only help by putting people in touch,” he says.
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