CCP’s bid to train foreign police officers seen as latest ploy in quest for global control

FORUM Staff

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced a plan in early September 2024 to export its law and order model by training 3,000 police officers worldwide.

The proposal from the CCP’s public service ministry may seem superficially attractive, when combined with offers of equipment, and especially to other authoritarian regimes that seek to emulate the CCP’s model of absolute party control, which purports that robust regime security enables national security and survival.

The CCP claimed at an annual policing forum in Lianyungang that the plan would make the world more “safe, reasonable and efficient” by training foreign officers to “help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” according to news reports. The forum, which was the third of its kind, falls under CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s Global Security Initiative introduced in 2022.

However, analysts note that in practice the CCP’s law enforcement model undermines military and police professionalism as well as notions of security for citizens. The training package includes political and ideological principles based on the CCP’s model that often contradict recipient nations’ constitutions.

Moreover, the policing offer entails a litany of internal contradictions, analysts said. For example, the CCP seeks to undermine the rule of law internationally with practices that threaten not only individual security but often national sovereignty.

The CCP uses surveillance, extrajudicial punishment such as kidnapping, repression and fear to control its population at home and abroad, according to a 2022 report by the Center for American Progress titled, “The Expanding International Reach of China’s Police.”

Since Xi came to power in 2012, the CCP has increased the use of such coercive tactics, including spying on and threatening members of the Chinese diaspora, and banishing large numbers of Muslim minorities to detention camps, the report detailed.

In recent years, the CCP has expanded law enforcement activities globally to promote its policing norms, especially in developing nations in the Indo-Pacific and Africa. In 2023, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) trained 2,700 foreign police officers.

Between 2018 and 2021, for example, more than 2,000 African police and law enforcement personnel received training in China, according to a May 2023 report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, which is based in Washington, D.C.

The police training program may be primarily a means for the PRC to protect its estimated $1 trillion in investments abroad, most of which fall under its One Belt, One Road infrastructure scheme. Beijing has set up about 47,000 firms in 190 countries or regions, according to its commerce ministry.

Such projects are increasingly imperiled due to the Chinese government’s predatory lending practices and mounting resentment over its related unfair policies that confer economic opportunities and control to Chinese firms and workers, while shirking host firms and laborers, according to a September 2024 article in the magazine The Spectator.

That has sparked a backlash. For example, separatists in Pakistan have almost overtaken Gwadar Port, part of the $62 billion China-Pakistan economic corridor. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, insurgents have targeted Chinese-controlled mining operations, the article noted.

“The party is deeply concerned about the fate of many of its global investments, which are now going sour, and the ability of some of the biggest recipients of its largesse to protect Chinese assets,” the article noted. “Beijing now seems to have concluded that they are dangerously exposed, particularly at a time of growing economic stress and geopolitical tensions and require a local security apparatus to match.”

Nations from the Blue Pacific to Southeast Asia are pushing back against the CCP’s questionable policing arrangements, however.

After the Solomon Islands and the PRC agreed in 2022 to increase cooperation on law enforcement and security, at least a dozen other Pacific island nations refused to enter into a similar regional agreement touted by Beijing.

Thailand, meanwhile, canceled a plan to conduct joint patrols with Chinese police after Thai officials said the plan would undermine national sovereignty. Citizens also barraged social media with concerns that Thailand could become a surveillance state, The Spectator reported.