Insane content censorship destroying people’s ability to make a living. Great one, UK.

Archived

Here is the full report: A Formula for Repression – China’s Global Grid for Community Control (pdf)

In 2022, Safeguard Defenders published 110 Overseas and Patrol & Persuade: two reports detailing the activity of over 100 overseas Chinese police stations operating in more than 50 countries.

After the report was published, many of the countries affected denounced the stations’ illegal operations. Some pursued criminal investigations. Beijing responded by claiming they had closed.

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Now a new report exposes Beijing’s claim to be false. Far from closing, the evidence shows expansion.

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Today, more than ten police forces from five Chinese provinces are engaged in the work of a global network of Chinese Communist Party operatives abroad. The police involvement is only the beginning, and these are not isolated initiatives by a few local governments in China.

Since late 2024, five new national policies instruct authorities across China to expand designated liaison activities abroad. The core aim is to export the domestic system of grid management to control the diaspora.

[...]

In China, the Party divides every city, town and village into grids, each square representing a few hundred households, and each with a grid manager who reports upward. The manager has ten tasks, nine of which have to do with surveillance and control. There is a file on every resident.

Anything seen as a threat to Party rule is escalated to a hub where enforcement stands ready to act.

Internationally, this system of mass surveillance, control and suppression is projected through a global grid of united front affiliated organizations or designated liaisons. They are run by the Party's "bridge and bond" to the diaspora: the Overseas Chinese Federation.

These Party liaisons provide the infrastructure other Chinese authorities - police, prosecutors, courts, justice bureaus and others - simply plug into. Or, as the Party calls it: through which they "extend their tentacles".

How the 'grid' extends abroad

The authorities sometimes use the word “grid” themselves when talking about overseas functions. In May 2019, eight months after opening their first “police-overseas-Chinese stations” [警侨驿站] abroad, the Qingtian county police, in Zhejiang Province, reported to the national police newspaper that they had hired 135 diaspora association leaders and chairs as center directors, deputies and liaison officers, and “put together an overseas grid-service informant corps of more than 1,000” [组建了1000余人的海外网格服务信息员队伍] ...

[The report describes how the Chinese grid of police stations extends abroad. It is fairly impossible to paraphrased what the report calls "The machinery: 1 + n + X + Y(y)". Everyone is stronglu encouraged to read the report (pdf).]

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In its new report, the NGO Safeguard Defenders finds nearly 1,250 formally designated liaisons in at least 91 countries which exist to carry out domestic grid functions abroad.

This number is based on a conservative methodology, and a likely underrepresentation of actual activity. The Party numbers its affiliated associations abroad in the tens of thousands, every one of them a potential grid liaison in the waiting.

Included in this number are the very liaison stations Safeguard Defenders exposed years ago and were told "merely" provided services to the diaspora community. Yet the functions of service and control cannot be separated, as the official policies and public statements that form the basis for this report make clear. In fact, the power to provide or deny services directly adds to the Party liaisons’ ability to exercise control.

Every liaison designated and every task carried out by them are breaches of sovereignty. They are transnational repression embodied, affecting entire communities around the world. Their standing order to carry out any task as required by the Party represents an active national security threat.

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

The names given to such designated liaisons may change; the underlying structure does not.

Policymakers must urgently devise strategies to confront this superstructure of CCP interference if the stations and their activities are to be shut down for good.

[...]

Archived English version

Archived Spanish version

Venezuela may be one step away from becoming one of the first countries outside the People’s Republic of China to adopt the new generation of Chinese artificial intelligence systems for mass surveillance and political control, according to a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

The report reveals that in July 2025, the Venezuelan government signed a memorandum of understanding with iFlytek, a Chinese company that has been on the U.S. trade sanctions list since 2019 for its role in the repression of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. The agreement to jointly develop Artificial intelligence in Venezuela was negotiated by Delcy Rodríguez, then vice president and now Venezuela’s interim president.

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The report, titled “Warning Signals: Venezuela and the Risk of Chinese AI-Enabled Digital Authoritarianism” (pdf), documents that Venezuela doesn’t need to build a surveillance system from scratch — it already has one, built largely on Chinese technology through importing cameras, networks, identity systems and command centres from Chinese firms in the past two decades.

While the resulting architecture is fragmented, unevenly deployed and technically constrained, ASPI's researchers identified six interconnected technological layers in the imported surveillance system: telecommunications, digital identity, central databases, video surveillance, internet control, and now, analytics and artificial intelligence. All of them were built or enhanced with support from companies such as Huawei, ZTE, CEIEC, Hikvision, and Dahua.

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At the core of this system’s identity layer is the Carnet de la Patria (Homeland Card), a digital ID linked to social benefits. The report states it had 21.8 million registered users as of January 2023—roughly three-quarters of Venezuela’s population—and served as many as 14.2 million people each month. A layer of central databases could cross-reference identity information, biometric data, and social welfare data.

The report also describes a network of video surveillance and command centres (such as the VEN911 and SIMA systems) capable of monitoring public spaces and coordinating responses in real time, and a telecommunications infrastructure that, by channelling a large portion of the country’s data traffic, functions as an additional checkpoint.

While the above technologies were imported through separate contracts, they reinforce one another and form a partially connected surveillance system, enabling government agencies to identify, monitor, and take action regarding citizens’ behaviour.

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According to the report, iFlytek's AI technology will further integrate the pre-existing layers of surveillance infrastructure into a more comprehensive system, making it faster, more scalable, and harder to evade.

Facial recognition, voice identification, and automated database cross-referencing tools could be used to identify, locate, and profile individuals without any visible human action, such as attending a protest.

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If that capability were combined with the network of cameras and the identity records in the Carnet de la Patria, the risk is that the government would no longer need to rely on someone’s visible participation in a protest to identify them, and could instead preemptively flag individuals based on patterns of association, movement, or activity on social media even before any specific incident occurs.

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Added to all this is a pattern of opacity. As has been the case for years with technology agreements between Venezuela and the People’s Republic of China, the details of the memorandum with iFlytek have not been made public in their entirety; this makes it difficult to ascertain the actual scope of the agreement, which is why the report recommends demanding the full publication of these agreements.

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The agreement with iFlytek was signed months before Maduro’s capture by U.S. forces in January 2026. Delcy Rodríguez, who negotiated it directly at the time, now serves as the U.S.-backed interim president. However, the report notes that during her tenure, the Venezuelan surveillance apparatus has not been dismantled. This is the same conclusion reached by the UN International Fact-Finding Mission, which documented that the surveillance infrastructure remained in place following the change in government.

The authors argue that, despite this, there is a window of opportunity. The interim government’s current dependence on the U.S. could be used to demand the cancellation of the memorandum with iFlytek before this technological escalation is implemented.

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