Chinese police stations in Italy cause unrest

Maybe a little unusual, but nothing too worrying. The first reactions were in September, when reports about a Chinese police station made the rounds in Italy. The newspaper “Il Foglio” had reported that the “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station” is located in the Tuscan city of Prato in the premises of a Chinese cultural organization.

A police station? Initially, officials’ assurances were believed that it was a facility to assist Italian-based Chinese in dealing with various administrative matters. And the photo of the six gentlemen in the somewhat improvised supposed police station in Prato, which was circulating on the Internet, didn’t look particularly threatening either – although “Il Foglio” was already there at the time expressed the assumption that the post also carries out intelligence activities.

Prato is the city with the relatively largest Chinese community in Italy. This makes up about a quarter of the almost 200,000 inhabitants. The Chinese dominate the textile and leather goods production, which is traditionally rooted here. Fuzhou, on the other hand, is the capital of the Chinese province of Fujian, from where a particularly large number of immigrants in Italy come from. This explains the choice of location and the name of the police station.

encroachment on sovereignty

But it is obviously far from a provincial farce. with two reports The human rights organization Safeguard Defenders, based in Spain, has now shown that the station in Prato is part of a large-scale offensive by China. According to this non-governmental organization (NGO), China is said to have opened 102 such police posts in 53 countries worldwide under the name “110 Overseas”, eleven of them in Italy alone – in addition to Prato, there are also those in Florence, Milan, Rome, Bolzano, Venice and Sicily. The organization based its research on openly accessible data from China.

The NGO assumes that the stations are used to monitor Chinese citizens abroad and to force dissidents to return home. Should this be the case, it would be an encroachment on the sovereignty of the states concerned and a violation of the applicable standards of judicial cooperation and law enforcement. Individual governments, for example Canada, the USA or the Netherlands, have already reacted to the publications by opening investigations.

As Safeguard Defenders campaign manager Laura Harth recently said at a media briefing in Rome, the NGO regrets that the governments of the affected EU countries have so far been unwilling to coordinate their measures. “It’s a shame and a big mistake,” said Harth.

But why should Italy of all places have become a playground for Chinese police officers? It cannot be due to the textile industry in Prato alone.

If you look back a bit, you will notice that Italy has an ambivalent relationship with the authoritarian great powers of our time. The striking proximity to Russia has historical reasons that go back to the time after the Second World War. But even after the outbreak of the Ukraine war last February, Italian politicians repeatedly made pro-Russian statements.

Silvio Berlusconi’s male friendship with Vladimir Putin is well known, but Matteo Salvini has long boasted of being a supporter of the warlord in the Kremlin. Only the clear pro-Western positions of Mario Draghi and Giorgia Meloni dispelled the doubts about Italy’s reliability among its partners in NATO and the EU.

Police cooperation since 2015

The «liaisons dangereuses» with China are more recent. In 2015, the Italian government became the first in the West to sign an agreement with China on joint police patrols. According to the official interpretation, human trafficking and illegal migration should be combated with the treaty. In addition, the patrols were intended as a support offer for the many Chinese tourists in Italy. But soon the patrol activity expanded from the tourist metropolises to the cities with particularly large numbers of Chinese immigrants. With the outbreak of the pandemic, police cooperation finally ground to a halt; According to “Il Foglio”, the exact text of the agreement is still not available.

Another important step was taken in 2019. The then government of Italy, composed of the Cinque Stella of Giuseppe Conte and Matteo Salvini’s Lega, signed a memorandum with China on cooperation in the major infrastructure project “New Silk Road” – again as the first and only country of the G-7, the association of the most important industrialized countries, and much to the anger and displeasure of Western partners.

In an article in the “Corriere della Sera”, the Chinese head of state and party leader Xi Jinping recalled at the time to previous relationships of the two states and to the Venetian Marco Polo, who had kindled the “first passion for China” as early as the 13th century. So far, the declaration of intent has not brought much concrete results.

Meanwhile, the Rome’s relations with Beijing noticeably cooled again. Even Mario Draghi increasingly distanced himself, and Giorgia Meloni hit in her election campaign critical tones towards China and the Silk Road project.

Meloni in a dilemma

Just a few days ago, her interior minister, Matteo Piantedosi, commented on the reports on the police posts in parliament. There is no license for the operation of such stations, Piantedosi said during question time in the Chamber of Deputies and announced further investigations. If the activities of the Chinese officials turn out to be illegal, he will take action, the interior minister said.

The interesting thing is that Giorgia Meloni recently had a long talk with Xi Jinping at the G-20 summit in Indonesia and was invited by him to visit China. The timing of her trip could just coincide with the date of the renewal of the Silk Road Agreement, which she doesn’t like. This will be automatically renewed in March 2023 if it is not terminated by one of the two contracting parties.

This puts Meloni in an uncomfortable situation. If it terminates the agreement, it will get into trouble with China, with whom it would actually like to enter into further advantageous economic agreements; If she lets it go, she is sure to be criticized in her own country and among her western partners.