As Allies Tie China’s Police Ministry to Overseas Repression, RCMP Refuses to Name Its Partner Agency

OTTAWA — In January 2026, the RCMP signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), renewing a framework for police cooperation with the same arm of the Chinese state that prosecutors in two democracies have now tied, in open court, to the surveillance and intimidation of dissidents on foreign soil — and, in one of those jurisdictions, to a notorious triad. It is a development that corroborates recent United States Treasury sanctions and Washington Post reporting pointing to deepening ties between Beijing’s security services and transnational Chinese mafia proxies.

In May, a federal jury in Brooklyn convicted Lu Jianwang, a 64-year-old Bronx resident known as “Harry Lu,” of acting as an illegal agent of the PRC for opening and operating an MPS “police station” in lower Manhattan, and of obstruction of justice for destroying evidence. He faces up to 30 years at sentencing. His co-defendant, Chen Jinping, had pleaded guilty in December 2024. The United States Justice Department called the outpost an instrument of transnational repression.

Asked directly whether it accepts that the MPS is behind transnational repression harmful to Canadians — as the New York verdict and a leading rights investigator have asserted — the RCMP declined to say.

In late May, The Bureau put two questions to the RCMP and to Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). The first asked whether the agencies, as bodies mandated to protect Canadians, agree or disagree that the MPS is behind transnational repression harmful to Canadian citizens, as was proven in New York and as the investigator Laura Harth has asserted. The second relayed a question Harth had asked Canadians to weigh.

CSIS spokeswoman Magali Hébert said the RCMP would be better placed to answer the questions.

The RCMP’s reply ran several paragraphs and answered neither.

The force said it “takes threats to the safety and security of people in Canada very seriously, including foreign interference and transnational repression,” and that where there is evidence of criminal activity backed by a foreign state, “it is investigated.” On the central question of attribution, it wrote: “Due to ongoing investigations, we are not in a position to attribute responsibility to specific entities or comment on individual claims.”

On the agreement itself, the RCMP described the January 15 signing as “a renewal of a long-standing cooperation framework,” noting that Canada and China have entered non-binding memoranda on combating crime since 2010. The arrangement, it said, “supports limited cooperation such as information sharing and investigative assistance and is grounded in mutual respect for sovereignty and compliance with Canadian law and values,” and presents an opportunity to work on counter-narcotics and organized crime. The force said it applies rigorous risk assessments and safeguards, including obligations under the Avoiding Complicity in Mistreatment by Foreign Entities Act, to all international cooperation.

Harth, of the human-rights group Safeguard Defenders, whose documentation of Beijing’s overseas police stations helped expose the network at issue in the New York case, and who has herself been the target of a Chinese state online smear campaign, told The Bureau she found it “staggering to see democracies walk into the same trap time and again.”

She pointed to the contradiction that Ottawa had “spearheaded international efforts to put the issue of transnational repression at the top of the agenda” and now was “legitimizing one of the very same counterparts (MPS) that is known to be part of biggest perpetrating apparatus of the practice around the world.”

Then she put a question she asked Canadians to consider: “who made the request for an MoU with the RCMP? And subsequently: who stands to gain from this agreement?” If the answer to both is the PRC, she said, “why on earth should Canadians assent to it?”

The New York case is the clearest judicial finding to date that the MPS directs repression abroad. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York charged that Lu and Chen opened the Manhattan outpost on the ministry’s behalf and used it to monitor and pressure pro-democracy dissidents.

The Canadian silence is thrown into sharper relief by developments in the United Kingdom, where law enforcement has begun to say openly what the RCMP will not.

A newly declassified Home Office study, based on interviews with officials across 14 law enforcement agencies, reportedly concludes that Chinese organized crime groups — long treated as a purely criminal problem — are now backed and directed by the Chinese Communist Party, a shift that has “changed the issue of Chinese organised crime from being one of a solely criminal nature to that of a national security issue.”

The report, written by David Wilson, a regional coordinator on the organized immigration crime taskforce at West Midlands police, warns that triads, the second-largest category of organized crime in Britain according to the National Crime Agency, could be leveraged for espionage, the infiltration of institutions, the funding of political influence campaigns, the bribery of officials, and the use of brothels for intelligence gathering, blackmail and coercion against influential figures, including members of Parliament. It found that few forces grasped the threat, and that suspects were evading prosecution for lack of Chinese speakers within law enforcement.