Last week, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) released its annual report. It provides a rare glimpse of insight into some of the Chinese Communist Party’s operations, as official data are increasingly hard to come by.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/30465766

Sky Net is China’s overarching overseas fugitive recovery operation. Launched in 2015, it includes the notorious Operation Fox Hunt started in 2014. It does not include ad hoc operations, such as the anti-telecom fraud campaign that forced the return of 230,000 individuals in the span of just over a single year (April 2021 – July 2022).

The methodology for China’s forced return operations were laid out in the CCDI’s 2018 written legal interpretation to the National Supervision Law. The mix of overt and covert means explicitly include the use of:

  • Extraditions
  • Deportations
  • Persuasion to return
  • Luring and entrapment
  • Kidnapping

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Last week, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) released its annual report. It provides a rare glimpse of insight into some of the Chinese Communist Party’s operations, as official data are increasingly hard to come by.

Beyond the steep increase in the use of extra-judicial incommunicado detentions in Liuzhi [the Chinese Communist Party’s secret detention system], the annual report also provides an update on the CCP’s flagship operation for “overseas fugitive recovery”.

In 2024, a reported 1597 individuals were captured under Sky Net. While the data does not provide a breakdown of how many of those individuals were forcefully returned from abroad, past research and official data sets indicate that would be most of the reported number.

This latest number puts the total amount of individuals forcefully returned to China under Operations Fox Hunt and Sky Net at almost 14,000 from over 120 countries and regions between 2014 and 2024.