Governments, Ottawa among them, said they had responded to Harth’s work by shutting the stations down. Her new report says the diaspora spying system behind them, aimed at the more than 60 million people Beijing counts as “overseas Chinese,” never closed. It runs through community associations designated as Party liaison nodes on Western soil, with Chinese police, prosecutors and courts plugged in from home, and online platforms and video links that put diaspora members face to face with authorities in China. A Formula for Repression, released Friday by the Madrid-based human rights group Safeguard Defenders at the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China summit in The Hague, identifies 1,247 formally designated Chinese Communist Party liaison points in at least 91 countries. A liaison point is a community association, or a person within one, that a Chinese authority has formally appointed as its contact abroad, often by presenting a nameplate to hang on the wall. They include points in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, the Montreal suburb of Brossard, and Ottawa. In the United States, they include New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Seattle and Washington. More than ten police forces from five Chinese provinces now work through the network, the report says, alongside Chinese prosecutors, courts and justice bureaus. Harth’s report places the police stations within a broader Party system for controlling Chinese communities abroad. The overseas operations “are part of a determined Chinese Communist Party policy to export its domestic system of surveillance and control to Chinese diaspora communities across the world.” “The Party controls China’s population through a grid,” the report states. “Every city, town and village is cut into grids of a few hundred households, each with a manager who collects information and reports to an enforcement hub. Since 2014 it has been building the same grid abroad.”