The Chinese police have been running two offices in the Netherlands since 2018 and there are strong indications they are being used to put pressure on critical Chinese nationals, according to research by RTL Nieuws and investigative website Follow the Money. The ‘overseas police service stations’, based in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, were first identified by Spanish civil rights group Safeguard Defenders in a report published in September. It said at the time they had been primarily set up to conduct administrative tasks to aid overseas Chinese, such as sorting out driving licences, but that they ‘also serve a far more sinister and wholly illegal purpose’.