Police Day Hypocrisy: CCP Jails Expose One China Cruelty

Chinese state media marks People’s Police Day with staged gratitude towards uniformed officers who are portrayed as everyday heroes safeguarding harmony and national rejuvenation. Behind the soft-focus videos and sentimental hashtags, however, lies a harder reality--the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has transformed policing into an instrument of ideological domination, not public service.

Festivities mask monk silencing and Uyghur erasure in vast prisons. While carefully choreographed ceremonies celebrate discipline and sacrifice, the same security apparatus sustains mass arbitrary detention in Xinjiang and a suffocating stability-maintenance regime in Tibet that criminalises faith, culture and even memory.

This dissonance is not a bug in the system--it is the system. Contemporary China’s police are the enforcers of a political project that insists there is only one China, one party and one permissible narrative. Those who dissent-Tibetan monks, Uyghur intellectuals, Hong Kong democrats, Taiwanese who refuse absorption-are treated less as citizens than as security problems to be managed, re-educated or disappeared.

The vast prisons behind the parades

Nowhere is the cruelty of this One China project more visible than in Xinjiang. After years of investigation, the UN human rights office concluded in 2022 that serious human rights violations have been committed there, including arbitrary mass detention of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities on a scale that may amount to crimes against humanity. Independent research estimates that more than a million people have passed through the region’s so called vocational or re-education camps since 2017, with many facilities converted into formal prisons as camp networks were nominally wound down.

Inside these centres, survivors describe torture, sexual violence, forced renunciation of Islam and relentless political indoctrination, corroborating UN findings of patterns of ill-treatment and coercive birth control policies. United States and other governments have labelled Beijing’s campaign as genocide or as crimes against humanity; Beijing insists it is combating extremism, but refuses unfettered access to independent investigators.

In Tibet, the architecture of repression is older but no less systematic. Human Rights Watch has documented how the stability-maintenance framework has expanded criminal categories to prosecute peaceful expression, from displaying the banned Tibetan flag to sharing songs deemed separatist. Thousands of Tibetans returning from religious teachings by the Dalai Lama were detained for months of compulsory political education in makeshift facilities.

US government reporting describes a sweeping policy of sinicisation of religion: party committees embedded in monasteries, mandatory ideological classes for monks and nuns, removal of Tibetan-language materials, bans on images of the Dalai Lama and long prison terms for those accused of splittism. Tibetan political prisoners endure torture, prolonged solitary confinement and denial of medical care, with some dying shortly after release.

The message is brutally consistent from Kashgar to Lhasa: loyalty must be to the party, not to God, community or conscience. Police Day simply wraps that coercion in patriotic language and festive choreography.

Repression without borders

The CCP’s policing project does not end at its frontiers. Global stations project power, but resilience outlasts chains. Drawing on investigative work by Safeguard Defenders, scholars and governments have traced a network of more than a hundred overseas Chinese police “service stations” embedded in community associations and businesses across at least fifty countries. China presents these outposts as benign consular extensions handling paperwork. 

Victims-Uyghur activists in Europe, Tibetan campaigners in North America, Hong Kong organisers in exile-describe late-night calls from officials, threats to relatives and instructions to stay silent when Chinese leaders travel abroad. These are extensions of the same police logic that governs Xinjiang and Tibet--citizens are never fully out of reach and political loyalty is a global obligation.

Yet the story does not end with fear. Diaspora communities, joined by rights groups and journalists, have exposed these networks, forcing democratic governments from Ireland to Canada and the Netherlands to close undeclared stations and open criminal investigations. Survivors who testify before parliaments and at the UN-from former detainees of Xinjiang camps to families of Tibetan prisoners-turn private trauma into public accountability. Their courage underlines a critical truth: an authoritarian police state can project power across oceans, but it cannot fully extinguish the stubborn human impulse to resist.

Taiwan in the lengthening shadow

Taiwan watches the spreading shadow. From Taipei, Xinjiang’s camps, Tibet’s silenced monasteries and Hong Kong’s crushed protests are not distant tragedies; they are warnings about the concrete meaning of One China when enforced by the CCP’s security machinery.

In Hong Kong, Beijing has systematically dismantled the one country, two systems promise. A sweeping national security law imposed in 2020, and an even harsher Article 23 passed in 2024, have criminalised dissent, gutted independent media and enabled mass arrests of activists, legislators and journalists. The city that once symbolised a hybrid of Chinese and liberal traditions now illustrates how rapidly police powers can be weaponised once party imperatives override the rule of law.

Taiwan’s leaders have drawn the lesson clearly. President Tsai Ing-wen has repeatedly argued that accepting any variant of one country, two systems would erase Taiwan’s democratic way of life, while public opinion surveys record overwhelming rejection of PRC-style arrangements.  For Taiwanese citizens, many of whom watched Hong Kong’s descent in real time, the slogan today Hong Kong, tomorrow Taiwan captures a strategic anxiety but also a determination to fortify their own institutions rather than submit to Beijing’s authoritarian embrace.

Chinese People’s Police Day seeks to normalise a world in which uniformed officers embody order, sacrifice and unity under One China. But the real emblem of contemporary Chinese policing is not the parade; it is the barbed wire encircling Uyghur villages, the surveillance cameras installed above monastery gates, the overseas police station tucked into a shopfront in a foreign city, and the warships that shadow Taiwan’s shores.

To take Police Day propaganda at face value is to accept the CCP’s claim that security justifies anything. To listen instead to those who have passed through its prisons is to see One China not as a benign aspiration of national unity, but as a project that, in practice, demands cultural erasure, enforced silence and obedience without consent.

What gives hope, even in this bleak landscape, is that repression keeps generating its own counter-narrative. Each document smuggled from a Xinjiang camp, each leaked directive on Tibet, each shuttered overseas police station, each free election held in Taiwan chips away at the inevitability Beijing tries to project. Chains can immobilise bodies, not the human capacity to name injustice and imagine alternatives. That resilience, not the spectacle of Police Day, will shape how the world ultimately remembers this era of China’s rise.