Sky Net 2024: China’s Global Manhunt Continues Unabated
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 (as reported yesterday), 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.
***Click on the image above for a PDF version of the 2014-2024 overview with links to original data sources.
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
As previous datasets analyzed in our April 2024 report Chasing Fox Hunt demonstrate, covert means account for the vast majority of forced returns. In blatant violation of other countries’ sovereignty, these methods carry the CCP’s favor as - as one official put it - the use of official bilateral cooperation mechanisms is considered “very cumbersome”.
Overseen by the CCDI, individual operations are carried out through a cooperative effort between China’s Supreme People’s Court, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the Central Bank and the Ministries of Public Security, State Security, and Foreign Affairs. Both national and subnational entities contribute to the global manhunt.
Read our Chasing Fox Hunt report for detailed accounts of these operations.
