China’s Foreign Police Training: A Global Footprint

Summary

Global outreach by China’s internal security agencies is expanding. As China’s Global Security Initiative externalizes a concept of security focused on domestic stability and regime protection, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has increased its efforts to train and build capacity among foreign law enforcement and internal security forces around the world, including across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Foreign police training is one of the most concrete and measurable outcomes associated with the Global Security Initiative, as President Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders have publicly committed to training thousands of foreign security officers in multiple high-profile appearances.

This paper examines China’s foreign police, security, and paramilitary training from 2000 to 2025. It draws on an original new dataset of nearly 900 trainings provided to at least 138 countries and places these trainings in the wider context of Chinese soft power, foreign policy objectives and projects such as the Global Security Initiative, broader patterns of Chinese security engagement, and Beijing’s narratives about China’s role as a global security provider.

The dataset highlights the scale, growth, breadth of regional and topical coverage, and functional intensity of China’s foreign police training efforts. A majority of the world’s countries have received police and domestic security training from China, giving Beijing a role in the internal security organs and policing practices of countries around the world. China’s provision of foreign police training increased before the COVID-19 pandemic, then paused, and has now begun to expand again, though publicly documented trainee numbers fall well short of China’s public commitments. Countries bordering China receive more police trainings, and a wide range of institutions inside the PRC are involved in providing such trainings, including some with clear regional specializations. Although China’s foreign police training efforts are most concentrated on its regional periphery, they increasingly extend to encompass most of the world, accumulating regional variations in emphasis that reflect the ways that regional security challenges mix with Chinese interests abroad.

China’s police training efforts mix relatively apolitical law enforcement capacity building and anti-crime training (such as counter-drug investigation) with more controversial training for forces involved in regime security and authoritarian repression, such as the Central African Republic’s presidential guard and the Black Berets in Cuba. Chinese writings emphasize the ability of foreign police training programs to improve the negative image of China’s police abroad; much of this work is generically described as capacity building, but there is also evidence that China may be deliberately downplaying or concealing aspects of its foreign police training work that might create political controversy or provide a basis for external criticism.

China’s foreign police training forms one of the major pillars of Beijing’s narrative that China has emerged as a major global security provider. Through these training programs, China’s internal security outreach shapes security institutions, practices, norms, technology use, and overall capabilities in recipient countries—thereby shaping those countries’ capacity both to enforce the rule of law and to carry out repression and state violence. Foreign police training programs are concrete lines of action that bolster the PRC’s diplomatic efforts to build new mechanisms of global law enforcement cooperation and to promote Chinese rhetoric about the PRC’s attractiveness as an exemplar of public safety. Foreign police training programs also help embed new, Chinese-led standards of security cooperation and policing tools into the practices of domestic security forces around the world—and in doing so, such activities bolster China’s narrative about what security is in today’s world, and who is best at providing it.

Introduction

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is emerging as a major global security provider. PRC internal security organs, in particular, are actively building new forms of law enforcement and security cooperation (执法安全合作) with foreign partners. Leaders from China’s police, domestic security, and intelligence agencies are spearheading a diplomatic push to broaden and intensify their organizations’ outreach in Asia and beyond, establishing internal security as a central pillar of President Xi Jinping’s Global Security Initiative (GSI) and building new forms of regional and global security architecture consistent with China’s vision for security.¹

One notable feature of China’s global security outreach is an increasingly high-profile effort to provide police and security training to countries around the world. We use the term “police training” as shorthand for a broad range of efforts to build the capacity of another country’s internal security agencies, which may include police and law enforcement, protective services, counterterrorism, gendarmerie and paramilitary forces, and bureaucracies engaged in internal security work.

We use the term “police training” as shorthand for a broad range of efforts to build the capacity of another country’s internal security agencies, which may include police and law enforcement, protective services, counterterrorism, gendarmerie and paramilitary forces, and bureaucracies engaged in internal security work.

While previous reports have touched on various facets of China’s police outreach,² we analyze an original, substantially larger dataset of 863 police training events to provide more comprehensive, systematic, and data-driven insights into this important and growing phenomenon.³ These data provide a new empirical baseline for assessing China’s role in shaping the internal security organs and policing practices of countries around the world.

The 138 countries that have received police or internal security training from China appear in figure 1.

Over the past several years, China’s top leadership has advertised Beijing’s commitment to providing police training (外警培训) in some of its most high-profile diplomatic forums and events. When Xi delivered keynote remarks at the INTERPOL 86th General Assembly in Beijing in 2017, for example, he pledged that China would upgrade INTERPOL communications systems and laboratories, as well as train 20,000 police officers for developing countries over the following five years.⁴ At the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Uzbekistan in 2022, Xi proposed that China would train another 2,000 law enforcement personnel.⁵ In the Foreign Ministry’s 2023 Concept Paper on the Global Security Initiative, China indicated willingness to provide “5,000 training opportunities . . . to train professionals for addressing global security issues” over the next five years.⁶ In September 2024, when he delivered the opening address for the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), Xi announced that China would train 1,000 police officers, provide police equipment assistance, and create a “demonstration zone” of GSI cooperation for Africa.⁷ And in May 2025, at the fourth ministerial meeting of the China–Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) Forum, Xi proposed closer security cooperation with countries in the region and offered law enforcement equipment and “training programs tailored to the needs of CELAC member states.”⁸

While recent Chinese rhetoric has emphasized the global governance dimensions of the GSI, police training is one of the initiative’s most concrete deliverables and most measurable commitments.

While recent Chinese rhetoric has emphasized the global governance dimensions of the GSI,⁹ police training is one of the initiative’s most concrete deliverables and most measurable commitments. China’s expanding engagement in nonmilitary global security cooperation, therefore, warrants closer observation and analysis. Examining the empirical record of China’s training of foreign police forces provides unique insights about China’s emerging role in global security, how Beijing operationalizes its sometimes-nebulous security concepts, and how the party-state’s domestic security practices are shaping foreign internal security forces and police activity around the world. 

China’s Global Security Outreach: Where Police Training Fits

China’s foreign police training did not begin with the GSI in 2022, but is now a key effort under it. The PRC began training foreign peacekeepers and foreign peacekeeping police in the early 2000s, as part of its engagement with United Nations (UN) peacekeeping; those efforts continue today at the China People’s Police University (CPPU) outside Beijing.¹⁰ Foreign policing programs at Chinese police universities multiplied in the mid-2000s, as the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) established international cooperation agreements with a growing number of countries. In 2011, China launched joint law enforcement river patrols in Southeast Asia, setting a foundation for regional-multilateral police cooperation that has expanded significantly since then, under the Lancang-Mekong Integrated Law Enforcement and Security Cooperation Center (LMLECC) established in 2017.¹¹

Police and security cooperation were also subsequently incorporated into the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The earliest version of China’s Global Public Security Cooperation Forum in Lianyungang (GPSCFL) began in 2015 as an accessory body to advance security guarantees for BRI projects.¹² In 2017, then minister of public security Guo Shengkun called on participants in a BRI-related Security and Cooperation Dialogue to “establish and improve ‘Belt and Road’ security cooperation mechanisms.”¹³

International police cooperation, however, extended beyond BRI. At a work conference also in 2017, Xi exhorted the political-legal system (China’s internal security apparatus) to adopt a more global vision in national/state security work.¹⁴ This propelled further expansion of police and law enforcement activity beyond China’s borders—using tools such as diplomatic agreements on security cooperation; extradition treaties; the export of surveillance technology, ‘safe city’ platforms, and police equipment; joint patrols and exercises; establishment of overseas police stations; and police training.¹⁵

More recently, China’s foreign law enforcement training has been incorporated under the auspices of the GSI. After its establishment in 2022, the GSI quickly incorporated a number of existing PRC security cooperation programs while also facilitating new forms of outreach.¹⁶ The GSI provides a framework to integrate a range of goals into specific lines of effort like police training. These include:

• Protection of China’s overseas interests¹⁷
• Securitization of the diaspora and enhanced control of Chinese populations overseas, including via both transnational repression of dissidents and repatriation of fugitives accused of corruption¹⁸
• Expansion of China’s political influence under conditions of growing strategic competition with the United States¹⁹
• Desire to act as a norm entrepreneur in Beijing’s promotion of the four Global Initiatives²⁰
• Elevation of China’s national prestige by assuming the role of global security leader and provider
• Externalization of a national security concept heavily focused on internal threats and the use of domestic security tools to combat them²¹

The GSI is frequently described by Chinese scholars as the “external presentation” of Xi’s comprehensive national security concept (CNSC, 总体国家安全观), an approach that prioritizes internal stability and regime security and adopts a strong focus on policing and social control.²² When he introduced the CNSC in 2014, Xi emphasized that China was confronted with “the most complicated internal and external factors in [its] history” and that national security work in China would need to “better adapt to the new situation and new tasks facing China’s national security.”²³ He emphasized that cadres should prioritize “both traditional and nontraditional security threats” and place “equal emphasis on external and internal security.” Political security, he wrote, was the “foundation,” while international security was the “support.”²⁴

Calls to enhance “international security support” for the comprehensive national security concept have intensified over time. In 2017, Xi’s keynote speech at INTERPOL advocated for global security governance reform²⁵—a call that was accompanied by a public pledge to train 20,000 police officers in developing countries over the following five years.²⁶ In 2017, China held the political-legal work conference calling for “global vision” in national security work.²⁷ Eighteen months later, at another work conference on international cooperation in public security work in March 2019, China’s public security leaders called for “establishment of an international law enforcement cooperation and coordination system under the unified leadership of the Ministry of Public Security Party Committee.”²⁸ MPS has since emerged as the lead actor carrying out China’s repertoire of global, nonmilitary security diplomacy.²⁹

While China continues to support existing multilateral security forums such as the UN, INTERPOL, and the SCO, it has worked to repurpose aspects of these organizations to better align with Beijing’s priorities, and has created new mechanisms to build global security order where such order is currently absent, weak, or unfavorable to Beijing. Chief among these is the MPS-hosted GPSCFL, now China’s largest global security convening.³⁰ The 2019 work conference linked high-profile forums such as GPSCFL to police training, proposing to strengthen the use of police liaison officers and “training foreign police with Chinese characteristics,” with the goal of “telling the story of Safe China” and “enhancing the international influence of [China’s] public security work.”³¹

Beijing’s public promotion of an internally oriented concept of security operationalized through police work is, in part, an effort to distinguish its approach from that of the West and to reset a normative discussion about internal security that has been largely critical of China on human rights grounds.³² One police-affiliated Chinese academic urges that public security work “break the shackles of the Western approach to security categorization,” extending China’s ostensibly successful security crackdown at home to the pursuit of allegedly anti-China forces and threats to domestic stability where they reside abroad.³³

Police and internal security services are also some of the most attractive security offerings China can provide on the global market, simply by default. While the United States has the advantage in providing security guarantees for external defense, China possesses comparative advantages in regime security and internal stability, and has become a global provider of security against such threats—leading to the sometimes paradoxical result that countries such as Hungary, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam can receive security assistance from Washington and Beijing simultaneously.³⁴

China’s normative justification for providing policing and law enforcement assistance to others increasingly rests on these claims of comparative advantage: that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has created one of the safest countries in the world, and wants to share its expertise with others.³⁵ The GSI, as an organizing framework for China’s international security outreach grounded in the need to support domestic stability and the party’s political security, advances Beijing’s narrative that it is a positive force for global stability and public safety, and that its assistance can be especially helpful to emerging countries whose needs have not been served well by existing regional and global security mechanisms.³⁶

The GSI, as an organizing framework for China’s international security outreach grounded in the need to support domestic stability and the party’s political security, advances Beijing’s narrative that it is a positive force for global stability and public safety, and that its assistance can be especially helpful to emerging countries whose needs have not been served well by existing regional and global security mechanisms.

Police training is therefore framed as a way to convey China’s success in domestic security and improve the Chinese police’s global public image. An article in CPPU’s academic journal notes:

“There are difficulties and challenges . . . including false reports affecting the international image of China’s police. . . . We should leverage main diplomacy events, such as visits by foreign diplomats to the Ministry of Public Security, foreign police training, and the education of foreign police international students to actively promote a positive image of the Chinese police as a force that consistently upholds the banner of ‘cooperation, innovation, rule of law, and win-win outcomes’ and adheres to a ‘common, comprehensive, cooperative, and sustainable’ security outlook.”³⁷

Other authors add that the projection of Chinese police forces outside PRC territory (for example, via joint patrols) and the training of foreign police forces “export [the] country’s law enforcement concepts” and “value orientations” such as the “China Dream” and Xi’s GSI-linked “community of a shared future.”³⁸

More concretely, the PRC’s 2023 Global Security Initiative Concept Paper proposes to “actively conduct law enforcement cooperation on the basis of respecting each country’s sovereignty, so as to jointly improve law enforcement capacity and security governance.”³⁹ It states that China will “support the establishment of a global training system to train for developing countries more law enforcement officers who are responsive to their countries’ security needs.” In a section on “platforms and mechanisms of cooperation,” the concept paper explains China’s goals for police and security training:

“Build more international platforms and mechanisms for exchange and cooperation on addressing security challenges in such areas as counter-terrorism, cybersecurity, biosecurity and emerging technologies, with a view to improving the governance capacity in the domain of non-traditional security. Encourage more exchanges and cooperation among university-level military and police academies. China is willing to provide other developing countries with 5,000 training opportunities in the next five years to train professionals for addressing global security issues.”⁴⁰

The GSI provides “systematic guiding principles and directional practical paths for international law enforcement and security cooperation,” while foreign police training implements these principles.⁴¹ “Strengthening international police cooperation,” one police-affiliated PRC scholar observes, “can become an enabler for realization of the comprehensive national security concept.”⁴²

China’s framework for internal security sets the global stage for PRC law enforcement outreach and training. The empirical record of China’s foreign police training, therefore, provides unique insights about how China operationalizes its sometimes-nebulous security concepts, how internal and international security activities are linked in Chinese thinking, and how the practices that emerge from this conceptual framework increasingly shape foreign security forces and police practices around the world.

New Data on China’s Foreign Police Training

Our analysis draws on an original dataset of 863 police and internal security trainings provided by China to foreign counterparts from 2000 to 2025, with the vast majority occurring after 2010.⁴³ In total, we identify 138 countries⁴⁴ that have received some kind of police or internal security training from China. Of those, 114 countries had participants trained in a bilateral setting, while 24 participated only in multilateral training courses. These countries appear in figures 2 and 3.

Countries on China’s regional periphery are especially likely to have received police training from the PRC, as evidenced by the high concentration of trainings in Southeast, South, and Central Asia.

The group of countries trained is broadly inclusive of both democracies and autocracies. Qualitatively, however, the relatively superficial (and often language-focused) courses attended by Australia and Western European countries are not directly comparable to the more intensive, internally oriented security trainings provided to participants from other countries.

The majority of these trainings have not been previously documented.

The majority of these trainings (over 550 of the observations in the dataset) have not been previously documented. An additional 308 observations incorporate data that either are previously available in published work, or have not yet been published but are incorporated here with permission from the authors.⁴⁵ We employ relatively restrictive criteria for inclusion, discussed further below, and in all cases include observations only if we could verify them.

China’s engagement in police training rose steadily under Xi, from 14 events in 2010 to 138 in 2019. These data confirm that China is a relative newcomer to global security provision, with recently evolving programs of police training and cooperation.

Foreign police training dropped sharply at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic and then resumed in 2021, as shown in figure 4. Publicly documented post-2020 totals are substantially lower than pre-pandemic counts, despite previously noted pledges by PRC officials to train up to 8,000 security officers since 2022. The relative paucity of post-pandemic data could owe to a local-level failure to meet policy goals, but it could also be the result of an intentional effort to scale back public scrutiny of some police training activities.

Our dataset includes, as a first cut, core police trainings provided by official actors in China. We include training provided by China’s major police universities and police colleges (both central and provincial), training bases and centers, and provincial and local public security bureaus (PSBs). We also include trainings provided by the paramilitary People’s Armed Police (PAP) and the China Coast Guard, as the majority of these trainings occurred prior to 2018 (when the two entities ceased to be under civilian law enforcement jurisdiction and fell solely under the CCP’s Central Military Commission).⁴⁶

We have excluded some adjacent training activities that, despite their importance, fall outside the scope of this paper. For example: 

• We do not include trainings provided by Chinese technology companies such as Meiya Pico⁴⁷ and Huawei. (For example, in 2024, Huawei signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ras Al Khaimah Police in the United Arab Emirates to provide advanced police technology and training.⁴⁸) We hope to include corporate security services and training in future work.
• We do not include academic exchanges, conferences, or visits by foreign delegations to Chinese police universities, or vice versa, unless training was a stated component of the visit. Chinese police academies commonly host visiting foreign delegations; many also organize and host conferences attended by foreign participants. Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau, for example, stated in 2019 that it had hosted fifty-one police delegations from eighteen countries totaling over 860 personnel.⁴⁹ A 2020 conference hosted by MPS and the Chongqing and Sichuan provincial PSBs examined railway security and law enforcement cooperation between China and Europe.⁵⁰ In 2023, CPPU hosted the third iteration of the Asia-Pacific Police Colloquium on Peacekeeping Police.⁵¹ These are important forms of police outreach, but are not properly categorized as training, so we exclude them from our data.
• We include some, but not all, joint patrols and joint exercises. We include, for example, four joint training exercises, wherein Chinese personnel conducted combat, counterterrorism, and special forces training with Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Serbia.⁵² We also include “police advisory teams” that have operated alongside foreign forces with an explicit mission to advise and train. Other joint patrols, such as those conducted through LMLECC in Southeast Asia, were not described as training and are therefore excluded. (In general, training events examined in our data have a directional quality: They were provided by China to a foreign police, gendarmerie, or other internal security force.)

These data are the most comprehensive currently available, but the number of trainees we document fall short of the large-scale training commitments made publicly by Chinese leaders. MPS has never released top-line figures on the number of trainings held, countries that have received training, or personnel trained. Across 863 training events from 2000 to 2025, we can verify that 12,024 foreign police officers received training; if we extrapolate average attendance from the events that provided headcount tallies to the remaining number of verified training events that did not, we arrive at an estimate of just over 20,000 trained. Two authors writing from a Chinese police university stated that China had already trained over 15,000 law enforcement officers by February 2017,⁵³ but our dataset only counts 4,118 by that point, and extrapolated figures suggest a total of around 8,173. In September 2024, Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong claimed that 2,700 foreign police officers had received training from China in the preceding year; we are only able to verify around one third of that total.⁵⁴

It is not currently possible to ascertain whether a substantial number of training events carried out by Chinese police and domestic security forces are simply unobservable because they are not publicly disclosed, or whether the round numbers announced by China’s top leaders are targets that China’s police institutions have been unable to meet. At various points, police training institutions have stated that they hosted a total number of trainings that significantly exceeds the number of events that can be publicly and individually documented. Reports on multilateral trainings also often list some of the participating countries, but not all of them. Our data, therefore, should be treated as a lower bound on the scale of Chinese police training: Both the number of training events and the number of participants trained around the world are likely undercounted here.

Additionally, there is evidence to suggest that—despite the public and high-profile nature of China’s commitments to provide foreign police training—the organizers of such trainings have been told to keep implementation quiet and not to publicize some of the contents. For example, an article published in 2022 and written by an instructor for counterterrorism at the Xinjiang Police College notes that:

“Some of the police content involved is extremely practical, [but] some teaching content and case information included is sensitive. . . . Compared with foreign aid training in other industries, the risk of leakage in foreign police training is higher. . . . Some issues that seem to us to be relatively common seem to be more sensitive and uncomfortable [不适应] to some foreign police trainees.”⁵⁵

The author warns that “sensitive topics in police training are prone to be hyped by anti-China forces in the United States and the West” and suggests a number of solutions, including careful assessment of the training participants to identify counterintelligence risks and the need to provide content that will “eliminate misunderstandings” of “hot spots and sensitive issues” so that the training is useful to “cultivate support for China.”⁵⁶ The author’s suggestions also include imposing confidentiality requirements with respect to the contents of the training.

There may be deliberate guidance limiting public disclosure of information about China’s police training activities, especially if and when trainings cover issues that PRC authorities believe could be used by outsiders to portray China in a negative light. 

We interpret this to suggest that there may be deliberate guidance limiting public disclosure of information about China’s police training activities, especially if and when trainings cover issues that PRC authorities believe could be used by outsiders to portray China in a negative light. This provides an additional explanation for the gaps in our data and further confirms that the data provided here likely both undercount the amount of training being provided and sanitize the presentation of it.

An Overview of China’s Foreign Police Trainings

The typical PRC foreign police training course (培训班 or 研修班) is a multiweek, lecture-based course held inside China at a Chinese police college, with content that covers both generic instruction on China’s development and system of law enforcement, and more specific coursework on specialized skills or thematic areas of internal security work. The majority of courses are organized on a bilateral basis and involve ten to thirty trainee participants. Over the progression of the course, trainees often participate in Chinese cultural activities, excursions to local public security bureaus, and practical exercises. These courses also frequently include a multiday trip to another part of China after formal classroom instruction concludes, typically to showcase specific public security technologies, organizations, or infrastructure employed by Chinese police forces.

Although the majority of trainings are conducted inside China and are delivered to personnel from a single country, China’s police trainings can take a variety of other formats. A significant minority of training courses, for example, are conducted either overseas or online; others have participants from multiple countries in attendance. The size and length of foreign police trainings also vary: While the average course hosts around two dozen trainees for no longer than three weeks, some occur over the course of several months, or host nearly one hundred participants. At least three Chinese police colleges have also enrolled small cohorts of foreign police officers in full degree programs.⁵⁷ In aggregate, wide variation exists in the recipients, topics, and training institutions—and by extension the complexity, tailoring, and local implementation—of foreign law enforcement capacity-building efforts carried out by MPS and its affiliated universities and organizations.

One distinct, more intensive form of training is the establishment of foreign “police advisory groups” (警务顾问组, also called “attachments”), which are groups of Chinese police that spend between three and nine months overseas providing itinerant training and consultation while seconded to foreign police services. Thus far, China has sent police advisory groups to Solomon Islands, Kiribati, and the Central African Republic.⁵⁸

In 2025, for example, MPS deployed a police advisory group to Solomon Islands for a 190-day tour. Chinese sources described the advisory group as visiting “over 70 communities and 20 schools over six months, conducting 57 community policing activities to promote China’s ‘Fengqiao Experience’ grassroots governance concepts and to deeply integrate Chinese governance wisdom with the island nation’s practices.”⁵⁹ MPS’s description mentioned both crime and social unrest as factors motivating the advisory group’s work.

Fiji has cooperated similarly with China, though it refers to “police exchanges.” Under this model, two Fijian officers have traded positions with PRC officers for stints of three to six months, allowing Chinese officers to embed with Fijian police to advise and work with them, while the Fijian police officers received on-the-job training in China.⁶⁰

Regional Focus

The earliest and most frequent participants in PRC police training activities were China’s immediate neighbors in Central Asia and Southeast Asia; African states are also well-represented.⁶¹ A regional breakdown of China’s foreign police trainings appears in figure 5 and table 1.

The concentrated pattern of police training for countries along the PRC’s land and maritime periphery tracks a combination of factors. One major factor is Chinese leaders’ prioritization of regional and subregional security affairs, framed as “neighboring country diplomacy.”⁶² China also has more frequent opportunities to cultivate security relationships along its periphery due to (relative) geographic convenience and the existence of regional multilateral institutions. The set-piece meetings, ministerials, and conferences associated with regional multilateral organizations such as the SCO and Lancang-Mekong Cooperation, in particular, place Chinese security officials in regular professional contact with their counterparts from Central, South, and Southeast Asia and provide a diplomatic foundation for the dissemination of police training.

A chart showing which countries in each region have received the most police training from the PRC appears in figure 6.

In comparing our data on Chinese foreign police training with the diplomatic outreach carried out by China’s internal security apparatus (primarily MPS and the party’s Central Political-Legal Affairs Commission), we observe that China’s police training is more concentrated than its police diplomacy in the developing world and the Global South.⁶³ Regions such as Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Latin America, and Africa have received a proportionally larger share of Chinese police training than Chinese police diplomacy, while Europe has received relatively less training and more security-diplomatic contact.

Bilateral and Multilateral Trainings

About three-quarters of China’s foreign law enforcement training courses to date have been conducted on a bilateral basis: these courses include 114 of the 138 countries in our dataset. The remainder of the courses are multilateral, with the number of country-participants ranging from as few as two to as many as twenty countries.

Of the 138 countries that have received police training from China, ninety-four have participated in both multilateral and bilateral training, and twenty-four only in multilateral training events. Typically, multilateral training courses host roughly as many total trainees as bilateral trainings, with each participant country sending a share of personnel, meaning that the impact on each participating country may be less dense. Furthermore, multilateral trainings are typically not customized to individual countries, but rather planned on the basis of multilateral groupings with some shared characteristic(s), such as development status, region, or organizational affiliation. Figure 7 shows a breakdown of target groups for China’s multilateral foreign police trainings.

In general, trainings targeted toward developing countries tend to be nonspecific, catch-all courses that allow any country outside of the Global North to send participants. Of the remainder, more than a third are targeted toward specific regions or subregions and seem to be selected on the basis of shared affinity, language, and/or law enforcement problem sets.

Most significant for China’s global security footprint are multilateral training courses that target countries by affiliation with global or international organizations. Over the past decade, the PRC has extensively used the SCO, LMLECC, and INTERPOL as vehicles for international law enforcement and internal security cooperation.⁶⁴ With respect to foreign police training, this means:

• SCO: China has provided multilateral training courses on counterterrorism, alongside miscellaneous courses on criminal enforcement and immigration.
• LMLECC: China has provided a series of specialized capacity-building courses in counternarcotics, cyber crime, intelligence sharing, and human trafficking. These courses closely match the thematic areas of crime targeted in the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation’s 2018–2022 action plan.⁶⁵
• INTERPOL: China’s MPS has provided capacity-building training to senior officers from INTERPOL regional bureaus and national central bureaus, who themselves are dual-hatted senior officers within their respective national police forces.

These multilateral course offerings suggest that China is tailoring its capacity-building support to match its growing security-diplomatic engagement with these organizations.

The Role of China’s Police Training Institutions

Each of China’s police trainings is a collaborative project, often composed and coordinated by multiple government organs including MPS and the Ministry of Commerce; provincial and municipal public security bureaus; and when trainings are conducted overseas, often the relevant PRC embassy or embassies.⁶⁶ The core entities that host and teach foreign police officers—the training institutions—vary in type, geography, and specialization. Their diversity is an indicator of the breadth and sophistication of China’s foreign police training apparatus. A map of these institutions appears in figure 8.

The strong majority of China’s foreign police training courses are conducted by national and provincial police colleges. These schools—in addition to providing professional training—are degree-granting postsecondary institutions with dedicated teaching and research faculty, and many have a specific international exchange department that facilitates training.⁶⁷ MPS designates twenty-one of these schools as partners in its International Law Enforcement Training Program, but our data show that at least sixty-four institutions have executed foreign police or internal security training programs.⁶⁸ Among these, Shandong and Yunnan Police Colleges stand out as the most prolific trainers, each hosting over one hundred trainings in the past two decades.⁶⁹ A list of the top foreign police training institutions (by number of trainings) appears in table 2.

Also noteworthy are the specializations that can be observed among China’s police training institutions. Some mainline, provincial academies have regional specializations—such as Shandong, Yunnan, and Xinjiang Police Colleges, which primarily provide police training services to Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia, respectively.⁷⁰ During the period we examine, for example, Shandong Police College conducted fifty-three bilateral trainings for African countries—far more than any other Chinese institution.

Some institutions, such as Railway Police College and China Coast Guard Academy, provide function-specific law enforcement trainings that align with their namesakes. And three major Chinese police universities—the Criminal Investigation Police University of China, Yunnan Police College, and Jiangsu Police Institute—have provided MPS-funded graduate and undergraduate degree programs for small cohorts of foreign police officers under the Chinese Government Scholarship for International Law Enforcement Talents program.⁷¹

China has also established several purpose-built bases (基地) and centers (中心) for training foreign police officers. (These training bases and centers usually do not have dedicated websites or publicity departments, so we know little about how many training programs they host. As a result, their role is likely to be underrepresented here.) Most prominent is the International Law Enforcement Training Base in Yancheng, Jiangsu, which was the first training base constructed for that purpose by MPS and appears to have hosted a site visit during the 2024 Global Public Security Cooperation Forum in Lianyungang.⁷² MPS also established the Central Asia Police Cooperation Training Center in Xinjiang in the late 2000s, but public information on its activity is scant.⁷³

Another notable facility is the CPPU Police Peacekeeping Training Center, which trains both Chinese and international police to participate in UN Police peacekeeping missions.⁷⁴ In 2016, the center claimed to have hosted over fifty courses for 650 officers from more than sixty countries;⁷⁵ in 2023, CPPU reported that this center had conducted “36 trainings for peacekeeping police, 17 for riot squads, 3 for police liaison officers, and 88 for foreign police, training a total of 5,243 personnel.”⁷⁶ (Because we could only confirm a small number of specific training events, the majority do not appear in our dataset.)

CPPU engages broadly on peacekeeping police work: In July 2023, for example, it held a seminar to address new standard operating procedures related to the selection of UN peacekeeping police.⁷⁷ The university’s article covering the event noted that “representatives of MPS’ 44th peacekeeping police training course” attended, and that Ata Yenigun, the chief of the Police Selection and Recruitment Section at the United Nations, explicitly thanked MPS for its efforts to organize and support the training of peacekeeping police. The university also hosted Red Cross officials in July 2023 for the third iteration of the Asia-Pacific Regional Peacekeeping Police Seminar.⁷⁸

Three training institutions were created to train police from countries that are members of China’s regional law enforcement cooperation mechanisms.

• The SCO has a dedicated Judicial Training Base at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, which has hosted twenty-one trainings for the interior ministries of the organization’s member states and dialogue partners. The organization also conducts additional trainings (not included in our dataset) for countries’ ministries of justice and courts.⁷⁹
• Yunnan Police College has hosted the China–Association of Southeast Asian Nations Law Enforcement Academy⁸⁰ and the Lancang-Mekong Law Enforcement Cooperation Academy (澜湄执法合作学院), a training subsidiary of LMLECC, which coordinates law enforcement cooperations between China and its neighbors in continental Southeast Asia.⁸¹
• The China–Pacific Island Countries Police Training Center, currently under construction at Fujian Police College, emerged from China’s recent efforts to establish an annual ministerial dialogue on law enforcement capacity building between China and several Pacific island countries.⁸²

Prior to its reorganization under the CCP’s Central Military Commission in 2018, the PAP provided a significant minority of internal security trainings, mostly at a small collection of PAP-specific academies. Data on PAP trainings are sparse after 2018, but this may simply be due to lower visibility after being subsumed under the military bureaucracy.

Lastly, a handful of miscellaneous institutions have put on some foreign police training events. Civilian universities, as well as municipal and provincial bureaus of public security, occasionally host foreign police trainees as part of their overall efforts at international law enforcement cooperation. Overseas, PRC embassies and local Confucius institutes have usually been the primary executors of training (typically Chinese language training courses for police in those countries).

Content of China’s Foreign Police Trainings

China’s foreign police and internal security training covers a broad range of topics. The availability of substantive information on the content of PRC foreign police trainings varies widely from course to course, and—as noted earlier—there is evidence that trainings about potentially sensitive topics may be subject to confidentiality agreements to suppress negative reporting (or any reporting at all).⁸³ Available course descriptions provide incomplete and sometimes euphemistic descriptions of topic matter, and, with rare exceptions, actual classroom curricula and materials are not available.⁸⁴

We organize China’s foreign police training into eight thematic categories. Analysis of China’s police training activities across these categories indicates that China’s training efforts mix capacity building and training on standard criminal law enforcement topics (such as counter-drug investigations) with trainings intended to bolster regime security and increase the repressive capacity of China’s authoritarian security partners.

Across topics, almost every law enforcement training provided by the PRC shares some core features. Courses begin with an introduction to China, its “national conditions,” the PRC’s police system, and progress since the start of China’s reform and opening period. A smaller subset of trainings mention instruction on Xi Jinping Thought and the “Fengqiao experience”—a Mao-era model of community policing and social control often cited by Xi and his internal security lieutenants.⁸⁵ Foreign police trainees also regularly receive a copy of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, a collection of Xi’s speeches and writings.⁸⁶

Descriptions of China’s police training content almost always list these materials first. This comports with the Chinese-language articles, discussed earlier, which suggest that a primary goal of China’s foreign police training is to “disseminate a positive image of the Chinese police” and counter so-called false reports that could tarnish that image.⁸⁷ Beyond this general political-ideological framing, many Chinese police training courses incorporate other soft-power cultural activities, such as calligraphy, tai chi, elementary Chinese language instruction, and visits to local monuments or heritage sites.

Table 3 and figure 9 provide an overview of the law enforcement training topics.

Next, we provide an overview of what each of category of foreign police training offered by China looks like.

Capacity Building (Generic)

Law enforcement capacity building is the most common type of training course represented in our data, but also one of the least specific. We identify at least 246 instances of training that could be categorized as capacity building, delivered to 103 countries. This number includes courses with titles—such as “law enforcement capacity building,” “policework,” and “training for middle- and senior-level officers”—that are nonspecific, with descriptions that seldom provide insight into the specific focuses or contents of the courses.⁸⁸

This subset also includes overview training courses with descriptions that refer to a collection of instruction topics (including some discussed later) but without focusing in a more specialized fashion on any one. Based on discussion in Chinese-language sources, these courses may be, but are not always, tailored upon delivery to the individual police force or forces receiving the training.

Crime and Criminal Law Enforcement

We document 172 training events involving seventy-seven countries that fall into the category of criminal policing and law enforcement (see figure 10). Training in this category mostly provide instruction for investigating and prosecuting a single form of specialized criminal activity, particularly types of crime that require a greater degree of organizational and technological sophistication.

More than half of the 172 courses cover drug crimes. For example, the description of a 2019 training at Yunnan Police College provides an exhaustive list of topics covered:

“National Conditions of China, Police System of China, Anti-Drug Strategies, Anti-Drug Laws and Regulations of China, China’s Drug Rehabilitation Mode, International Cooperation on Anti-Narcotics Law Enforcement, Criminal Investigations on Narcotics Cases, Analysis on Narcotic Intelligence, Organization and Carrying-Out of Controlled Drug Delivery, Administration on Precursor Chemicals, Application of Police Drone in Actual Combat, On-Site Investigation and Seizure (taking Yunnan Province as an example), taichi, Elementary Chinese Language.”⁸⁹

One additional, related set of subtopics, covered in forty training events, stands out: cyber crime, telecommunications fraud, and illicit gambling, all of which share related coursework on policing crime on the internet. Relevant coursework that addresses internet crime includes electronic forensics, cybersecurity governance, data mining, and prevention and investigation of telecommunications fraud.⁹⁰ These digitally focused law enforcement trainings are one facet of China’s wider efforts to stop cyber scam and online gambling crime syndicates that have fled PRC jurisdiction but continue to pose serious security and policing challenges to Chinese-speaking communities across PRC borders.⁹¹

The remainder of courses in this category consist of various miscellaneous specialty crimes, as well as courses with content focusing on criminal enforcement without specifying a particular subset.

Human Capital (Tactics)

We document 132 human capital trainings involving seventy-seven countries (see figure 11). These refer to trainings premised on teaching particular tactics, techniques, skills, and technology use to foreign police trainees. Although some of these courses have thematic implications that might also merit inclusion in another category, human capital courses focus primarily on training officers to acquire certain professional skills and capabilities, instead of learning about a thematic area of law enforcement or internal security.

One major subcategory of this kind of training involves training foreign police on how to use criminal investigation technology. These courses focus on training attendees in analytical techniques—such as crime scene photography, handwriting analysis, and ballistics—and on the technologies required to conduct DNA, gunshot residue, and toxicology analyses.⁹²

Elementary Chinese is frequently taught in foreign police training courses across all of the categories analyzed, and is taught intensively in some international cooperation trainings. However, a minority of courses consist solely of Chinese language instruction for foreign police officers. These courses, typically organized in target countries by Confucius institutes or PRC consulates, often have the goal of either enhancing collaboration with PRC officials on transnational crime or enabling foreign police to better police Chinese-speaking communities in their respective countries.⁹³

The remaining subtopics in this category include a variety of advanced, militarized law enforcement techniques that involved practical drilling and exercises. Combat and use-of-force trainings primarily instruct participants in the use of techniques from kung fu and sanda (散打) hand-to-hand combat styles, and have been provided to Angola, Jordan, South Africa, and Sri Lanka.⁹⁴ On at least one occasion, Saudi police officers have been trained in firearms use.⁹⁵ Another set of courses focuses on command and decisionmaking, and appears to combine organizational and on-the-ground leadership skills for commanding officers from foreign police forces.⁹⁶

The final, notable subcategory involves training for foreign police special forces (SWAT). These trainings’ descriptions sometimes make passing references to counterterrorism but are otherwise opaque. The exceptions are three trainings for security forces in Cuba.⁹⁷ Through courses in 2008–2009, 2016, and 2021, PAP officers provided training in hand-to-hand combat, sniper shooting, riot control, and advanced tactics to the special national brigade of the Cuban Ministry of the Interior, known as the Black Berets.⁹⁸

PAP training of the Black Berets, who are notorious for their role in suppressing political dissent in Cuba, is an example of Chinese training of a security force that has since been sanctioned by the United States for committing human rights abuses that protected an autocratic regime’s hold on power.⁹⁹ Such activities may not be the sole purpose of China’s provision of foreign police training, but such instances—alongside other examples detailed below—indicate China’s willingness to assist countries with internal security training that extends beyond public safety to include repression of public dissent and suppression of political opposition.

Counterterrorism

Counterterrorism is the most homogenous training category represented in this paper’s dataset, with seventy-seven documented training events involving at least forty-seven countries. The vast majority of these trainings include the term “counterterrorism” (反恐, also translated as “anti-terrorism”) in their titles, and have no subcategorization.

The contents of Chinese counterterrorism training bear little resemblance to U.S. military counterterrorism doctrine. Instead, they reflect China’s preventative approach to counterterrorism through police work focused on grassroots monitoring and digital and cyber surveillance.¹⁰⁰ An unusually detailed description of one 2024 counterterrorism training course provided by Xinjiang Police College to Pakistani police detailed the topics covered:

“China’s national conditions, promoting the building of a community with a shared future for mankind, the Belt and Road policy, anti-terrorism laws and regulations, combating terrorist forces to promote regional security and stability, China’s preventive counter-terrorism struggle in Xinjiang and its effectiveness [emphasis added], counter-terrorism intelligence theory and practice, basic counter-terrorism grassroots work, Sun Tzu’s Art of War and counter-terrorism strategy, network space security governance, and new era international law enforcement cooperation.”¹⁰¹

While this course description is unusually direct in referring explicitly to “China’s preventive counter-terrorism struggle in Xinjiang and its effectiveness,” the other contents listed are consistent with courses in the counterterrorism category.¹⁰² Other common lecture topics in counterterrorism training courses include police response to terrorist incidents, bomb disposal, and countering terrorist financing.¹⁰³

Chinese officials assert the right of each country to define terrorist threats for itself under the cover of state sovereignty; as applied to police training, Beijing appears to employ a principled disregard for whether and how its foreign partners define their enemies. In Myanmar, for example, China has conducted a series of counterterrorism trainings since 2019, after accepting the military junta’s characterization of Rohingya Muslims as terrorists.¹⁰⁴ Chinese regional analysts characterize this refusal to render judgment on “the Myanmar government’s stability maintenance actions” as an illustration of its long-standing “neutral stance of ‘non-interference’,”¹⁰⁵ even as its operations specifically assist Myanmar’s internal security forces in cracking down against an ethnic and religious minority group.

Figures 12 and 13 show that China’s counterterrorism-focused foreign police trainings began in Central Asia, and have remained concentrated there, but have recently focused on South and Southeast Asia as well as some trainings in Africa and the Caucasus.

Security and Protection

“Security and protection” refers to a collection of sixty-five courses provided to thirty-two countries that focuses on providing security and protection to populations and critical infrastructure through a mix of passive defense, guard work, and surveillance. The largest subset is large-scale event security, which involves risk mitigation, security planning, traffic management, and bomb inspections (see figure 14).¹⁰⁶

Trainings on “railway policework” appear to be unusually specialized courses that train foreign police officers to conduct law enforcement activities on trains and around rail infrastructure. Details are sparse, but one description refers to conducting security inspections, responding to terrorist threats against train infrastructure, and tactics for policing aboard trains.¹⁰⁷

“Resource and infrastructure protection” courses are unique in the extent to which they draw implicit connections between China’s law enforcement assistance and overseas infrastructure projects. Some of these trainings make general reference to “jointly building Belt and Road Initiative safeguards,” while others specify the type of infrastructure to be protected, such as oil and gas pipelines in Central Asia and Myanmar, “energy facilities” in Kyrgyzstan, and facilities along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.¹⁰⁸ The courses typically do not state explicitly that their purpose is to help foreign police protect PRC-backed infrastructure projects, but the wording associated with these courses strongly suggests linkages between China’s provision of economic and security assistance to a country and provision of security and protection police training.

A number of Chinese institutions have also provided training for foreign police forces on the implementation of “surveillance and safe city construction.” Safe city platforms are platforms marketed for policing and public safety by major Chinese technology companies (such as Huawei, a leading global provider of “safe city solutions”), which provide integrated facial recognition, identification databases, and data collection and analytics capabilities that support informatized, real-time monitoring of an urban area.¹⁰⁹ Since 2010, Chinese technology companies such as Huawei and ZTE have become major exporters of safe city and surveillance platforms for use in policing, with these types of platforms adopted in over eighty countries worldwide prior to the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020.¹¹⁰

Our data only examine trainings of foreign police in the use of safe city and other surveillance technologies that have been carried out by actors such as local PSBs and Chinese police colleges and universities. It is important, therefore, to note that a substantial number of additional trainings in this category are provided by the Chinese technology companies that supply the platforms, in the form of customer service for subnational governments and law enforcement clients who acquire and install these surveillance platforms for government use.¹¹¹

However, sources indicate close collaboration between these technology companies and China’s foreign police training programs. For example, training seminars held in Shenzhen in 2022 and 2023 covered safe city, urban security, and video surveillance projects for developing countries, and featured speakers from ZTE and China Information and Communication Technology Group Corporation on the instructor list.¹¹² (We hope to compile additional data on trainings conducted by Chinese technology companies in future research.)

Immigration and Border Enforcement

The fifty-seven training courses provided to at least fifty-nine countries under the category of “immigration and border enforcement” are mostly self-explanatory. China’s foreign police training efforts in this area focus on enforcement at points of entry and along national borders (see figure 15). Techniques taught include manual and technology-assisted document verification, counterfeit inspection, use of facial recognition technology, and border questioning and interrogation.¹¹³ Courses on “border protection” tend to include additional coursework emphasizing the risks of terrorism and illicit activity across national borders.¹¹⁴

Public Order and Regime Security

This category contains fifty-three trainings focused on preservation of public order and (either implicitly or explicitly) protection of regimes and leaders. These trainings involve at least thirty-two countries (see figure 16).

A handful of trainings in this category refer to more benign forms of public order protection, such as management of epidemics or natural disasters. The majority, however, include descriptions that refer to crowd control, riots, and “stability maintenance” (维稳), which in Chinese discourse typically references police suppression of instability, collective action, and public protest. Descriptions associated with these trainings invoke rhetoric familiar to those who study China’s repressive apparatus.

The largest subset of trainings in this category concern “VIP protection.” Generally, this refers to training guards for major public and international events. Some of China’s trainings refer to protecting foreign dignitaries at “foreign affairs events,” such as the 2018 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Papua New Guinea.¹¹⁵ Others make direct reference to protecting top national leaders, such as trainings for presidential and palace guards in the Philippines, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau.¹¹⁶

In one exceptional instance, MPS provided a series of trainings to hundreds of members of the Central African Republic’s elite presidential guard battalion, covering firearms and blade weaponry, special operations, tactical interrogation, and VIP protection.¹¹⁷ The unit, known as the Special Republican Protection Group, has also received training “to protect the regime” from the Wagner Group, a Russian private military company.¹¹⁸

Some trainings for foreign police forces discuss “riot control,” “social security governance,” “social stability maintenance,” “crowd control,” and non-UN-related “peacekeeping.” This set of trainings appears broadly similar and focused on suppressing public disturbances or riots—or, following China’s emphasis on “prevention and control” (防控) of potential sources of instability, focused on approaches to social control that prevent such instability from arising in the first place.¹¹⁹

Descriptions for the remainder of subtopics in this category are scant. Foreign police trainings on “public emergency and disaster response” appear to focus on preserving public order in the aftermath of natural disasters and other catastrophes.¹²⁰ Trainings on “handling nontraditional security threats” appear not only to partially concern natural disaster response, but also to encompass terrorism and public health disasters as well.¹²¹

At least one training on “national” or “state” security was conducted by the PAP,¹²² but no descriptions of courses under this heading are available in the public domain.

International Cooperation

The final category of foreign police training, of which we found at least forty-one instances for seventy-six countries, includes distinct courses designed to facilitate international law enforcement and public security cooperation (see figure 17).

Courses that generically refer to “international law enforcement cooperation” are typically short-term and train attendees to coordinate with overseas counterparts on pursuit of suspects, extradition, and asset recovery.¹²³

“Police liaison officer trainings,” by contrast, may involve up to a year of intensive language and police training in China, with the goal of cultivating China-specialist national police officers to liaise with PRC counterparts.¹²⁴ Police trainings provided to countries in Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand fall almost entirely into this category: In most cases, 1–2 police officers have gone to China for a year to study Chinese in order to conduct Chinese-language foreign liaison work.

This category also includes a special subset of trainings dedicated to training foreign police to participate in UN police peacekeeping operations.¹²⁵ These courses are hosted at the CPPU’s Police Peacekeeping Training Center, which has accreditation to train and certify police officers for UN police peacekeeping missions.¹²⁶ China highlights its provision of this form of peacekeeping support as one of the global security goods that it contributes to the international system,¹²⁷ but (as noted earlier) there is a significant gap between the number of peacekeeping police CPPU reports training and the number of training courses documented in our dataset.

Topical Emphasis of Training by Region

The scope and content of China’s police trainings differs across different partners and geographies. Such variations seem to be driven by variation in the national and regional security challenges that law enforcement organizations in the recipient states are expected to address—which, in turn, shape both the demand for particular types of training expressed by potential foreign security partners and law enforcement trainees, and China’s interest in supplying that type of training to the police forces of a given recipient state.

The functional focus and substantive issues tackled in these trainings offer a window into Beijing’s assessment of which missions and issues rise to the top in China’s perception of the regional and global security environment. Topical variation by region is shown in figure 18. 

For example, Central Asia has received more counterterrorism trainings than trainings in any other category, consistent with the SCO’s focus on countering the so-called “three evils” (三股势) of terrorism, separatism, and extremism, as well as China’s own interests in cross-border cooperation on counterterrorism in the region. Police training delivered to countries in Southeast Asia has focused on crime and criminal law enforcement, consistent with growing challenges from transnational organized crime along China’s southern periphery, such as drug, wildlife, arms, and human trafficking; scam rings and financial crimes; and cyber crime.¹²⁸

China’s impact on police training in the Pacific Island Countries (PICs) is especially significant relative to these countries’ sizes and the size of their police forces. (Given that some of these countries do not have military forces, police training is the most significant form of security cooperation possible.) China has sent “police advisory groups” that spend months advising and training police officers to Solomon Islands, Kiribati, and Fiji, and is explicitly replicating its model of surveillance technology and grassroots social control, called the Fengqiao model, in cooperation with Solomon Islands police.¹²⁹ In 2025, MPS cooperation with Honiara resulted in the deployment of Chinese police for 190-days, where these forces visited more than seventy communities across Solomon Islands.¹³⁰ Under the label of “police exchange,” PRC officers have also embedded with Fijian police to advise and work with them, while Fijian police officers have gone to China for on-the-job training.¹³¹

China also funded and built the Samoa Police Training Academy, which opened in August 2024 and graduated its first cohort in July 2025. ¹³² Chinese police teams have traveled to Vanuatu to train officers on how to use the breathalyzers that the PRC provided.¹³³ China is also constructing an enormous, 30,000-square-meter police training academy on the site of the existing Fujian Police College in Fuzhou, Fujian. The academy, called the China-Pacific Islands Police Training Centre, is being built specifically to bring police officers from these countries for training; a July 2024 ceremony to break ground at the site saw representatives from eight Pacific island countries in attendance.¹³⁴

China’s foreign police training programs are broad, touching a majority of countries around the world. The bilateral and multilateral foreign police trainings provided by Chinese law enforcement and security institutions address both the security challenges in the particular country or region to which training is directed, and China’s interests in security in those places. While some training modules are relatively apolitical in their focus on capacity building and criminal law enforcement, others have been more clearly aligned with an authoritarian model of social control, suppression of popular protest, and nondemocratic regime security.

Conclusion

China’s training of foreign police forces forms a key part of its emergence as a global security provider. A wide variety of institutions across the PRC provide training to foreign police forces, and the amount of police training worldwide has rebounded following China’s emergence from its Zero COVID lockdowns. A strong majority of the world’s countries (at least 138) have received some form of police training from China since 2010; programs range from sending individual detailees to China to learn the language necessary to liaise with PRC police counterparts to more systematic and intensive trainings in bilateral or multilateral formats.

China’s police training programs provide concrete lines of action that bolster the country’s efforts to build new mechanisms of global law enforcement cooperation and new regional and global security architectures focused on cooperation on internal and nontraditional security challenges. They help embed new, Chinese-led global standards in security cooperation and emerging techniques and tools of security work into the practices of police forces around the world. Although some reports indicate complaints or skepticism about the contents of Chinese trainings,¹³⁵ these activities are key to China’s push to offer a counternarrative about what security is in the contemporary global environment and who in the world is best at providing it.¹³⁶ Collectively, China’s foreign police trainings are part of the effort to position Beijing as a major global security provider.

China’s foreign police training mixes garden-variety courses on relatively standard law enforcement and crime control topics, such as counter-drug investigations and forensics, with other activities that are more explicitly aimed at regime security, such as leadership protection, protest management, surveillance, and social stability. Much of China’s training is generically described as capacity building, but there is evidence that China deliberately does not publicize aspects of its foreign police training work that might create political controversy or lead to further criticism of the PRC as a “police state.” China’s foreign police efforts are most concentrated on its regional periphery but increasingly extend to encompass large swaths of the world, with regional variations in emphasis that reflect the ways that regional security challenges mix with Chinese interests abroad.

Given the diversity of goals and topics covered in China’s foreign police training programs, their impact on recipient countries around the world may also be diverse and, to date, is largely unknown. What is clear is that China’s efforts are, in varied ways, now shaping the institutions, practices, norms, capacities, and technological capabilities of key organizations in recipient countries that have the power both to shape the rule of law and to carry out repression and state violence. In some cases, China’s assistance may strengthen weak state governance and improve human security; in others, it has already contributed to the repressive capacity of authoritarian security organs. Growing Chinese influence inside recipient countries’ security bureaucracies could also affect political stability through other mechanisms, such as the creation of fragmented and counterbalanced security agencies or new dependencies on China for the state’s very capacity to maintain sovereign control over its own territory and people.¹³⁷ As China’s impact on global policing expands, therefore, it will be important to track and assess how China’s changing role shapes and changes the activities of recipient countries’ police forces, in terms of both their performance on crime control and public safety and their willingness and capacity to engage in repression.

Acknowledgments

For contributing their data on police training, we thank Lin Sae-Phoo, Jordan Link, and the University of Texas student research team (Bailey Crane, Kevin Lentz, Arianne Ohman, Anna Pate, Ryan Williams, and Liz Wong). We also thank Jinhong Li, Sophie Zhuang, Walter Lam, and Liberty Osborne for research assistance. Sheena Chestnut Greitens also thanks the Smith Richardson Foundation for their support of pilot data collection efforts.