New Zealand agreed to visa contractor at ‘behest’ of Beijing police, documents show

New Zealand began using a company owned by Chinese police as the subcontractor for its visa application centre in Beijing nearly a decade ago ”at the behest of” the city’s Public Security Bureau, according to internal government documents disclosed through access to information legislation.

The documents, first reported by New Zealand news site Stuff Ltd., offer insight into the pressures for foreign countries to use facilities and staff provided by Beijing Shuangxiong Foreign Service Company, which Canada also relies on for its visa application centre in the Chinese capital.

Owned by the Beijing Public Security Bureau (PSB), Beijing Shuangxiong is a subcontractor for VFS Global, a company headquartered in Zurich and Dubai that holds a wide-reaching contract to provide visa-processing services around the world for many governments, including Canada and New Zealand. VFS offices collect personal and biometric information that is then forwarded to immigration officials for decisions on who will be granted visas.

Ottawa says it only learned Chinese police ran visa centre this year

Canada’s visa office in Beijing staffed mostly by Chinese police-owned company

No indication federal security agencies were consulted before Beijing visa centre was approved

In New Zealand, where Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said this week that differences with China are growing “harder to reconcile,” officials have said they knew from the outset that Beijing Shuangxiong is owned by the police and expressed no concerns about the arrangement.

But the internal documents reveal the role the Beijing security authorities, and VFS itself, played in steering New Zealand toward the use of a police-owned company for its visa centre.

Critics in New Zealand say the Beijing security authorities’ involvement in pushing the country to employ a police-backed company raises questions.

“The insistence by any security agency on such matters is rarely, if ever, without purpose,” said Simon O’Connor, an opposition MP who is a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.

“Serious answers are now needed as to why demands by an organization with links to the PSB were accepted.”

New Zealand had initially used a different subcontractor in Beijing, a company called Tonghui. But in late August, 2012, Simon Smith, a senior official with Immigration New Zealand, wrote in an e-mail that he had received information from an unidentified manager in Beijing that Tonghui “is currently under investigation.” Moreover, China’s Ministry of Public Security, which oversees the police, “won’t accept” Zhaoyuan, the alternative subcontractor New Zealand had chosen, the manager wrote.

Zhaoyuan was a business unit of the Diplomatic Services Bureau – an apparent reference to an arm of the country’s Foreign Ministry – but the Ministry of Public Security had decided it didn’t “want DSB to be involved in this kind of outsourcing business,” the manager wrote.

Instead, VFS chose an outsourcing business run by the police itself: Beijing Shuangxiong. New Zealand was given less than two weeks to make the change. “VFS requires us” to request the change to Beijing Shuangxiong, the manager wrote. There is no indication in the e-mails that VFS disclosed the police backing of Beijing Shuangxiong. The Globe and Mail was unable to locate any public reporting on an investigation into a company named Tonghui.

The next day, the embassy of New Zealand in Beijing wrote to the Ministry of of Public Security requesting approval to use Beijing Shuangxiong. In his e-mail, Mr. Smith expressed displeasure that VFS senior management had not brought the issue to his attention directly.

VFS, however, denies that it was obliged to use the police subcontractor, which it calls a facility-management company.

“At no point do Chinese authorities or any owners of a facility management company influence or instruct VFS Global to use a particular licensed FMC,” VFS spokesman Peter Brun said in a statement this week.

He described subcontractors such as Beijing Shuangxiong as being involved in “the administrative task of accepting visa applications at the counter.” Those companies and “their owners or investors have absolutely no access to any data at these visa application centres and no IT infrastructure access,” he said.

They do, however, directly employ people inside those visa application centres who handle and process information for applicants. Beijing Shuangxiong, for example, directly employs 86 per cent of the staff at the Canadian visa application centre. Ottawa acknowledged last week that it did not learn about the police ownership of the company until this February, when The Globe first reported on the link.

Visa application centres can hold on to electronic documentation for 40 days and physical documentation for 20. The centre in Beijing sends “high-level application information” daily to Immigration New Zealand “via password protected e-mail,” according to a briefing from earlier this year contained in the access to information documents.

Anne-Marie Brady, a New Zealand specialist on Chinese Communist Party domestic and foreign policy and a global fellow at the U.S.-based Wilson Center, argued that the police backing of the company overseeing the visa application centre means “applicants for visas are like lambs being led up to slaughter [in] dealing with this office.”

The Public Security Bureau “is in charge of monitoring dissidents, counterintelligence and monitoring foreigners in China. Gathering the biodata of visa applicants would be very useful to them,” she said.

The New Zealand documents, which include briefing notes in response to media inquires earlier this year, acknowledge some risk to the arrangement with Beijing Shuangxiong. The Ministry for Public Security “has both law enforcement and political security functions,” notes one briefing document.

While working with visa centre subcontractors is “an inescapable part of doing business in China, INZ is aware that they do present risks which must be managed,” the document says.

It then lists a series of safeguards, which include vetting the “identity, education, employment and character information” of staff; diverting applications on sensitive humanitarian grounds and other such factors away from the visa centre; and dispatching New Zealand staff to physically check all aspects of the visa centre “to ensure all contracted safeguards are in place and operating to a high level.”

Historically, visa centres in China have “performed very well against audit requirements, with no serious issues identified that have required intervention,” the document states.

Still, it said immigration authorities “will arrange an audit” of the Beijing visa centre “at the earliest opportunity – local COVID restrictions allowing.”

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