China’s rubber-stamp legislature on Nov. 6 passed a law that attempts to put the worldwide hunt by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for fugitives and their money on a permanent legal footing.

The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress adopted the Anti-Cross-Border Corruption Law, which took effect on the same day. It covers bribes paid by Chinese companies abroad, bribes paid to Chinese officials by foreigners, and suspects who flee overseas with their assets.

The law comes less than two months after new State Council exit rules took effect on Sept. 15, giving officials broad power to stop citizens from leaving the country. Analysts previously told The Epoch Times that the screenings hit hardest against people with savings, debts, or family abroad.

Both measures come as China’s economy sputters. Fixed-asset investment fell by 7.2 percent, and property investment plunged by 20.6 percent in the first nine months of the year. Land sales, long a major source of cash for local governments, brought in less than half as much in 2025 as in 2021, a drop of more than 4 trillion yuan, or about $600 billion.

Local governments have turned to fines, back taxes, and asset seizures to make up the shortfall. Non-tax revenue, a category weighted toward fines and confiscations, jumped by 25.4 percent in 2024 even as tax revenue fell by 3.4 percent.

The new law’s 47 articles let investigators bar suspects from leaving China, ask foreign governments to search homes and freeze assets, and bring fugitives back through extradition, repatriation, and other means.

The law also bars foreign agencies from investigating corruption inside China without Beijing’s approval. People and companies in China may not hand any evidence or data to foreign investigators without that approval either.

The statute attempts to give legal standing to Sky Net, the CCP’s overseas fugitive campaign, which includes the police-run Operation Fox Hunt. The U.S. Justice Department has prosecuted Fox Hunt operations on American soil and calls the two campaigns “transnational repression programs,” a term the FBI uses for foreign governments’ efforts to stalk, intimidate, or assault people in the United States.

Beijing launched Sky Net in 2015 to bring fugitives and their money back to China. Several Chinese agencies, including the police and the central bank, run a new round of it every year. Fox Hunt began in 2014. The “foxes” refer to people who fled abroad.

Chinese officials have described “persuasion to return,” or coaxing fugitives home to turn themselves in, as one of Beijing’s main methods. U.S. officials say that, in practice, it has included threats against relatives, some of them still in China.

Sky Net’s Tally

Li Xi, who heads the CCP’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and sits on the Politburo Standing Committee, previewed the law in People’s Daily, the CCP’s official mouthpiece, on Nov. 5. He wrote that it would strengthen the hunt for fugitives, keep suspects from fleeing, and recover stolen assets. 

The commission is the CCP’s internal enforcer, and the Standing Committee is its top leadership.

He wrote that the campaign targeted “tigers,” “flies,” and “foxes” at once—party shorthand for senior officials, low-level cadres, and fugitives who flee abroad. Among those it had taken down, he named Zhang Youxia and He Weidong, both former vice chairmen of the Central Military Commission. Chinese leader Xi Jinping chairs the military commission, which commands the armed forces.

Since 2012, discipline inspectors have punished 7.92 million people, including 963 senior officials managed by the party’s central leadership, Li wrote.

The law states that Beijing opposes giving corruption suspects or their assets a safe haven “under any pretext.”

From 2015 through 2024, Sky Net brought back 14,048 people from more than 120 countries and regions, the discipline commission stated last year. Of those, 2,999 were party members or state employees. Only 2,777 were extradited, deported, or arrested abroad. That leaves more than 11,000 who returned by other means.

Rules for Companies

The law’s compliance rules cover Chinese companies with branches, subsidiaries, or investments abroad. They also cover branches and subsidiaries that foreign companies operate in China.

Those companies must build anti-corruption compliance systems and report suspected cross-border graft to the state’s supervisory commissions or the police. The commissions share offices with the CCP’s discipline inspectors.

In major cases, investigators may require foreign companies and individuals to cooperate on a reciprocal basis. The ban on handing evidence to foreign investigators applies to every institution, organization, and individual in China, including the Chinese units of foreign companies.

The law also lets Beijing retaliate against any foreign government it accuses of using anti-corruption as a “pretext” to contain China. It points to the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law as the basis for such countermeasures. Beijing has used that 2021 law to sanction foreign companies and officials.

People and Money

Several provisions target officials’ ties abroad. Supervisors are told to crack down on officials who obtain foreign citizenship, permanent residency, or long-term residence permits in violation of the rules.

The law also calls for early-warning and “blocking” systems to stop suspects from fleeing and moving money out of China. Investigators may order exit bans, which immigration authorities carry out.

The Sky Net 2026 campaign, launched in April, tasked China’s national police, the Ministry of Public Security, with another round of Fox Hunt. It also ordered tighter control over “naked officials,” whose spouses and children have moved abroad, and over officials’ private trips overseas.

Fox Hunt on Trial

U.S. officials have long rejected Beijing’s account of the campaign.

“China describes Fox Hunt as an international anti-corruption campaign—it’s not,” then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a July 2020 speech at the Hudson Institute.

He said its targets included political rivals, dissidents, and critics, and that hundreds of them lived in the United States.

Wray said that when the regime could not find one target, it sent an emissary to the target’s family in the United States with a message: “The target had two options: return to China promptly or commit suicide.”

He said that Fox Hunt agents in the United States engage in “rogue law enforcement” that bypasses U.S. authorities.

In June 2023, a federal jury in Brooklyn returned the first convictions at a U.S. trial tied to Fox Hunt. It convicted a retired New York police sergeant and two Chinese nationals over a Beijing-directed campaign to stalk and pressure a former Chinese official and his wife in New Jersey.

Prosecutors said that in 2017, Chinese officials threatened to jail the man’s sister in China to force his frail 82-year-old father to travel to New Jersey.

In 2018, a note left at the couple’s door said that the man’s “wife and children will be okay” if he surrendered to face 10 years in a Chinese prison, according to prosecutors.

Terence Reilly, then acting special agent in charge of the FBI’s Newark field office, named the client behind the job when the sergeant was sentenced in April 2025.

“His client, the People’s Republic of China [PRC], has invested years and millions of dollars trying to silence dissent beyond its borders,” Reilly said. “When those efforts cross into our country, they threaten our national security. The PRC needs to understand: we will not tolerate it.”