Why the US Still Has No Extradition Treaty With China
The US and China have never had an extradition treaty, so Beijing runs a covert repatriation campaign, Operation Fox Hunt, that has landed its own agents in US prison.
Two hundred and twenty years. That's how far the United States' network of extradition treaties reaches back — the first, with Ecuador, has been in force since 1873. In that time Washington has built formal treaties with 116 countries, most recently Croatia in 2022. China isn't one of them, and never has been.
The gap matters in both directions. A person accused of a crime in the United States who reaches Chinese soil is, in practice, out of reach of American courts. Less obviously, the reverse is also true: Beijing has no legal mechanism to compel the United States to hand over the Chinese nationals it wants back, either. That second fact is the more interesting one, because China has built an entire covert program to work around it.
No treaty, and no real prospect of one
The reasons the two countries never signed an extradition treaty come down to a basic incompatibility that shows up in nearly every serious legal analysis of the relationship: extradition treaties require both sides to trust the other's courts, and Washington has never extended that trust to China's judicial system. China's legal system lacks the due-process protections — an independent judiciary, transparent trials, protection against coerced confessions — that U.S. courts require before agreeing to send someone into another country's custody. China also retains the death penalty for a wide range of offenses, including economic crimes, and U.S. extradition law generally bars sending a defendant somewhere they could be executed for the underlying charge without assurances American negotiators haven't been able to secure with Beijing.
China isn't unique in this. The U.S. also has no extradition treaty with Russia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Ukraine, most of the Gulf Cooperation Council states, and most of the former Soviet Union — a list of countries whose legal systems, for one reason or another, Washington doesn't extend treaty-level trust to. Hong Kong is a case study in how fast that trust can evaporate: the U.S. suspended its extradition agreement with Hong Kong on August 19, 2020, after Beijing imposed the national security law that reshaped the territory's courts.
The traffic China actually wants to run the other way
China's own framing of the problem, when officials have addressed it publicly, has been that the U.S. has become a haven for the people Beijing wants back. "The US has become the top destination for Chinese fugitives fleeing the law," Liao Jinrong, then head of the Ministry of Public Security's International Cooperation Bureau, told the state-run China Daily in 2014, when the ministry announced it was pursuing more than 150 "economic fugitives" believed to be living in the U.S. A senior official on that team, Wang Gang, put the core problem plainly: "They always think Chinese judicial organs violate suspects' human rights."
Without a treaty, China's options for getting someone back are limited to negotiation, deportation on unrelated immigration grounds, or — as U.S. prosecutors have spent the past several years documenting — pressure applied outside any legal channel at all. The Chinese government calls this "Operation Fox Hunt," officially framed as an anti-corruption campaign launched in 2014. American law enforcement has come to see it as something closer to transnational repression.
Post by @FBI
What Fox Hunt looks like when it reaches into the U.S.
In March 2025, a federal judge in Brooklyn sentenced Quanzhong An, 58, of Roslyn Heights, New York, to 20 months in prison for acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government. According to the Justice Department's account of the case, An spent years — starting in 2017 and continuing until his arrest in 2022 — trying to pressure a U.S. resident into returning to China by targeting the man's adult son instead. An visited the son's home uninvited, later brought two Chinese government officials and his own daughter along on a follow-up visit, and delivered messages he described as conveying what Beijing wanted without wanting to "pronounce 'ruthless words'" himself. According to prosecutors, he warned the son that Chinese officials would "keep pestering [him]" and "make [his] daily life uncomfortable" until his father agreed to go back. An was ultimately ordered to pay close to $5 million, including roughly $1.3 million in restitution to the family he'd targeted.
It wasn't an isolated case. The Justice Department has separately charged more than a dozen people, including PRC intelligence officers and their recruited agents, in related Fox Hunt schemes — surveillance operations, family coercion, and in some cases private investigators hired to track down and harass targets on U.S. soil. FBI Director Christopher Wray has said publicly that Fox Hunt's real purpose extends beyond corruption cases into political repression, aimed in part at dissidents and critics of the Chinese government, not just accused embezzlers.
The one case that did go back — through a different country
The clearest illustration of how hard it is to move someone out of a non-treaty country came from Canada, not the U.S. Lai Changxing, accused by Chinese authorities of running a massive smuggling and bribery operation, fled to Canada in 1999. Ottawa refused him political refugee status but then spent more than a decade fighting the case through Canadian courts before finally extraditing him in 2011 — and only after Beijing gave written assurances that Lai wouldn't be tortured or executed. No comparable case has played out on the American side; as of the mid-2010s, by China's own account, only two fugitives had been returned from the U.S. to China in the preceding decade, and most of that movement has come through deportation or voluntary return rather than anything resembling formal extradition.
What the missing treaty doesn't mean
None of this amounts to a guarantee of safety for someone hiding out from American charges in China, or vice versa. A missing treaty doesn't stop an Interpol Red Notice, doesn't prevent a country from deporting someone on immigration grounds instead of extradition grounds, and doesn't freeze that person's bank accounts, business interests, or ability to travel through a third country with its own treaty obligations. What it does mean is that any return has to happen through negotiation, coercion, or luck — never through a court order either government can simply invoke. For two governments this distrustful of each other's justice systems, that gap looks unlikely to close anytime soon — much like the diplomatic standoff that has left the U.S. without a formal embassy in Pyongyang for more than seven decades: some ruptures in the U.S. rulebook simply outlast every administration that inherits them.
