Belfast-based activist Patrick Yu has urged the UK government to shut down a Chinese "police station" operating in the city.
Mr Yu said the known stations established in various parts of the world are used to monitor and as a base to threaten Chinese citizens.
The Irish government in October ordered a "police station" set up in Dublin's city centre to shut after its existence was publicly revealed by a human rights group.
Fuzhou Police Service Overseas Station opened earlier in 2022. The Chinese embassy has denied any wrong-doing in Dublin.
But the Department of Foreign Affairs said no Chinese authority had sought its permission to set up the “police station".
Mr Yu, resident in Northern Ireland for 30 years and on the board of the NI Council for Racial Equality (NICRE), told BBC News NI: "I think it's about the monitoring of Chinese citizens and a way of threatening them.
"If you're a Chinese citizen the government is always watching you." The Chinese government has denied the claims circling around the facilities.
Mr Yu, a young activist in his native Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, said he is unable to return to the city state because of the National Security Law enacted in 2020.
Alicia Kearns, Conservative chair of Westminster's Foreign Affairs Committee, told the House of Commons the UK was vulnerable to "Chinese transnational repression".
"It is still true that there are four illegal police stations operating in the country that we know of - the one in Belfast seems to be missing from much of the reporting," she said.
Also in the Commons, DUP MP Jim Shannon said: "I have some constituents who are Chinese expats who have told me that they feel they have been followed. "They are pretty sure that their phones have been tapped."
Safeguard Defenders, a Spanish-based human rights group, said stations are understood to be operating in 53 countries.
A report by the group Safeguard Defenders report identified two of the facilities in London with another in Glasgow, the latter operating out of a restaurant.
The Times newspaper in April reported one of the alleged stations is operating in Croydon, south London.
US prosecutors arrested two men in New York last month for allegedly operating one of the stations while Dutch media found evidence that the stations were being used to try to silence Chinese dissidents in Europe.
