Special Police Units in The People's Republic of China
Though initially confined to the metropolitan cities, today virtually every city has a paramilitary tactical unit of its own. A variety of abbreviations and acronyms are used for these organizations, which operate at national, municipal, and provincial levels. Although the SPU moniker is used colloquially to refer to all such units in the PRC, some teams have been known to use the SWAT acronym instead. Both names/acronyms are interchangeable when referring to them in the English language as they are actually the same (The phrase "特警", is used in the PRC to refer to both SWAT and SPU and thus may cause confusion for English speakers who think of them as different units). The confusion is made worse when some units tend to officially adopt their nicknames.
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