cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52948584
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In 2023, Lyndon Li, an activist with political connections, was followed by a Chinese man to his London church. The man had previously befriended Hong Kong activists and collected personal information on some of them. In a pub in the capital, Li says the man, who was called Harrison Chan, offered him money to infiltrate the Conservative party.
“He said China will be the future,” Li recalled. “Britain will fall.”
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Since 2020, China has ramped up a campaign of intimidation, infiltration, harassment and violence against free speech activists operating in the UK. China experts warned that the programme is a part of a global project to stamp out dissent. “It’s widespread,” Laura Harth, the China director at human rights NGO Safeguard Defenders, said. “The aim is to try and control the entire overseas Chinese community.”
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More than a dozen UK-based dissidents [...] say they have been the victims of so-called transnational repression. They include a former elected politician, an exiled lawmaker, several student activists and journalists, a trade union organiser, a policy researcher, two artists, a musician and a young asylum seeker rebuilding his life.
Almost all the dissidents said they believed that repression in the UK has increased sharply in the last few years.
“If you said to the Hong Kong community 10 years ago: ‘Are you being repressed?’, the answer would have been no,” said Labour MP Alex Sobel, the joint author of a cross-party report on transnational repression. “That is completely different now.”
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Hong Kong claims its economic and trade offices promote commerce but dissidents believe the Communist party also uses them as a base to track dissidents. In addition to its outpost in London, Hong Kong maintains HKETOs in New York City, San Francisco and Washington DC.
Anna Kwok, of the Washington-based Hong Kong Democracy Council, warned that Beijing can use these diplomatic outposts to carry out transnational repression in the US. In 2024 a bipartisan bill passed giving the president authority to shut the HKETOs down.
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Many activists who fled to the UK have continued to criticise China’s communist leadership, leaving them open to ongoing targeting. A recent parliamentary report, co-written by Sobel, concluded that China runs “the most comprehensive transnational repression campaign of any foreign state operating in the UK”.
Hong Kong Watch, a UK NGO, shared a survey of 1,000 Hong Kongers exclusively with The Observer. The survey found that almost one-fifth had experienced some form of transnational repression, such as being photographed at protests or seeing sensitive information about them published online.
“China doesn’t need to [assassinate people],” Laura Harth said. “That activity creates international backlash, and the cost is much higher. You can achieve your objectives by grey-zone tactics that evade the scrutiny of local authorities.”
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Finn Lau, the activist who was beaten up, said there were “more and more concerns that the Hong Kong community could be sacrificed in exchange for economic benefits”.
The government has said that its policy on China is to “cooperate where we can, compete where we need to and challenge where we must”. It has said intelligence agencies had concluded that threats stemming from the planned embassy were being “appropriately managed”.
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Chloe Cheung, the young Hong Kong activist, was followed by two men who appeared to be of Chinese origin as she left a 2024 [protest] event in London. She reported the incident to the Met but received no response. On Christmas Eve 2024, Cheung, who had just finished her A-levels, had a bounty placed on her head by Chinese authorities: a £94,000 reward for anyone who could assist in her arrest and capture.
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Another female dissident was offered a fake doorbell camera after her family was sent letters threatening that she would be raped if she didn’t stop her advocacy work.
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