This blog is authored by Stephen Vines, a journalist, author, and member of the Advisory Board of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong (CFHK) Foundation.
It’s not every day that anyone wants to thank Prince Andrew, or indeed his Chinese handler Yang Tengbo. But thanks are in order because they have finally made people aware of China’s extensive efforts to meddle in British affairs.
What this farrago also emphasizes is Britain’s consistently supine and willingly blind approach to relations with the world’s largest dictatorship.
The evidence was there for all to see but despite consistent efforts by people such as Chris Patten, the last Governor of Hong Kong and Ian Duncan Smith, the former Tory party leader, the insidious and seemingly unstoppable efforts by Beijing to infiltrate British institutions, silence criticism and bulldoze Britain into various forms of supplication has largely been ignored.
Now that the King’s brother has become a prominent part of the story a great many people are paying attention.
Mr Yang, a rather insipid looking functionary working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party’s hitherto shady United Front Work Department, targeted the Prince and thus brought its other activities into focus.
The United Front operation, a Leninist creation, works around the fringes of the Party to vastly expand its influence by ensnaring hapless idiots like Prince Andrew to enhance the respectability of a ruthless dictatorship by luring outsiders to directly or indirectly promote its interests.
In Britain, as elsewhere, United Front operations target people in influential positions to become apologists for the regime. Some do so knowingly, others cynically in pursuit of financial reward and in some cases, the truly deluded, have been persuaded that China is basically a good thing despite a few ‘minor’ embarrassments, including a genocidal campaign in Xinjiang, blatant flaunting of international treaties, such as that signed with Britain to facilitate the takeover of Hong Kong and the death of literally millions of Chinese citizens brought about by starvation and thuggery.
Some of China’s apologists are more influential than others. Big companies, notably HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank, which make serious money in Hong Kong, devote a great deal of time to restraining Britain from taking any action which might hamper relations. In the former British colony they have acted to dissuade Hong Kong immigration to Britain by denying the incomers access to their pensions. Meanwhile they have been signing declarations of support for the odious National Security Law which has snuffed out Hong Kong’s last remnants of liberty.
Elsewhere Britain allows the Confucious Institutes, an influential weapon of the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department, to operate unhindered on British university campuses throughout the land.
Academics, politicians, journalists and other opinion formers are the recipients of generous free trips to China and subsequently showered with generous rewards, either personal or corporate.
Then there is the extraordinary boldness of Chinese diplomats who beat up protestors outside the Manchester consulate confident that they would get away with it. Right now operatives from China’s Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office are on trial for their surveillance activities in Britain involving break-ins etc.
Chinese state security officials even established secret ‘police stations’ in Britain in part to keep an eye on dissidents living here. They are supposed to have been dismantled but when I asked Catherine West, the minister responsible for Asia-Pacific affairs, whether this had been done, she could not supply an answer.
During the absurd ‘Golden Era’ of relations with China initiated by Prime Minister Cameron Chinese firms were invited to acquire significant parts of Britain’s infrastructure. Government ministries even used Chinese made surveillance equipment for ‘security’ purposes.
This would all be quite bad enough but the way that government ministers simply suck up humiliation when engaging with their Chinese counterparts is truly embarrassing. When Foreign Secretary David Lammy, recently made an ice-breaking visit to Beijing, China made a point of using the occasion to launch wide ranging saber-rattling military exercises over Taiwan.
Prime Minister Stammer claims to be working for the release of British citizen Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong media mogul behind bars, probably for life, yet meekly accepts the refusal of the local authorities to grant elementary consular access.
It is now being reported that Britain’s so called audit of relations with China is being watered down and delayed, not least because of pressure from British business corporations.
Sir Keir claims that Britain is pursuing a policy of three Cs in relation to China – challenge, compete and cooperate. The cooperation part of the policy is clear, as for the rest…
What is equally clear is that China is very good at bullying and that somehow the British government thinks the best response is to cower.
This blog was originally published on Substack here.
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