How Hong Kong’s Struggle Came to Britain

London isn’t much like Hong Kong. The cold grey drizzle, the cobbled alleys, the colour-palette ethnic makeup—no one could confuse it with the typhoons and wet markets and densely packed skyscrapers of Asia’s Vertical City. But on the afternoon of Saturday 8 February, the London borough of Tower Hamlets witnessed scenes that certainly evoked Tsim Sha Tsui in the sweltering summer of 2019. Hundreds of Hongkongers crammed the streets outside the old Royal Mint, blocking a police van that was attempting to transport two of their fellow protesters to the nearest police station. A phalanx of officers faced off against the protesters, roaring at them to “Get back!” The crowd chanted: “Release! Release!” Perhaps inevitably, a lone voice could be heard shouting at the police: “Are you working for the CCP?”

I had turned up knowing that drama was likely, just because of the sheer numbers expected. Estimates suggest there were 4,000 in attendance; when I asked a policeman for his guess, he reckoned 5,000. I saw flags proclaiming China’s various and ever-growing national independence movements—East Turkestan, Tibet, Southern Mongolia, “Cantonia” (the latter a new one to me: it appears that those particular separatists represent the southern province of Guangdong). But one group was dominant. Everywhere I looked, I saw the Black Bauhinia: pro-democracy protesters’ striking piratical variant on the flag of Hong Kong.

The protest had been organised because the Chinese Communist Party plans to build a national embassy at Royal Mint Court, giving rise to concerns about espionage and the illegal detention of dissenters. There is also concern over the practicality of the site. “In the event that more than a relatively small number of protesters attend the location,” warned Chief Inspector David Hodges back in December, “they will highly likely spill into the road … a major arterial junction … [with] over 50,000 vehicle movements per day.”

Saturday’s gathering aimed to prove Hodges correct. The goal was disruption. By any standard, the day was a success: even as I arrived, the safety barriers were already being dismantled and the protest area expanded. Crowds spilled out into the road and onto traffic islands; hundreds of police officers were deployed. Multiple roads in the surrounding area were blocked for most of the afternoon.

We heard the usual speeches from the usual China-sceptic politicians: Iain Duncan-Smith, Tom Tugendhat, etc. Just as I was beginning to grow cold and tired, I heard a siren out on the edges of the crowd, so I made my way in that direction, wondering if CCP thugs were attacking. A (British) cameraman cannoned into me, almost knocking me to the ground in his eagerness to get to the action. Some young Hongkongers were roaring in angry Cantonese, and I asked one of them what had happened. He explained that two people had been arrested. He was visibly shaking with adrenaline. I felt how the ghosts of 2019 had risen for people like him—always hovering just on the edge of consciousness, now they were back.

It appeared that one protester had refused to move when ordered to do so, and so she had been dragged from the crowd into the police van. Separately, there was a medical emergency: I saw a body lying in the street. But once this person had been removed, protesters spilled into the road. And so, the two sides faced each other, shouting and screaming, neither giving ground for quite some time, until finally the van began reversing.

Over at the Royal Mint, the assorted speakers had caught wind of what was happening, and the day’s final speech was delivered in the pitch of hysteria. “Police, we are cooperating with you!” the man roared. “But remember: we will be back! Every day! Every day!” As the protest ended and people began dispersing, I saw a Hongkonger shouting at some police who were hurrying him as he crossed a road, and when he turned back to confront them angrily, they handcuffed him. Then they were bundling him over the road and right up to the wall on which I was leaning—about ten officers, absurd overkill—and reading him his caution. Within minutes the man was out of handcuffs and delivering an interview in rapid-fire Cantonese to reporters from Radio Free Asia.

The clash was inevitable. An entire generation has been traumatised by the violence of the Hong Kong police-triad alliance, operating on the orders of the Communist Party. This generation is now primed for conflict with the authorities. Hongkongers expect police abuse as a matter of course; they expect tear gas, rubber bullets, torture, and disappearances. The dim-witted Metropolitan Police force, meanwhile, has absolutely no idea what it is facing, or how it might be perceived as representing the long arm of Hongkongers’ greatest enemy.

A war is coming to Britain’s streets—a war that pits those Hongkongers who have made the UK their home against a Communist Party that wants to make the UK its vassal. This war has nothing to do with the Woke/DEI propaganda that seems to constitute modern police training (if either of these new combatants were to shout “Racist!,” the police really would be in a position of some difficulty.) Things are about to get a lot more complicated, and Britain is not ready.

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We can see the UK authorities’ vacillation over this embassy as a microcosm of their vacillation over China as a whole. They have swayed back and forth over the years. Beijing first purchased the Royal Mint site for £225 million in 2018, hoping to build a diplomatic mission that would cover 700,000 square feet (65,000 square metres) dwarfing the Washington equivalent. But by 2022, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had declared an end to the “Golden Age” of Sino-British relations.

It turned out there were many good reasons to deny the CCP its mega-complex, from the prosaic to the geopolitical. We could zoom in and consider the safety of potential protesters crammed between the front gates and a busy junction; we could zoom out and worry about the wider safety of the nation should the embassy be used (as it assuredly would be) for espionage. For these reasons and more, Tower Hamlets council voted to reject planning permission for the embassy. The CCP made no appeal at the time, knowing that a more pliant government was just around the corner.

Perhaps Beijing also guessed which way the economic winds were blowing. Today, the British economy has effectively stalled. Annual real wages are 6.9 percent lower for the average worker than they were in 2008. In the 1990s, the national debt was just over twenty percent of GDP; today, it is 99.4 percent; over the next fifty years, it will triple to 270 percent. If we discount London, the UK is now as poor per capita GDP as the state of Mississippi. “Britain,” concludes economic historian Niall Ferguson, “is on its way from being a key US ally to being a geopolitical nonentity.”

And so, on a cold morning in mid-January, UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves flew to Beijing, accompanied by top executives from British banks. (In a break with tradition, journalists were not invited.) There, she met the CCP’s vice premier, and they effectively restarted the two nations’ frosted economic relationship. Reeves returned with a triumphant assurance: £600 million worth of agreements and up to £1 billion of value for the UK economy.

We can be reasonably confident that the embassy came up in her discussions with the vice premier. Beijing had actually resubmitted its proposal as soon as Labour regained power in the summer, and following Reeves’ visit in January, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner called in the scheme. This gave the British government the final say on approving construction—not a promising development.

Sure enough, the Metropolitan Police dropped its opposition to the embassy, having suddenly felt an inexplicable urge to re-examine a forgotten research paper from 2022. This paper had used alternate modelling methodology to assess the potential safety of protests. Having previously stated that the site could fit just a hundred protesters, the Met decided that, on second thoughts, the number was more like 4,500, just as the paper had concluded. (The research had been commissioned and funded by—who else?—the Chinese Communist Party.) It turned out that all potential for disruption and tragedy could be waved away in an instant at Beijing’s say-so.

Britain will pay for such naivety. Think back to the mid-2010s Golden Age: in reality, it was nothing of the kind. Promised trade centres never materialised. Hotel conversions proved too costly. Multimillion-pound deals were loudly proclaimed before quietly fizzling out. As early as 2018, one Sheffield councillor was describing deals with China as “candyfloss … it is spun into something substantial and alluring but the moment you touch it, it starts to disintegrate.” Are we to trust that the candyfloss has become rock-solid, today, in this new age of Chinese economic trouble?

No—the embassy is a tactical move. From Beijing’s perspective, the world is now deep into a Second Cold War. Chinese espionage in the United Kingdom has reached an “epic scale” in recent years, according to no less an authority than the head of MI5. Whether they’re cultivating British royals or surveilling and burglarising Hong Kong migrants, CCP spies plague these isles.

Here is the context in which the British government has made the extraordinary decision to approve the construction of a giant spy hub, strategically situated near sensitive City of London communication lines and fibre-optic cables critical to Britain’s internet network. (As recent Taiwanese and Baltic cases have shown, cable sabotage is a key component of the CCP’s hybrid warfare.) In the light of this madness, Washington may well be reassessing the UK’s reliability as an intelligence partner, according to a former senior intelligence analyst with the CIA.

Shutting its ears to intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic, the British government has chosen not to include China in the enhanced tier of the new Foreign Influence Registration Scheme. States like Russia and Iran will occupy the higher tier, requiring UK-based individuals to provide more detailed disclosures about their obligations, but the China risk has been downgraded in the face of Britain’s desperate new economic dependency. The UK’s hapless Foreign Secretary David Lammy calls all of this “progressive realism.” As Orwellian euphemisms go, that ranks alongside “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

The Communist Party calls for world peace; meanwhile it builds barges equipped with 120-metre road-bridges for which the most obvious purpose is the transport of large vehicles (like tanks) across beaches—a likely preparation for an invasion of Taiwan. Beijing gives every indication that it expects apocalyptic war in the near future. On the outskirts of the capital, a command centre more than fifty times the size of the Pentagon (1,500 acres) is now under construction, replete with nuclear bunkers for military leaders. Even leaving aside all moral considerations and adopting a purely pragmatic approach, this is not a partner that we want.

For a British citizen, or at least for this one, there is a growing sense of unease; a sense of living on enemy territory. Those who govern the country are attempting to bend one knee to medieval Islamism (“Islamophobia” is a constant obsession; blasphemy is an arrestable offence), while bending the other to Beijing’s techno-totalitarian post-Marxism. Britain is prostrating itself before all the wrong gods.

I see incompetence rather than malevolence (the application of Hanlon’s Razor). There has simply been a failure at the highest level to understand the nature of the conflict. Hongkongers gratefully accepted the British National Overseas (BNO) visa route and its promise of an escape from the CCP; they hardly expected the British authorities to leave the door open and welcome their persecutor in behind them.

Shortly after Saturday’s stand-off with the police van had petered out, we heard the wailing of an ambulance. The same crowd that had refused to give an inch to the van parted instantly like the Red Sea, opening up ample space for the ambulance to make its way through. If these protests become more frequent, there will doubtless be an attempt at defamation by the Chinese media and its various representatives—the lackeys, tankies, and bondmen—in the UK. They will try to paint the Hong Kong protesters as a wild rabble. Don’t believe a word of it. I saw great anger, but also discipline, organisation, integrity, and compassion.