The mood was defiant as London’s anti-CCP coalition gathered at Royal Mint Court on Saturday 15 March, but there was also an unmistakeable tension. Protesters were meeting for a second time at the site of China’s planned super-embassy, and the demonstration was taking place in the most surreal, chaotic, and alarming of geopolitical contexts. The police vans that packed the surrounding streets drew uneasy glances—ostensibly a security measure, they also represent the executive arm of a state that may no longer be friendly to the opponents of totalitarianism.

How Hong Kong’s Struggle Came to Britain

Conflict is brewing between Hongkongers who have made the UK their home and a Communist Party that wants to make the UK its vassal.

QuilletteAaron Sarin

What government can now be trusted? For Hongkongers, the United Kingdom has long served as both refuge and inspiration. On Saturday, I saw protesters proudly waving the old colonial flag, the “Dragon and Lion.” Lately, however, their sanctuary is looking unsafe. In return for a paltry £600 million in agreements over the next five years, the UK government has green-lit the construction of a giant Chinese embassy: an explicit statement of CCP power in the heart of London’s financial district. For all the rage and the 4,000-strong protests, there is no indication that Whitehall intends to rethink its position.

China’s mission will include a large basement complete with security airlock, as well as two suites of additional unlabelled basement rooms and a tunnel (this information was provided to the planning inquiry by Oliver Ulmer, director of David Chipperfield Architects, before being “redacted for security reasons”). That subterranean zone will almost certainly be used for intelligence work, but there is another, darker prospect: the kidnap and torture of anti-CCP dissidents. Two years ago, a Hong Kong protester was dragged into the Chinese consulate in Manchester and beaten by staff members. In the coming years, a more confident CCP may go much further than this.

London teems with Hongkongers, Tibetans, Southern Mongolians, and Uyghurs—manifold clans that the Party simply groups together as one, considering them state property and calling them huaqiao (Chinese citizens living overseas) or huaren (ethnic Chinese with foreign citizenship). Many of these people despise the CCP. Once the embassy is a reality, they will surely keep gathering outside its walls to make their voices heard. Some could be snatched in the chaos of protests; more likely, for the purpose of deniability, they would be surveilled at first and then taken from other parts of the city at a later point. Then they could be driven straight through the mission gates before being taken underground for “interrogation.” It was once a Black Death burial site down there: somewhat fittingly, it will now become the de facto territory of a state with medieval notions of justice. (While an embassy is not officially sovereign territory, Article 22 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations states, “The premises of the mission shall be inviolable.”)

So far, the British authorities have tolerated the Royal Mint protests. But there are signs that patience is running out. On the eve of the second demonstration, the Metropolitan Police abruptly announced that they would arrest anyone gathering in front of Royal Mint Court. Protesters were instructed to file round the side of the estate instead. Why? Because “the assembly may result in serious disruption to the life of the community.” The Met seemed to have forgotten its own assessment of the site’s safety for large-scale protests (meaning approximately 4,500 people) back in January. With that assessment and the subsequent withdrawal of Met opposition, Beijing’s final obstacle had been overcome, and the mission approved. Now the police were reversing their position yet again.

It would hardly be cynical to suspect that January’s decision was dishonest, and that Scotland Yard had actually been following orders to find a reason—any reason—to get that embassy approved. We can guess where such orders might have originated. Luckily, last-minute negotiations between the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) and the Met resulted in a compromise. The protest did indeed take place in front of Royal Mint Court as before, although protesters were not permitted to flood into the road this time. As the numbers swelled into their thousands, police began blocking any further Asian-looking people from crossing the road to Royal Mint Court—an amusing glimpse of the knots into which London’s piously “woke” and “anti-racist” constabulary will have to tie itself.

Who will break first? The British government is unlikely to abandon the embassy plan (at least not unless or until their hand is forced by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which our best estimates suggest is coming in 2027.) The UK economy, previously stagnant, finally began shrinking in January. Chinese investment is desperately needed. And so, as the protests continue, requiring hundreds of police officers on each occasion—the same huge disruption and expense, month after month—the British authorities may become increasingly authoritarian.

For Hongkongers, however, too much is at stake: nothing will make them stop. Recall the 2019–20 protests in Hong Kong. Police officers there were filmed rugby-tackling schoolchildren, stamping on protesters’ heads as they lay on the ground, and rushing like madmen onto train carriages to beat unarmed civilians. They were filmed on motorcycles repeatedly attempting to mow down pedestrians. Footage exists of officers pinning a screaming female protester to the floor and forcing her legs open. Women were forced to submit to naked body searches in front of gangs of policemen, and one teenager claimed to have been subjected to a gang-rape in Tsuen Wan police station, resulting in a pregnancy, which she terminated. None of this put a stop to the protests—only a global pandemic managed that.

The British authorities can make life difficult for protesters in other ways. Last summer, the Labour government paused the Conservative Party’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, before eventually deciding to revive it six months later. The Act requires universities to protect those students who are routinely targeted and harassed by Beijing (Hongkongers, Chinese dissidents, etc). Universities lobbied against it, fearful that it would diminish the flow of Chinese money to which they have grown accustomed. They even called the Act a “Tory hate speech charter.” Labour caved to them once: it is not difficult to imagine another capitulation.

Old liberal ideals still hold strong in English society, of course, and the proponents of these ideals will continue to push back against the groping, creeping rise of authoritarianism. George Orwell once observed that the English middle classes swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism. He had a point, but he overstated his case. This country is not China. But recent history suggests those worthy old ideals are likely to retreat and advance, retreat and advance—a schizophrenic back-and-forth that will prove periodically disastrous for those who oppose the CCP.

Trump and the DEI Counter-Revolution

Civil-rights law made the DEI world; civil-rights reform can unmake it.

QuilletteThomas F. Powers

Across the Atlantic, things are no better. The new Trump/Musk imperium has done valuable work combating antisemitism and DEI, but its scorched-earth approach to government spending has also removed voices like Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Voice Of America (VoA), via the closure of the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM). Those outlets acted as a counter-narrative to the CCP’s propaganda. RFA, for instance, provided vital reportage on the twin dystopias of Tibet and Xinjiang. Its disappearance will only have the effect of amplifying the agitprop. As political scientist Michael McFaul points out: “This is absolutely crazy. It is unilateral disarmament. China won’t be closing CGTN. Russia won’t be closing RT. The theocrats in Iran and their proxies in the Middle East won’t be closing down their media operations.”

Washington risks not only silencing itself, but also blinding itself. The day before Trump’s executive order terminating the USAGM grants, RFA reported that Beijing had begun testing its unique narwhal-tusked “invasion barges” for amphibious landing exercises—potentially a rehearsal for Taiwan. In this perilous historical moment, as we sail closer to global conflict, we hardly want to be reducing our sources of information on the aggressor’s behaviour. 

Trump 2.0’s storm of activity has made American intentions difficult to read. Journalist Noah Smith offers us two possible interpretations, neither of which is reassuring. First there is the “Reverse Kissinger” view, which sounds like a wrestling move but actually describes an attempt to follow Henry Kissinger’s precedent by splitting Moscow from Beijing. This time, the American rapprochement would take place with Moscow, not Beijing. While it’s certainly true that the CCP is the bigger threat and should therefore be Washington’s priority, and it’s also true that tensions exist concerning Russian land that once belonged to a Chinese dynasty, no Sino-Russian split is likely. The reasons are both economic and ideological. Putin’s regime is far too dependent on Beijing now, and far too invested in combating the Western liberal order. If a Reverse Kissinger is underway, it won’t succeed.

Trouble in Outer Manchuria

As Moscow’s dependence on Beijing grows, the CCP has set its sights on the Russian Far East.

QuilletteAaron Sarin

Noah Smith’s second theory of the Trump administration is the “Metternich-Lindbergh” view, which suggests that Trump is following the lead of two further historical figures: 20th-century American military officer Charles Lindbergh, and 19th-century Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich. The former espoused a form of US isolationism, while the latter presided over the Concert of Europe: a pan-European conservative response to the French Revolution.

According to this theory, Western progressivism is the new French Revolution, along with Moscow’s and Hong Kong’s popular uprisings of the late 2010s. MAGA seeks to respond with a global version of the Concert of Europe—a triple alliance with Russia and China. The three great powers would keep to their spheres of influence. They would avoid major conflict and focus on the crushing of internal dissent. As J.D. Vance told the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, the threat he worries about “is not Russia, it’s not China … [it] is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” A serious threat indeed, but we can tackle more than one problem at a time. There is no excuse for neglecting the greatest menace to human freedom since the Soviets.

We may be witnessing a geopolitical twist expected by no one, least of all this writer, in which Western powers move collectively closer to the Chinese Communist Party despite their own growing divisions, at precisely the moment that the Communist Party itself is in terminal decline. The reasons have to do with pragmatic realpolitik, but also with naivety—a misunderstanding of the very nature of the CCP. Western political scientists argue in the prestigious pages of Foreign Affairs that China’s diplomats are not fundamentally different from those of other countries. Britain’s slow-witted prime minister expresses his hope of having “honest talks” with the serial liar Xi Jinping. And even after everything that has happened over the past few years—all the exhausting lessons, all the bitter experience—European politicians are calling for increased collaboration between Brussels and Beijing.

The Nature of the Beast

Too many Western politicians continue to delude themselves about the character of Beijing’s regime.

QuilletteAaron Sarin

This new dynamic opens up the possibility that Beijing’s decline, while irreversible, might be slowed. Wolf warrior diplomat Lu Shaye (a man who once spoke breezily of the “re-education” of the conquered Taiwanese) is already seeking to encourage the divisions for Chinese benefit:

When you look at how the Trump administration has implemented a brazen and domineering policy towards Europe, treating its allies in this way, honestly, from a European perspective, it’s quite appalling. I believe European friends should reflect on this and compare the Trump administration’s policies with those of the Chinese government. In doing so, they will see that China’s diplomatic approach emphasises peace, friendship, goodwill, and win-win cooperation.

That would be win-win cooperation with Chinese characteristics, of course. And the queasy addendum “with Chinese characteristics” tends to have the effect of negating whichever words came immediately before it. For those of us paying attention, a new Policy Exchange study offers a glimpse of the true fruits of such cooperation. The study’s authors find that a Taiwan invasion would cause Britain to tip into full recession, before actually shutting down over several months. The UK is resource-poor and therefore reliant on food, energy, and manufacturing imports. British supply chains and major domestic producers are hopelessly entangled with Chinese state-owned enterprises. The NHS relies on Chinese technology. UK tech companies depend on Chinese cyber resilience support. In the event of a war, the paper suggests, “British companies … could find themselves functionally held hostage to the Chinese state.”

The UK government already behaves on occasion like a hostage, as critics of Beijing are discovering. Recent years have seen the activation of a sprawling multi-ethnic alliance in cities across the globe; an as-yet unnamed movement that defines itself in relation to its shared enemy—the Chinese Communist Party. The London branch came out in force at Royal Mint Court on 15 March. Its number includes Hongkongers like Chloe Cheung and Carmen Lau, who live in Britain with HK$1 million bounties hanging over them, due to their activism. No police protection has been offered; the farcically inept Met just sent across some emails about self-protection. Considering the wider context, we might consider those emails darkly appropriate. Chloe and Carmen are just two of the more visible faces of a community in danger of losing its protectors.