Australian academic Clive Hamilton was moved to write his expose, Silent Invasion, after witnessing violent attacks on pro-Tibet demonstrators in Canberra, in the lead-up to the 2000 Olympics. In the forecourt of Parliament House, the seat of Australian democracy, an aggressive and violent cohort of Chinese students threatened and attacked “the Tibetans and any Anglos like myself who had gone to support them”.
The shock of that encounter led Hamilton to investigate and uncover a vast web of Chinese Communist Party psychological warfare against Australia and Australians. The tentacles of that war reached to the heart of Australian academia and politics. CCP goons not only demand – and get – changes to Australian university curricula, but closely monitor Chinese international students on campuses. Most recently, diaspora Chinese in Australia were ‘required’ by a CCP-linked ‘community organisation’ to campaign for Labor and Teal candidates.
No doubt some do out of genuine patriotic and ideological fervour for the Chinese Communist cause. Others, just as undoubtedly, do so because they know anything they do here can and will impact their families back home.
Around the world, diaspora Chinese have to live with the knowledge that their relatives back in China are fully at the mercy of Beijing and its secret police apparatus.
Chinese authorities have arrested relatives of a former Hong Kong politician who protested against the Communist regime’s new “mega-embassy” in London.
Carmen Lau, 30, fled her native Hong Kong five years ago and joined 3,000 others at a rally in February against plans to build the 5.5-acre complex near Tower Bridge.
Why are they protesting against a Chinese embassy in London? Because, like Soviet embassies during the Cold War, it will be in reality a station for spying and repression by a brutal communist dictatorship.
If approved, the new mega-embassy would be 10 times bigger than the current Chinese embassy and the country’s largest diplomatic mission in Europe.
The site, at the former Royal Mint Court in east London, would include offices, 225 homes and a “cultural exchange” building.
China bought the site for more than £255 million in 2018, but Tower Hamlets council rejected plans for the embassy in 2022.
But the national election last year changed the political landscape dramatically. British Labour is no less a CCP lickspittle than Labor in Australia.
Chinese officials did not appeal against the decision amid speculation that the Conservative government at the time would have backed the council’s decision. However, they resubmitted mostly unchanged plans just weeks after Labour won last year’s general election.
Plans which, ominously, contain a network of underground rooms, whose purpose is a strict secret. For ‘security reasons’, the nature of the rooms on the plans is redacted.
Ms Lau said she believes the new embassy would become a hub for “transnational repression” by China in London […]
She said: “These rooms could be used for interrogations and locking up people like us. They could be used to torture us.”
If that sounds far-fetched, it’s not. Lau’s neighbours in Berkshire received notes promising a bounty of more than £100,000 to anyone who could lure her to the current Chinese embassy in Marylebone in London.
If the CCP can’t get their hands on Lau, there’s nothing to stop them snatching her family back home.
Which is just what they’ve done.
Within 48 hours of Lau leading speeches at the protests against the ‘mega-embassy’, her elderly aunt and uncle in Hong Kong were arrested by secret police.
They were detained in morning raids on their homes and questioned for six hours before being released.
Ms Lau said her relatives were questioned about the links she still has to the former British colony. “They wanted to know about financial relationships I had with others in Hong Kong and were interested in my family tree – the other relatives I have in Hong Kong,” she told The Mail on Sunday.
Ms Lau believes police used the information they obtained to arrest another aunt a week later. She was also questioned for several hours. The activist claimed the harassment was an attempt by officials to stop her “anti-Chinese” activities in the UK.
Lau has been on a Chinese wanted list, along with five others, after she fled Hong Kong in 2021.
Ms Lau was previously deputy secretary-general of the Civic Party, Hong Kong’s second-largest pro-democracy party, before it was later forcibly dissolved. She was also a district councillor.
She resigned her councillor role in 2021, fled the former British colony and sought refuge in the UK after the Chinese authorities put her under surveillance.
Ms Lau claimed undercover police officers had been parking outside her apartment and following her, while also alleging she had been harassed by security personnel and state media.
British police are doing their usual bang-up job, of course. Lau was advised by the Metropolitan Police not to attend public gatherings, as she could be attacked.
During a speech at the event, the activist said allowing China to build the large diplomatic mission sent the “wrong message” that Britain welcomed authoritarian regimes.
Is it the wrong message, though, if it’s true?
