China’s communist party and the Tiger women now influencing the very heart of the Establishment
And one of whom gave £200k to a top Labour MP – who argued against his party’s opposition to a Chinese-funded nuclear plant in Britain
PROMINeNT BRITONS of Chinese heritage are very important in promoting China’s interests in the West. Christine Lee is a solicitor whose firm has offices in Beijing, hong Kong and Guangzhou, as well as London.
her links to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) go deep. She has been chief legal adviser to the Chinese embassy in London and a legal adviser to the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, an agency of the Communist Party’s vast network of influence overseen by its United Front Work Department.
These positions are unmistakable signs of her importance to the Party. Yet she is also the secretary of the Inter-Party China Group of the British parliament.
In 2006 she founded the British Chinese Project, whose stated aim is to ‘empower the UK Chinese community, making them aware of their democratic rights and responsibilities, whilst ensuring the needs and interests of the community are heard at a political level’. It sounds a very worthy multicultural enterprise
But its Chinese name has different echoes. It translates as ‘British Chinese Participation in Politics’, linking it to the huaren canzheng infiltration policy of the CCP to maximise political influence in democracies by promoting trusted people of Chinese heritage.
Lee’s involvement in British politics began during the prime ministership of Tony Blair, when she formed an alliance with Labour MP and minister Barry Gardiner, more recently Labour’s shadow international trade secretary.
her law firm donated more than £200,000 to the MP and his constituency party. In 2007, while a Blair government minister, Gardiner became the chair of her British Chinese Project and the two of them embarked on a programme of making friends in Westminster, boosted by Gardiner’s formation in 2011 of ‘ an all-party group to represent Chinese citizens in Britain’.
One of Lee’s children, Michael Wilkes, became its vice chairman while another son, Daniel, worked in Gardiner’s parliamentary office, with his salary paid by his mother’s firm.
The firm defended these political links: ‘Christine Lee & Co is proud of its record of public service and the support it has provided to the democratic process. We have never sought to influence any politician improperly or to seek any favours in return for the support that we have provided.’
Gardiner said her son had volunteered in his office before securing employment through an open appointment process and that he had never been ‘improperly requested by, or influenced by’ the firm in his political work.
TheMP has been a strong advocate of closer SinoBritish relations and investment in Britain by China’s sovereign wealth fund. he backed the construction of a nuclear power station at hinkley Point by a state- owned Chinese corporation, which Theresa May’s government put on hold due to concerns about national security.
he is also reported as having strongly opposed internal party criticism of Chinese involvement in the hinkley Point project.
Lee appears to have developed a good relationship with David Cameron while he was prime minister.
In January last year, she received a Points of Light Award from Prime
Minister May, in recognition of her contribution to good relations with China.
A photo of Lee in front of 10 Downing Street shows the iconic door draped with red banners displaying New Year couplets in Chinese characters and announcing the ‘Golden era’ of Sino- British relations. The symbolism is blunt and powerful: Lee at the heart of Britain’s government, being embraced by it.
Another prominent influencer on China matters is Li Xuelin, who arrived in Britain in 1989 and quickly become an enthusiastic campaigner for the Conservative Party and David Cameron in particular, meeting him on many occasions. By 2015 Cameron began speaking of ‘a Golden era’ in the Sino-British relationship.
In 2009 she was the founding president of the Zhejiang UK Association, for people living in the UK who come from the coastal province of Zhejiang in eastern China.
Between 2010 and 2014 she was vice president of the council of the Zhejiang Overseas exchange Association. It later merged with the United Front Work Department, an agency of the CCP tasked with liaising with all forces outside the party, such as recognised religious organisations and other interest groups. It’s also tasked with guiding the 50-60 million people of Chinese heritage abroad.
In one of the clearest signs of the CCP’s faith in her, Li Xuelin was executive vice-president of the UK Chinese Association for the Promotion of National Reunification, the British chapter of the Beijing body which promotes the CCP’s position on Taiwan.
In 2011 she met and married the Conservative peer and sometime minister of state Michael Bates. Bates had been a friend of China for some years, so much so that when Xi addressed the British parliament during his 2015 state visit he singled out Bates for praise.
Bates was present at Xi’s meeting with the elite of the CCP’s British friends, along with a number of prominent faces from the 48 Group Club, of which Bates is a fellow.
In 2019 Bates gave a talk in which he professed his love for China and the amazing achievements of its government, reeling off a string of statistics and telling his audience that China only wants peace.
In 2014 Xuelin Bates was caught up in a property scandal involving Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, with whom she had developed a friendship. She suggested the Royal Albert Dock as a development site to a Chinese company, Advanced Business Park, described as China’s largest property investment in the UK.
It was claimed that Johnson gave preferment to ABP because of Bates’s donations to the Conservative Party — £162,000 between 2010 and 2012. Lady Bates said the money had not come from ABP but from her own pocket.
Xuelin Bates paid £50,000 a year to join the Leader’s Group, set up by David Cameron for top donors to the Conservatives. Members have special access to senior politicians.
In May 2014, at a Conservative Party luncheon, Xuelin Bates introduced her Chinese guests one by one to Cameron, in order, it was said, to lay a foundation for future Sino-British cooperation.
In 2017 she campaigned with her husband for Theresa May in the general election, sitting next to the prime minister as May phoned voters. Lady Bates was again rubbing shoulders with the prime minister at a Two Cities Luncheon in 2018. In 2019 Lord and Lady Bates campaigned enthusiastically for Boris
Johnson. In 2019 she helped organise the UK-China ‘Golden Era’ New Year Dinner in the Houses of Parliament, where British politicians, Chinese diplomats and businessmen mingled. At a charity auction, a piece of paper-cut art by Theresa May was bought by Beijing businessman Yao Yichun for £2,200.
The prime minister was reportedly very pleased and thanked Yao for his generosity. Two years earlier, Yao Yichun had donated £12,000 to a charity event hosted by Lady Bates.
ANDon the same day Christine Lee was draping the door of 10 Downing Street with Chinese banners, Xuelin Bates and three other figures linked to CCP agencies were decorating No 10 for a celebration of Chinese New Year with Theresa May.
Christine Lee and Xuelin Bates had both succeeded in positioning themselves close to Britain’s top elites, where they could spread a ‘Chinese perspective’.
As for Lord Bates, he has undertaken several ‘Walks of Friendship’ through China. A month- long hike around Zhejiang province was co- organised by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and the Walk for Peace Foundation (chaired by Lady Bates).
A soft- soap documentary was made of his walk by a subsidiary of the China Foreign Language Bureau, part of the CCP’s external propaganda machine.
Whether seen as pathetic or sinister, Michael Bates’s activities are ideal for the CCP tactic of ‘use the foreigner to tell good China stories’. Interviewed by the People’s Daily in 2019, he once again gushed about modern China, stressing how much it has contributed to world peace and prosperity.
In China’s Communist Party, it is the International Liaison Department (ILD) that is tasked with forging links with foreign NGOs and other political groups and promoting the Belt and Road Initiative.
One of the more loyal friends of the ILD is Peter Mandelson, former senior cabinet member in the Blair government and honorary president of the Great Britain- China Centre. In May 2019 Mandelson was reported as saying relations with China are very important to Britain, which ‘hopes to actively participate in the building of the Belt and Road Initiative’.
In words that read as if composed by a Party propagandist, he added: ‘The UK is ready to continue to work with China to conduct the UK- China dialogue between political parties, strengthen exchanges between political parties of the two countries and promote the building of a “Golden Era” of UK-China relations.’
A month later, Mandelson was writing in a newspaper that the US had launched a trade war against China to quash a rival, and that Britain should not take sides. The tenor of his article is that there is no downside to the CCP, and Britain should welcome China’s rise.
What this overlooks is the stark reality that the Chinese Communist Party is exploiting the weaknesses of democratic systems in order to undermine them.
Democracies urgently need to become more resilient if they are to survive.
The threat posed by the CCP affects the right of all to live without fear. Many Chinese people living in the West, along with Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong practitioners and Hong Kong democracy activists, are at the forefront of the CCP’s repression and live in a constant state of fear. Governments, academic institutions and business executives are afraid of financial retaliation should they incur Beijing’s wrath. This fear is contagious and toxic. It must not be normalised as the price for prosperity.
Democracy itself is assailed when CCP- linked organisations and Party proxies corrupt political representatives, and when Beijing co-opts powerful business lobbies to do its work.
AdApted from Hidden Hand: exposing How the Chinese Communist party Is Reshaping the World by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, to be published by Oneworld on July 16 at £20. © 2020 Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg