‘Project Kowtow’ – Communist China Should Be Banned from Queen’s Funeral, Parliamentarians Demand

LONDON, ENGLAND - OCTOBER 20: Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Britain's Queen Elizabet
Dominic Lipinski - WPA Pool /Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and other communist officials should not be able to attend the funeral for the late Queen Elizabeth II, a group of MPs and human rights campaigners have demanded.

The former leader of the Conservative Party, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, alongside Tom Tugendhat, Nus Ghani, and Tim Loughton, all of whom were sanctioned by the Chinese state and barred from entering the country last year over their leading role in condemning the oppression of Uygur Muslims in Xinjiang, have all condemned the idea of President Xi Jinping being invited to the funeral at Westminster Abbey on Monday.

Sir Iain told POLITICO that it was “astonishing” that representatives of the murderous regime would be invited to the funeral and that it was “Project Kowtow all over again.”

Speaking to Breitbart London, Benedict Rogers, founder of Hong Kong Watch and the author of the upcoming book The China Nexus,  said: “Given that Myanmar, Belarus, and Russia have, absolutely rightly, been banned, it is absurd to invite China, which is alongside them as one of the worst violators of human rights in the world and which poses perhaps the biggest threat to our freedoms around the world.”

Mr Rogers highlighted his own history of squaring off with Beijing, noting that the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission, of which he serves as deputy chairman, was one of the entities alongside the MPs to be sanctioned by China.

Mr Rogers was also threatened with a jail sentence by the Hong Kong Police under the Beijing-imposed National Security Law, as well as being barred from the former British colony in 2017 for his activism on behalf of Hong Kong’s people.

“As someone who has spent countless hours hearing first-hand the testimonies from the survivors of the Uyghur genocide, atrocities in Tibet, the persecution of Christians, forced organ harvesting, the threats to Taiwan, the crackdown on civil society and dissent in China itself, and the total dismantling of Hong Kong’s freedoms, and as someone who has friends in jail in Hong Kong today, I do not want to see Xi Jinping or any representative of his brutal, criminal, inhumane regime present at the funeral of my Queen.”

Mr Rogers said that Queen Elizabeth II embodied “all the values that are the antithesis of the Chinese regime: human dignity, freedom, wisdom, compassion, and public service.”

“The invitation should be fully, completely withdrawn,” he concluded.

All world leaders who represent countries with diplomatic ties with the United Kingdom have been invited to attend the funeral, even the despotic North Korean regime. However, three countries, Russia, Belarus, and the military junta-led government in Burma (Myanmar) have not been invited to attend.

It is unclear if Xi Jinping will attend the funeral personally, having only just taken his first overseas trip since the start of the Chinese coronavirus crisis last week. The vice president of the communist regime in Beijing, Wang Qishan is thought to be likely to travel to London in his stead.

Though it appears that the Chinese delegation will be welcomed at the funeral in Westminster Abbey, the Speaker of the House of Commmons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, has reportedly banned Chinese officials from entering the Palace of Westminster — the home of the British parliament — while the Queen lies in state, according to The Telegraph.

In September of last year, Sir Lindsay took the bold step to ban Chinese ambassador Zheng Zeguang from entering the parliamentary estate after his invitation caused an uproar among the MPs who were sanctioned by Beijing.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

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