UK Lawmakers and Their Families Targeted in Communist Chinese Intimidation Campaign

LONDON, ENGLAND - JUNE 12: MP Iain Duncan Smith speaks at a rally for Hong Kong democracy
Laurel Chor/Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

British parliamentarians who have been critical of Communist China have claimed that they and their families have been targeted by the regime in Beijing as a part of an intimidation campaign.

A group of  Tory MPs have revealed that they and their families have been subject to harassment, intimidation, and tracking by Xi Jinping’s apparatchiks over their criticisms of the Chinese state’s genocidal actions against ethnic minorities in occupied regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang and the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in the former British colony of Hong Kong.

Speaking to The Telegraph newspaper, one unnamed Conservative claimed that her child’s application to a university was put in jeopardy after the school received pressure from Chinese donors, who threatened to pull their funding should the MP’s child be admitted. Another MP also claimed that their child was barred from travelling on a Chinese airline in retaliation for their parent speaking out against Beijing.

Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former leader of the Conservative Party and the founder of the Interparliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), said that he has reason to believe that the Chinese are actively tracking his and his family’s whereabouts.

The senior Tory MP, who was personally sanctioned by Beijing for declaring genocide in Xinjiang over the treatment of the Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities — which has reportedly included mass sterilisation, forced abortions, organ harvesting, and torture — went on to claim that he has been subject to cyber attacks from China.

“It is clear that if China wants to get to you, they’ll get to you,” Sir Iain said. “I’ve personally been targeted by ‘wolf warriors’ – guys we suspect are set up by the Chinese government to track ‘annoying’ or ‘bad’ people, or those they consider a nuisance.”

Sir Iain told the paper that someone — believed to have been operating “on the outskirts of Hong Kong” had created a fake email in order to impersonate him and write to politicians in Australia and America to try to convince them that he had changed his views on the Chinese Communist Party and that he now saw the murderous regime as a “beacon of goodness and decency.”

Another prominent critic of the Xi Jinping government, Lord David Alton said that he was informed by the UK Foreign Office that they could not guarantee his safety if he travelled to the Middle East, as China might seek to use economic pressure, through its global domination Belt and Road Initiative, to possibly extradite him back to China.

“It was necessary for three of us, members of the committee, to visit our military bases in the Gulf, and we went to Bahrain and Qatar,” Lord Alton said. “But I was given warning by the Foreign Office in advance that they couldn’t guarantee my safety.

“The anxiety would be that [China] might have an extradition agreement with a country you’re visiting, and it might just suit that country to ingratiate themselves with the People’s Republic of China because of, perhaps, indebtedness over Belt and Road.”

The Chinese Communist Party and its henchmen have a long history of using intimidation tactics on British soil, with suspected CCP-tied groups even going so far as to announce £10,000 bounties for information on Hong Kong dissidents living in exile in the UK.

One such dissident, former UK consulate employee Simon Cheng, who was kidnapped from Hong Kong and tortured in a black site prison in China in 2019, previously told Breitbart London that he was concerned that he was being monitored by CCP agents and that he initially struggled to secure employment over pressure from Beijing.

Benedict Rogers, the founder of Hong Kong Watch also previously told Breitbart London of facing threats from the Chinese regime “including receiving threatening letters by mail to my home, similar letters sent to my neighbours in my street in London asking them to ‘watch’ me, and letters to my mother in a different part of the country urging her to tell me to stop my human rights advocacy work.”

Mr Rogers went on to claim at the time that he was made aware of four separate instances in which the Chinese embassy in London attempted to pressure MPs to shut him up.

Denying the latest allegations, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy described the claims from MPs as “pure rumours”, warning that they should avoid “stoking rivalry and confrontation”.

“A sound China-UK relationship serves the fundamental interest of the two peoples and is conducive to world peace, stability and development,” the Chinese spokesman said.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

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