On May 7, in a historic verdict, Peter Wai and Bill Yuen were found guilty of assisting a foreign intelligence service under the UK’s national security law. Their beliefs send an unambiguous message: the transnational repression carried out by the Chinese Communist Party has no place on British soil. Remarkably, on the same day, the United States and Norway also delivered this message. The fact that three liberal democracies acted in a single day against Beijing’s long arm was not coordinated – but perhaps it should have been.
Peter Wai, director of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office (HKETO) in London, and Bill Yuen, a British immigration officer, were convicted for their roles in a “shadow police operation”. Wai’s position within the HKETO has given weight to long-standing concerns among civil society groups that HKETOs, which are nominally trade missions, function as additional diplomatic outposts through which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) extends its surveillance reach and advances its anti-democratic agenda overseas. Yuen, meanwhile, exploited his access to British government databases to extract sensitive immigration data from Hong Kong dissidents living in the United Kingdom, thereby turning the state apparatus against the very people it was supposed to protect.
The human cost of this operation had a face. Monica Kwong, a Hong Konger living in the UK through the British (overseas) visa scheme, has become a target. Officers slipped a camera under his front door to watch his movements and poured water underneath to lure him outside. A woman who left everything behind to seek refuge in Britain was chased to her mailbox – this is the lived reality of transnational repression. Fortunately, counterterrorism police were monitoring the suspects. When the men attempted to lure Kwong out of his apartment, police, who were already waiting inside, intervened and made the arrests.
Notably, some of the most serious acts uncovered during the investigation could not be charged because they predated the implementation of the national security law in 2023. Still, the resulting convictions are significant. They demonstrate that British law is fit for purpose and set a precedent: harassment, intimidation and repression on British soil now carry real and serious legal consequences. The Foreign Office’s decision to summon the Chinese ambassador following the verdict underlines that the British government views this not just as a criminal matter, but as a direct affront to national sovereignty that demands a diplomatic response.
On the same day, parallel developments took place in New York, with the continuation of the trial of Liu Jianwang. Liu is accused of operating a secret Chinese police station in Manhattan’s Chinatown. It is just one of 50 such stations identified by the NGO Safeguard Defenders in cities across Europe, North America and beyond. Prosecutors say Liu received direct orders from Beijing to monitor, intimidate and ultimately silence pro-democracy activists living in the United States.
The case is part of a broader pattern. In recent years, U.S. federal prosecutors have charged several individuals with acting as unregistered foreign agents on behalf of Beijing, targeting Hong Kongers, Uighurs and Tibetans on American soil. The Liu trial, which began May 6, is the highest-profile test yet of whether the U.S. legal system can hold these networks accountable, and the fact that it is continuing sends a signal in itself.
Norway’s contribution was more discreet but no less pointed. On May 7, authorities arrested a Chinese national accused of collecting sensitive data near the Andøya spaceport, a facility central to Europe’s expanding space and satellite infrastructure. The alleged operation is part of a well-documented pattern of Chinese intelligence activities targeting dual-use technologies. In an era where satellite communications underpin everything from financial systems to battlefield coordination, Andøya is not a secondary concern. This is exactly the kind of target in which Beijing’s intelligence services have shown sustained interest.
Three cases involving Chinese transnational operations in three different countries saw major developments in a single day. The coincidence is striking, but the underlying story is not a coincidence at all. This reflects the scale and geographic scope of Beijing’s transnational crackdown campaign to surveil, harass and silence those who dared to speak out against it. It is a campaign that does not respect borders, residency status or the protections that democratic citizenship is supposed to confer.
So far the response is necessary but not sufficient.
Currently, democracies are largely fighting this battle alone, each developing their own legal tools, enforcement capacity, and political will at different paces. The UK did not pass its national security law until 2023. Other allies are further behind. Meanwhile, Beijing’s networks operate transnationally, exploiting borders between jurisdictions, sharing intelligence between embassies and proxies, and adapting when one avenue is closed.
In Britain, a concrete and long-awaited step would be to include China in the upgraded level of the foreign influence registration system. The FIRS, which came into force last year, requires individuals and entities acting on behalf of foreign powers to register their political influence activities. The enhanced level, which imposes stricter obligations and greater monitoring, is currently reserved for a small number of specified States. The exclusion of China from this level is increasingly difficult to justify. The HKETO case alone illustrates precisely the type of opaque, state-directed influence activity that the project was intended to expose.
The answer beyond that is coordination. The Five Eyes intelligence alliance, NATO, and the Democracy Summit all provide frameworks through which like-minded states can share information and align their responses. What is needed is the political decision to use them explicitly for this purpose: treating transnational repression not as a matter of national law enforcement in each country, but as a threat to collective security requiring a collective response.
In practice, this could mean common watch lists of known agents, shared early warning systems when diaspora communities report acts of intimidation, coordinated diplomatic expulsions when shadow police networks are discovered, and mutual legal assistance allowing evidence collected in one country to support prosecutions in another. None of this is radical. It is simply the application of tools that democracies already use to fight terrorism and organized crime.
For Hong Kongers, Uyghurs, Tibetans and all those who sought safety in democratic countries, this week offers some reassurance. The countries that welcomed them are starting to seriously defend them. It is now a matter of making this defense systematic, shared and permanent.