On May 7, two Anglo-Chinese dual nationals were sentenced at the Old Bailey in London for espionage. Peter Wai and Bill Yuen were convicted of carrying out a “shadow police” operation against Hong Kong dissidents from Yuen’s workplace, the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office (HKETO). Using Wai’s contacts and access to sensitive information related to his role as an immigration officer within the UK Home Office, the two men monitored Hong Kong pro-democracy activists and attempted to launch an operation to illegally seize and return to China a woman suspected of fraud. style of the Chinese Operation Fox Hunt.
For Britain’s small coterie of exiled Hong Kong pro-democracy activists, the success of the legal proceedings serves as vindication for their concerns about the transnational reach of the Hong Kong government. Since 2022, Hong Kong authorities have sought to pursue exiled activists in an attempt to either silence them or “persuade” them to return to face prosecution in Hong Kong. He has imposed Bonuses of US$130,000 (HK$1 million) for 19 activists living in the UK, US, Canada and Australia, and US$25,500 (HK$200,000) for 15 others. The youngest of them, Chloe Cheung, was 19 years old when the bonus was awarded.
Activists benefiting from bonuses found themselves victims of violence and harassment. In a series of particularly worrying incidents, wanted posters and false sexualized images have been distributed in the neighborhoods of pro-democracy activists Carmen Lau and Tony Chung in the United Kingdom, and former LegCo politician Ted Hui in Australia.
If the aim of these actions was to silence their critics, the Hong Kong government and its supporters scored an own goal. The issuance of sexualized bounties, wanted posters and fakes has attracted much attention from journalists and politicians, making young activists like Chloe Cheung and Carmen Lau the media face of Hong Kong’s democracy movement abroad. They bravely spoke about their experiences in media interviews and oral testimony as part of the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry into transnational repression in the UK. Hong Kong has gained a reputation as a leading progenitor of transnational repression.
However, media and political attention to the individual experiences of high-profile activists may have belied the true scale of the transnational repression experienced by Hong Kong’s British diaspora. Since 2021, more than 180,000 Hong Kongers have settled in the United Kingdom through the British National (Overseas) (BNO) humanitarian visa program, launched by Boris Johnson’s government. The total BNO diaspora in the UK is estimated at over 200,000 people. A survey showed that the average BNO visa holder is middle-aged, married with children and living in some of the leafiest suburbs of London, Birmingham and Manchester. Their lives are very different from those of the young activists and professional human rights defenders openly targeted by the Hong Kong government. It would be reasonable to assume that transnational repression is not a major concern for the wider diaspora.
To test this hypothesis, Hong Kong Watch launched a investigation of Hong Kongers in the UK to assess the level of political engagement and experience of transnational repression within the diaspora as a whole. We wanted to know if and how transnational repression affected ordinary Hong Kongers without their activism being publicly known, and to what extent the broader Hong Kong diaspora felt politically engaged.
The results were very worrying. Our survey found that two thirds (66%) of Hong Kongers in the UK feel at risk of transnational repression, and a sixth (17%) feel “mostly” threatened. Of these, the most common concerns included infiltration of diaspora groups by state actors or hostile informants, and being identified, photographed, or doxxed. These concerns were corroborated by Wai and Yuen’s trial, which provided evidence of these surveillance tactics being used against pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong.
These concerns seem linked to the direct experience of transnational repression. A third, or 32 percent of our total sample, reported having personally experienced some form of transnational repression in the past calendar year. Of these, the most common form involved the infiltration of Hong Kong groups and identification by hostile actors. A fifth of all survey respondents said they had experienced group infiltration by a hostile state actor in the past year.
This finding was extremely worrying. Even if we only consider the BNO visa population, that’s about 40,000 people who have faced infiltration by a hostile actor into a civic group or event in the past year.
Unsurprisingly, this is having a significant impact on the civic engagement of Hong Kongers across the UK. Hong Kongers reported high levels of civic engagement, but primarily through online or written means such as petitions or letters. We found that 42% of Hong Kongers avoid attending public events in the UK due to the risk of transnational repression. This risk was not necessarily to themselves; 86% of survey participants said attending public events in the UK put their family members in Hong Kong at risk. For many Hong Kongers, the floor and conviction of the father of American activist Anna Kwok in Hong Kong only confirmed the reality of these fears.
Overall, these findings suggest that transnational repression against the Hong Kong diaspora extends further than is commonly imagined. While a small number of high-profile activists are bearing the brunt of transnational repression – and more should be done to protect them – our data suggests that thousands of Hong Kongers across the UK have suffered transnational repression. Much of this appears to take the form of infiltration and surveillance of pro-democracy groups and events, with the implicit threat that identification could cause problems for family members remaining in Hong Kong. While other authoritarian states are sometimes willing to commit acts of violence on British soil against dissidents and journalists, the Hong Kong government appears to be taking a more subtle approach, one that is harder to denounce and prosecute.
It’s difficult, but not impossible, as Wai and Yuen’s conviction demonstrates. Britain’s national security law, under which the two men were convicted, provides a sufficient legal framework to prevent hostile state actors from infiltrating pro-democracy groups and harassing activists. The biggest challenge is resources. Our investigation suggests that many thousands of Hong Kongers are under threat from transnational repression: their community groups and events infiltrated by hostile actors working on behalf of a foreign state; their families have been threatened with reprisals for attending civic events in the UK. Simply put, this is a national problem that requires a national response from the UK government. Individual activists and NGOs cannot be left alone to solve this problem.