Chinese influence: Lee case is ‘just the tip of the iceberg’

Chinese influence
Case Lee is ‘just the tip of the iceberg’

By Marcel Grzanna

For years, lawyer Christine Lee has been making generous donations to British political parties and parliamentarians. Now MI5 is warning politicians about their activities. For the first time, the secret service named the united front as a problem for national security.

Suddenly all these pictures of Christine Lee appear in a different light. There’s this shot of her in what appears to be a close exchange with former British Prime Minister David Cameron. In another photo, she is seen with a group of young Chinese people alongside former Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Recently, the name Christine Lee has been on everyone’s lips in Great Britain.

The domestic intelligence agency MI5 got the ball rolling last week. The security service warned Members of Parliament about the influential lawyer with a British passport. She is trying to influence the country’s politics in the interests of the People’s Republic of China. The pictures with Cameron or Corbyn give the impression that she was successful.

Neither Cameron nor Corbyn are at the center of the affair, but Labor MP Barry Gardiner. As the biggest beneficiary of Lee’s payments, he raked in £200,000. A total of half a million flowed to MPs and parties from across the political spectrum.

Legal and still disreputable

Gardiner received the donations legally and transparently. The money was used to fund studies and research in his London constituency of Brent North. The politician expressed surprise at MI5’s warning. He informed the secret service about Christine Lee’s donations for years, he explained. He was never warned. Lee was a registered donor and the money she paid was clean. The Home Office classified Lee’s activities as “below the criminal threshold”.

Still, Gardiner has to justify himself. He is accused of promoting Chinese involvement in the construction of the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in southern England under Lee’s influence. But these allegations are not new. The British press reported on donations to Gardiner’s office as early as 2019. The name Christine Lee was also mentioned back then. But the secret service didn’t get involved. Instead, in the same year, then Prime Minister Theresa May presented Christine Lee with the “Points of Light” award for her commitment to Sino-British relations. You can be “very proud”, May wrote to the lawyer in a personal letter.

Now the turnaround. MI5 not only warned parliament about Lee, but also addressed the Hong Kong native’s good contacts with the United Front Work Department (UFWD), the Chinese united front. “It’s the first time that MI5 has publicly identified the united front as a national security problem,” Didi-Kirsten Tatlow of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) told ntv.de. “This not only has symbolic meaning, but is a signal that the UK has apparently decided to seriously push back Chinese influence.”

Don’t underestimate the united front

The united front is almost as old as the party itself. It is used intensively where doubts arise about the legitimacy of the CP, where criticism of its policies is voiced and where there is a threat of resistance to its authoritarian rule. Through branches of many party organizations, the united front also establishes contacts with influential forces abroad. Politics, business, science – she is active everywhere. And literally in every country in the world.

Experts warn against underestimating the power of the united front. “It’s a kind of management tool used by the CCP to ensure that non-members are brought into line with the party and negative voices are marginalized,” Ralph Weber, a professor at the University of Basel’s Europa Institute, told ntv last year .de.

Some political observers wonder whether the timing of the warning by the secret service could also have domestic political reasons. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is in knee-deep trouble for visiting a party in Corona times. Donations to a Labor politician from a generous donor with the best connections to the Communist Party come in handy. However, the fact that too many British parties and politicians are involved in the case speaks against it.

Dazzling character Lee

Lee is a British citizen. Her parents emigrated to Northern Ireland when she was a child. Every parliamentarian who accepted her money should have known that she maintains good contacts with the Chinese party state. Her law firm has its own office in the British Embassy building in Beijing. She has been advising Chinese companies that want to invest in Great Britain for many years.

She is photographed at the Shenzhen Overseas Exchange Association Conference. As a volunteer adviser, she assisted the director of the Shenzhen branch of the United Front. Another picture shows her shaking hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping at a reception.

In China, Lee was once present at a speech by united front leader You Quan, writes Martin Thorley of the University of Exeter on Twitter. Thorley does research on Sino-British relations. You encouraged the audience to accept “Xi Jinping’s socialism with Chinese characteristics” as a guide. Thorley said Lee was “encouraged and touched” by the speech. Accordingly, she gushed about her strong sense of national pride. Although she has spent all these years in the UK, she wants “to be a communicator for the voice of China”.

Thorley believes the Lee case is “just the tip of the iceberg”. Authors Mareike Ohlberg and Clive Hamilton take an even more bleak view of the degree of influence of Chinese interests in Great Britain. In your book “The Silent Conquest” you describe the British political and business elite as having been so deeply infiltrated that the “point of no return” has already been passed. The system is practically impossible to clean.

Researcher Tatlow from the DGAP, on the other hand, is less pessimistic. She believes that the “creeping, sometimes aggressive influence” can still be successfully counteracted. Prerequisite: less naivety and more determination. But that doesn’t just apply to the UK. “In Germany and in many parts of Europe, China has already penetrated deep into the corridor of political power. This is the result of decades of work by the Communist Party.”

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