Luke de Pulford is Executive Director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.
Of the thousands of emails I have received from Conservative HQ, this was the strangest: “Your subscription of £2.09 monthly to The Conservative and Unionist Party for Membership has been cancelled.”
I replied to this unexpected note asking what I had done to deserve expulsion from the only party I’d ever joined, and campaigned for faithfully for over a decade. The answer took a while to arrive. When it did, I learned that the membership had been resigned by an impersonator.
The culprit had emailed CCHQ from the address lukedepulford.saint@gmail.com (yes, really), expressing disgust at the then Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab’s inertia on Hong Kong. The email provoked some correspondence between CCHQ and the impersonator, who then phoned London to confirm his identity, somehow managing to persuade his interlocutor in 4 Matthew Parker St that he was me. I’m told he spoke with a flawless English accent. The faked email address was later traced to Hong Kong.
Since 2019 there have been at least 20 email accounts in my name, innumerable fake accounts on X, and a lot of targeted harassment. The impersonators contact my family, friends, colleagues, people they think are my colleagues, “confessing” things I’ve done, ranting about “China’s internal affairs”, or embedding links in click-bait emails in the hope of hacking people close to me.
I haven’t written about it before, partly because I didn’t want to give these people the satisfaction of thinking their bullying works (it doesn’t), and partly because this kind of harassment pales in comparison to the very real intimidation suffered by Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, Tibetans, and other Chinese dissidents. I’m also not alone. Ben Rogers, the founder of Hong Kong Watch, has endured this for years. Such MPs as Iain Duncan Smith and Tom Tugendhat have also had similar experiences.
The link? We have all been working to hold China to account for its human rights abuses, and, regrettably, this type of foreign interference goes with the territory. But it all got a little more serious this month when I was named a “co-conspirator” in the trial of Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong. This serves as official confirmation that the Chinese and Hong Kong authorities consider me criminally liable for national security related offences.
A brief explainer for those less familiar with the dystopia that has become the Hong Kong justice system: Jimmy Lai is a self-made Hong Kong media magnate. For decades, he has been a thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party, because his media outlets would freely publish criticism of Beijing.
For a host of political reasons, the Chinese authorities are seeking to characterise the 2019 democracy protests as a Western-led conspiracy against China, and have settled upon Jimmy as the mastermind. He was arrested in 2020 under the newly imposed National Security Law, which criminalises dissent and allows life sentences to be handed down for, inter alia, “colluding with foreign forces”.
This is the third charge on Jimmy’s rap sheet, and it’s the charge where I’m named co-conspirator along with Global Magnitsky Justice’s founder, Bill Browder, and my Japanese colleague in the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), the former Diet member Shiori Kanno.
The problem for Beijing is that there is scant evidence to link Jimmy to the youth-run pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. Jimmy is nearly 80, and it’s no secret that some of the teens principally responsible for the 2019 democracy movement were his political opponents.
So to convince people of Jimmy’s guilt, Beijing needs witnesses. Tragically, one of those witnesses is a young man named Andy Li – a computer programmer who volunteered with many pro-democracy organisations in Hong Kong, including IPAC. Beijing doesn’t like IPAC, unsurprisingly. Andy was arrested in August 2020 under the National Security Law.
The Washington Post reported last month that Andy Li was tortured in detention. He has since been listed as a witness for the prosecution in Jimmy trial, and has already identified the mogul in court as the mastermind behind the 2019 unrest in Hong Kong. This is nonsense, of course, but Andy has no choice.
Back in 1984, China and the UK signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, a binding treaty in which both sides pledge to uphold Hong Kong’s autonomy and way of life. Jimmy’s case exposes the parlous state of those promises. A British citizen (Lai) will be convicted in a political show trial relying on coerced testimony from a reported torture victim (Li) dragging in other British citizens (me, Browder) as evidence of collusion.
So what is the British Government going to do about it? Not a lot, it seems. As of today the Foreign Office has said nothing at all about the “co-conspiracy” charges. They haven’t even made a statement about the naming of the former Consul General to Hong Kong, Andy Heyn, despite the fact that this could mean that he is considered criminal, too.
At time of writing, I have received no contact from my government. Security Minister Tom Tugendhat tweeted support, but I was told by a well-placed source that the Foreign Office thinks it’s a “battle we don’t need to fight”. Thanks, guys.
This is consistent with the UK’s policy towards Hong Kong. At best, Beijing’s escalating infamies are met with statements of HMG’s concern, but no steps towards accountability. The BN(O) visa policy was generous, and welcome, but should not be confused with a policy that makes China think twice about violating international law.
Meanwhile, the first UK Minister to visit Hong Kong since Beijing’s crackdown, Lord Johnson, failed to meet with a single civil society group, or any of the 286 people arrested under the National Security Law. Johnson met instead with a bunch of businesses. Some accountability, that.
The whole posture is reminiscent of Monty Python’s Black Knight crying “I’ve had worse” while his severed arm lies on the floor. We haven’t had worse. Beijing torched the Joint Declaration while the UK pulled a sad face – and then tried to do more trade.
It’s deeply humiliating stuff. Liz Truss was right in her intervention this week. Beijing may be in ongoing violation of the Joint Declaration, but the treaty is still in force, and the UK’s promises to the people of Hong Kong remain. By failing even to try to hold China accountable for Hong Kong, we are defaulting on those promises, and through capitulatory, begging-bowl diplomacy we have rewarded Beijing for its violations.
The common rejoinder is to question what a middle-power like the UK can do against the might of China? Starting from an incredibly low bar (it beggars belief that this is even a campaigning point) the Foreign Secretary ought to say something to mark the crossing of a new red-line: the labelling of British citizens criminal in Jimmy Lai’s sham trial, together with a British diplomat.
Again, Beijing is testing the water. We need to show that it’s hot. This isn’t “megaphone diplomacy”, and the alternative is inconceivable: that the UK has nothing to say about Beijing attempting to incriminate UK citizens.
Next, we need to impose targeted sanctions on those responsible. The United States has sanctioned over a dozen Hong Kong officials, despite not having any specific legal responsibility to the city. The UK has failed to sanction a single person.
We must issue revised business risk advice to UK companies operating in Hong Kong. Jimmy’s trial shows that the legal system in Hong Kong cannot be relied upon to deliver justice. There is no firewall between commercial and criminal cases. Jimmy Lai had a previous commercial case which found against him, predictably. C-suite figures believing themselves to be exempt from Beijing’s weaponising of commercial law should have a word with Jack Ma. For the purposes of UK trade, Hong Kong ought to be considered just another city in China, and any preferential tariffs or status afforded the Special Administrative Region should be revoked.
We must work with allies to ensure that existing extradition and mutual legal assistance treaties with Hong Kong and China are suspended across the free, democratic world. Beijing regularly abuses Interpol to pursue political opponents, recently imposing arrest warrants and 1m HKD bounties on young Hong Kongers who have fled the city.
I have some personal experience of this. Over a year ago, the Foreign Office warned those of us named in Andy Li’s case that I was at risk of extradition to China or Hong Kong from third countries. There is no such thing as a fair trial in China, and I’d rather avoid it, thanks very much.
More broadly our diplomatic posture towards China desperately needs reform. Beijing is more repressive at home, and more assertive abroad. Its diplomats beat people up on the streets of Manchester and its government perpetrates genocide against Uyghurs. These two things alone are sufficient to demonstrate that whatever we are doing isn’t working. Worse, that our failure to achieve redress for abuses have trained Beijing well in the art of international impunity.
Spare a thought for Jimmy Lai and Andy Li – at least one of whom will probably die in jail. Two good men whose only crime was to try to defend the promises the UK made to Hong Kong. God forgive us for allowing it.
Luke de Pulford is Executive Director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.
Of the thousands of emails I have received from Conservative HQ, this was the strangest: “Your subscription of £2.09 monthly to The Conservative and Unionist Party for Membership has been cancelled.”
I replied to this unexpected note asking what I had done to deserve expulsion from the only party I’d ever joined, and campaigned for faithfully for over a decade. The answer took a while to arrive. When it did, I learned that the membership had been resigned by an impersonator.
The culprit had emailed CCHQ from the address lukedepulford.saint@gmail.com (yes, really), expressing disgust at the then Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab’s inertia on Hong Kong. The email provoked some correspondence between CCHQ and the impersonator, who then phoned London to confirm his identity, somehow managing to persuade his interlocutor in 4 Matthew Parker St that he was me. I’m told he spoke with a flawless English accent. The faked email address was later traced to Hong Kong.
Since 2019 there have been at least 20 email accounts in my name, innumerable fake accounts on X, and a lot of targeted harassment. The impersonators contact my family, friends, colleagues, people they think are my colleagues, “confessing” things I’ve done, ranting about “China’s internal affairs”, or embedding links in click-bait emails in the hope of hacking people close to me.
I haven’t written about it before, partly because I didn’t want to give these people the satisfaction of thinking their bullying works (it doesn’t), and partly because this kind of harassment pales in comparison to the very real intimidation suffered by Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, Tibetans, and other Chinese dissidents. I’m also not alone. Ben Rogers, the founder of Hong Kong Watch, has endured this for years. Such MPs as Iain Duncan Smith and Tom Tugendhat have also had similar experiences.
The link? We have all been working to hold China to account for its human rights abuses, and, regrettably, this type of foreign interference goes with the territory. But it all got a little more serious this month when I was named a “co-conspirator” in the trial of Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong. This serves as official confirmation that the Chinese and Hong Kong authorities consider me criminally liable for national security related offences.
A brief explainer for those less familiar with the dystopia that has become the Hong Kong justice system: Jimmy Lai is a self-made Hong Kong media magnate. For decades, he has been a thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party, because his media outlets would freely publish criticism of Beijing.
For a host of political reasons, the Chinese authorities are seeking to characterise the 2019 democracy protests as a Western-led conspiracy against China, and have settled upon Jimmy as the mastermind. He was arrested in 2020 under the newly imposed National Security Law, which criminalises dissent and allows life sentences to be handed down for, inter alia, “colluding with foreign forces”.
This is the third charge on Jimmy’s rap sheet, and it’s the charge where I’m named co-conspirator along with Global Magnitsky Justice’s founder, Bill Browder, and my Japanese colleague in the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), the former Diet member Shiori Kanno.
The problem for Beijing is that there is scant evidence to link Jimmy to the youth-run pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. Jimmy is nearly 80, and it’s no secret that some of the teens principally responsible for the 2019 democracy movement were his political opponents.
So to convince people of Jimmy’s guilt, Beijing needs witnesses. Tragically, one of those witnesses is a young man named Andy Li – a computer programmer who volunteered with many pro-democracy organisations in Hong Kong, including IPAC. Beijing doesn’t like IPAC, unsurprisingly. Andy was arrested in August 2020 under the National Security Law.
The Washington Post reported last month that Andy Li was tortured in detention. He has since been listed as a witness for the prosecution in Jimmy trial, and has already identified the mogul in court as the mastermind behind the 2019 unrest in Hong Kong. This is nonsense, of course, but Andy has no choice.
Back in 1984, China and the UK signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, a binding treaty in which both sides pledge to uphold Hong Kong’s autonomy and way of life. Jimmy’s case exposes the parlous state of those promises. A British citizen (Lai) will be convicted in a political show trial relying on coerced testimony from a reported torture victim (Li) dragging in other British citizens (me, Browder) as evidence of collusion.
So what is the British Government going to do about it? Not a lot, it seems. As of today the Foreign Office has said nothing at all about the “co-conspiracy” charges. They haven’t even made a statement about the naming of the former Consul General to Hong Kong, Andy Heyn, despite the fact that this could mean that he is considered criminal, too.
At time of writing, I have received no contact from my government. Security Minister Tom Tugendhat tweeted support, but I was told by a well-placed source that the Foreign Office thinks it’s a “battle we don’t need to fight”. Thanks, guys.
This is consistent with the UK’s policy towards Hong Kong. At best, Beijing’s escalating infamies are met with statements of HMG’s concern, but no steps towards accountability. The BN(O) visa policy was generous, and welcome, but should not be confused with a policy that makes China think twice about violating international law.
Meanwhile, the first UK Minister to visit Hong Kong since Beijing’s crackdown, Lord Johnson, failed to meet with a single civil society group, or any of the 286 people arrested under the National Security Law. Johnson met instead with a bunch of businesses. Some accountability, that.
The whole posture is reminiscent of Monty Python’s Black Knight crying “I’ve had worse” while his severed arm lies on the floor. We haven’t had worse. Beijing torched the Joint Declaration while the UK pulled a sad face – and then tried to do more trade.
It’s deeply humiliating stuff. Liz Truss was right in her intervention this week. Beijing may be in ongoing violation of the Joint Declaration, but the treaty is still in force, and the UK’s promises to the people of Hong Kong remain. By failing even to try to hold China accountable for Hong Kong, we are defaulting on those promises, and through capitulatory, begging-bowl diplomacy we have rewarded Beijing for its violations.
The common rejoinder is to question what a middle-power like the UK can do against the might of China? Starting from an incredibly low bar (it beggars belief that this is even a campaigning point) the Foreign Secretary ought to say something to mark the crossing of a new red-line: the labelling of British citizens criminal in Jimmy Lai’s sham trial, together with a British diplomat.
Again, Beijing is testing the water. We need to show that it’s hot. This isn’t “megaphone diplomacy”, and the alternative is inconceivable: that the UK has nothing to say about Beijing attempting to incriminate UK citizens.
Next, we need to impose targeted sanctions on those responsible. The United States has sanctioned over a dozen Hong Kong officials, despite not having any specific legal responsibility to the city. The UK has failed to sanction a single person.
We must issue revised business risk advice to UK companies operating in Hong Kong. Jimmy’s trial shows that the legal system in Hong Kong cannot be relied upon to deliver justice. There is no firewall between commercial and criminal cases. Jimmy Lai had a previous commercial case which found against him, predictably. C-suite figures believing themselves to be exempt from Beijing’s weaponising of commercial law should have a word with Jack Ma. For the purposes of UK trade, Hong Kong ought to be considered just another city in China, and any preferential tariffs or status afforded the Special Administrative Region should be revoked.
We must work with allies to ensure that existing extradition and mutual legal assistance treaties with Hong Kong and China are suspended across the free, democratic world. Beijing regularly abuses Interpol to pursue political opponents, recently imposing arrest warrants and 1m HKD bounties on young Hong Kongers who have fled the city.
I have some personal experience of this. Over a year ago, the Foreign Office warned those of us named in Andy Li’s case that I was at risk of extradition to China or Hong Kong from third countries. There is no such thing as a fair trial in China, and I’d rather avoid it, thanks very much.
More broadly our diplomatic posture towards China desperately needs reform. Beijing is more repressive at home, and more assertive abroad. Its diplomats beat people up on the streets of Manchester and its government perpetrates genocide against Uyghurs. These two things alone are sufficient to demonstrate that whatever we are doing isn’t working. Worse, that our failure to achieve redress for abuses have trained Beijing well in the art of international impunity.
Spare a thought for Jimmy Lai and Andy Li – at least one of whom will probably die in jail. Two good men whose only crime was to try to defend the promises the UK made to Hong Kong. God forgive us for allowing it.