"I no longer feel safe in Britain": A Chinese activist on Starmer’s China trip

By Dong Zhiqing (Name changed to protect identity.)

Beijing may be thousands of miles away, but for me, and for many Chinese activists and students living in the UK, it feels uncomfortably close. The Chinese state intimidates us here: monitoring our activities, threatening our families, and attempting to silence dissent far beyond its borders.

I live and study in Britain, where laws are meant to guarantee freedom of expression and political participation. Yet when it comes to China’s reach, those protections often feel fragile. The Chinese government has perfected the suppression of dissent at home – and it has increasingly exported those tactics overseas.

As soon as I started taking part in demonstrations in the UK, the Chinese government made it clear that it was watching me. During my first protest outside the Chinese embassy in London in 2022, as part of the White Paper Movement commemorating the victims of a devastating fire in Xinjiang caused by the government’s aggressive Covid restrictions, I was filmed and followed.

Soon after, the pressure shifted to my family. My parents and relatives in China have been repeatedly visited and threatened by local police because of my participation in peaceful protests in London – protests against the mass repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, restrictions on Tibetan freedoms, the persecution of LGBTI people, and the dismantling of rights in Hong Kong.

The police warned my parents that unless I stopped my so-called “anti-China activities”, my mother’s financial assets could be seized, her business disrupted, and her access to bank funds restricted. They even threatened to destroy a relative’s grave. These are not idle threats; they are part of a system designed to punish dissent by proxy.

The evidence of Chinese state repression of its people both at home and abroad is well-reported and stark. A report by Amnesty International documented how Chinese and Hong Kong students are being intimidated, harassed and spied on by Chinese authorities in the UK, across Europe, Canada and the US in a sinister pattern of transnational repression. The UK parliament has warned the Government that repression on UK soil is going almost completely ‘unchecked’.

With the Prime Minister’s meeting in Beijing with Xi Jinping this week, I worry that the rights and safety of Chinese people – including those living on British soil – take second place to the UK’s commercial interests.

Recent shifts in the UK government’s approach to China are deeply unsettling for Chinese and Hong Kong communities here. There is a growing sense that economic opportunity is being prioritised over the values of freedom and democracy that many of us came to Britain believing in.

That concern has been sharpened by the Government’s support for a new “mega-embassy” for China in London, pushed through despite widespread opposition from local residents and diaspora communities. I no longer feel safe. I feel politically depressed.

For many of us, the prospect of a vastly expanded Chinese diplomatic presence raises fears of increased surveillance and intimidation. Some dismiss those fears as implausible, but for people who have lived under the Chinese state’s reach, they are painfully real. Our only remaining hope of stopping the development lies in a legal challenge and judicial review.

Before coming to the UK, I did not know it was possible to change a government, vote freely, or openly criticise those in power. In China, control is maintained not only through force but through fear, persuasion, self-censorship and enforced silence.

It was vital that Prime Minister Starmer call on the Chinese government – publicly and privately – to end its human rights abuses, from transnational repression in the UK to the denial of Tibetan rights and the brutal repression in Xinjiang. This included demanding the immediate release of all those unjustly detained for peaceful activism, including the MeToo activist Sophia Huang Xueqin, Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, Hong Kong lawyer Chow Hang-tung, British citizen Jimmy Lai, and student activist Tara Zhang Yadi, who was due to begin a master’s degree in London in 2025 but is instead being held incommunicado in China for her activism.

The prime minister needed to show that human rights are not negotiable. Anything less is a signal that the UK is willing to look away from repression in exchange for access to markets – and that authoritarian pressure, even on British soil, will be tolerated.