The Controversy Over China's New Embassy in London Reflects Growing Tensions With the West

"It is disgraceful," local community activist Mohammad Rakib tells TIME. "The government of China should not have been able to purchase such a prominent site. [By] sticking an unobstructed Chinese flag by Tower Bridge and the Tower of London the authorities may as well have allowed neo-Nazis to occupy the building and fly a swastika from it." "Gesture politics like renaming streets won't have any real effect in terms of how the Chinese behave," says Prof. Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London. Now the war in Ukraine has given China skeptics fresh impetus to draw focus to the new embassy proposal. Calling the Chinese threat his "Single greatest priority," Moore said Chinese operatives were instructed to "Monitor and attempt to exercise undue influence over the Chinese diaspora." In 2019, a U.K. foreign affairs select committee report found "Alarming evidence" of Chinese interference on British University campuses, some of which had been coordinated by the Chinese Embassy. The Tower Hamlet motion to change street names noted that the Chinese Embassy had written to some neighborhood schools to explore opportunities for potential collaboration, and expressed worried that the CCP promoting its own aberrant ideas about ethnic harmony may chafe with the borough's "Proud history of standing up for each other as one community and celebrating our differences." Having the Chinese Embassy may possibly attract more Chinese investment, though given the borough already hosts the U.K. headquarters of HSBC and the Bank of China in its freewheeling Docklands financial center, any boost is likely to be incremental.