“The proposed conversion of the historic Royal Mint Court into Europe’s largest Chinese diplomatic compound is no ordinary embassy,” observe Tsering Passang and Clara Cheung, commenting for Tibetan Review (November 11, 2025). “It is a calculated strategic and intelligence hub designed to tighten Beijing’s grip on Britain’s political, economic, and social fabric.”
This conclusion has long been evident to any who cared to look objectively at the proposed embassy and the history of the Chinese Communist Party outside and inside Great Britain.
The authors also say:
● A seventh protest against the mega-embassy project will be held on November 15, 2025 by “Hongkongers, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Chinese dissidents, Taiwanese communities, and British allies.” The protest will be a “call to conscience. For the exiled and persecuted, this project represents the physical embodiment of the regime they escaped. For Britain, it is a test of moral resolve and national sovereignty.”
● Britain has betrayed those persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party before. In 2008, Gordon Brown’s Labour government reversed “nearly a century of policy that had quietly acknowledged Tibet’s de facto autonomy…. Brown’s government sought China’s cooperation at the 2009 G20 Summit, which he hosted in London. Instead, Beijing pocketed the concession and offered nothing in return. The damage went far beyond diplomacy. It told Beijing that Britain’s moral stance was negotiable.”
The authors suggest that China’s intensification of its repression in Tibet and Xinjiang and its post-2020 dismantling of the freedoms of Hong Kong “in open defiance of international law” were a response to the British government’s moral treason. The CCP would have doubtless been inclined to grow more repressive anyway, but the UK government’s appeasement could only have encouraged this.
● “Britain responded honourably [to the plight of Hongkongers after 2020] with the British National (Overseas) visa scheme, offering sanctuary to those escaping tyranny. More than 200,000 Hongkongers have rebuilt their lives here. Yet the construction of a vast CCP compound only miles from Parliament would place these same refugees under renewed threat….”
In the latter part of their essay, Passang and Cheung review what we know of the mega-embassy and the circumstances of its approval: its proximity to crucial data and communication lines; the track record of Chinese espionage in the UK; how the mega-embassy, “protected by diplomatic immunity, would also provide the regime with a legal shield for surveillance, intimidation, and psychological harassment of Tibetan, Uyghur, Hongkonger, and Chinese dissident communities”; how “political lobbying [by China] and backroom diplomacy [with China] have overshadowed due process,” with the UK government evincing a “disregard for transparency and local governance” that mirrors that of the CCP itself.
The proper way
Recently, Starmer told Bloomberg that he would not let Britain “be pushed around by China after it warned of ‘consequences’ should the London project not proceed…. ‘The decision on the embassy will be taken in the proper way regardless of any views or pressure from anyone,’ the premier said.”
If these were honest words, the mega-embassy would already be dead. We wouldn’t be talking about it anymore. The threat it represents is not hard to grasp.
As is true of too many of his predecessors, though, Starmer’s natural impulse is to appease the Chinese Communist Party, as was demonstrated by his administration’s recent scuttling of the Cash and Berry spy case. The case was dropped before it could get to trial for stated reasons that are alternately dumb and unintelligible but in fact because Starmer and his team are eager to accommodate the CCP.
If the mega-embassy does eventually get blocked, it will be because domestic and intra-Labour politics prove to be too much for Downing Street, not because Prime Minister Starmer and his colleagues will have suddenly developed character and principles and become made of sterner stuff.
