Kuru
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Rahima Mahmut, U.K. director of the World Uyghur Congress, and protesters from Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the local London borough of Tower Hamlets in front of the former Royal Mint, September 2021. They were demanding that road names around the site of a planned Chinese embassy be changed to honor groups persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party. Photo by Ruth Ingram.
Londoners put off by Chinese Communist Party behavior have blocked, once and for all, construction of a new super embassy China had planned for the U.K. capital, prompting fury in Beijing but jubilation in the exiled community of Uyghurs, Turkic Muslims who fled oppression in Xinjiang for Britain.
Six months after the town council of Tower Hamlets — home to London’s largest Muslim constituency — refused China’s plans to transform the iconic 19th-century Royal Mint and its five-acre grounds into the largest embassy in Europe, the August 10 appeal deadline has passed.
Maira Aisa, the president of the U.K. Uyghur Community, an advocacy organization, said she was “relieved” the embassy was not going ahead because Britain’s Uyghurs already lived “on tenterhooks” as a result of Chinese authorities’ practice of harassing exiles who oppose Beijing’s crackdown in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwestern China.
“We know we are safe in the U.K., but still we have that nagging fear that we could be forced to return,” Aisa told The China Project. “A massive embassy equipped with the latest technology would be more easily able to target Uyghurs and others who have been in opposition.”
Many members of Kyrgyzstan-born Aisa’s extended Uyghur family live in Xinjiang and are subject to the arrests carried out against more than 1 million Turkic people there since the 2016 appointment of Chén Quánguó 陈全国 as governor of the region, which is three times the size of France.
Though Chen has been replaced at the top of the CCP in Xinjiang, Aisa has not heard from her family in seven years and has received anonymous phone calls to her London workplace asking for her details.
“I know the Chinese government is watching me and knows where I am all the time,” Aisa said. “We live constantly under this pressure.”
Aisa said that a giant Chinese embassy in London with “thousands of staff” would give Beijing an easy staging ground “not only in Britain, but across Europe” for surveillance of the Chinese diaspora in the U.K., including Uyghurs, many of whom live in the eastern parts of London, Hongkongers, Tibetans, and Han Chinese dissidents.
Council minutes, provided to The China Project by Khan, noted Tower Hamlets’ “deep concern” about “China’s human rights record on a number of issues, in particular the appalling treatment of the largely Muslim Uyghurs and the situations in Hong Kong and Tibet.”
Read more:
China’s plan for a new U.K. embassy foiled by Uyghur activists and local allies – The China Project
Muslims make up 40% of constituents in Tower Hamlets, a small London borough with a history of standing up for the oppressed.
thechinaproject.com
