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The oohs and aahs came in a steady stream. The lion, made up of two lads inside a costume of elaborate, fluorescent riffles and painted swirls, was going shop to shop performing dramatic gyrations to a flurry of drumbeats, before rearing up to chomp lettuces hung from windows, and then spraying out the bits to onlookers. This was London’s Chinese New Year parade and it was, in short, a better day out than Glastonbury.

But though I did not realise it at the time, there was a similarly troubling political backdrop. That very day, a few streets away, Sadiq Khan was posing for photos with a man called Chu Ting Tang who, to all appearances, was just a regular diaspora bigwig who leads the London Chinatown Chinese Association. This, it turns out, is a bit like calling Captain Hook a cultural ambassador for amputees. What Tang actually is, according to a new report by the investigative charity UK China Transparency (UKCT), is an exceptionally senior official linked to the notorious Chinese propaganda and espionage department known as the United Front. (Neither he, nor the LCCA, responded to my queries.)

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In this important work, as he puts it: “Our ancestor-land is our strongest support.” He is not talking figuratively. Tang appears to have an extensive communist party infrastructure behind him, not that you would ever see this disclosed openly in English-language sources. Only by trawling Chinese sources was the UKCT able to discover that Tang was appointed a “senior vice president” of the China Overseas Friendship Association, a United Front-run organisation whose stated aim is to aid in the “reunification of the ancestor lands”, meaning all the territories, from Xinjiang to Taiwan and the South China Sea, that China claims as its own (rather like Putin’s mission to “regather the lands” of Ancient Rus).

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The United Front Work Department (UFWD) is a key Chinese Communist Party vehicle whose mission is to achieve control of civil society and suppress anti-communist dissent, originally just in China, but now globally. One of the chief channels through which it operates is party sympathisers (or simply the ambitious or the corrupt) in the Chinese diaspora.

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It’s not as if Tang is a single case. There is Christine Lee, a United Front agent outed by MI5 in 2022. There is Xuelin Bates, wife of Lord Bates, linked to a United Front organisation while ferociously networking her way through the Tory establishment (she has said she cut her links with the United Front after 2020). There is Yang Tengbo, who became a confidant of Prince Andrew before being banned from the UK. There is Edmond Yeo, who ran a charity offering help to Hong Kongers fleeing Chinese oppression, while repeatedly meeting a Chinese embassy United Front official (Yeo has denied working on behalf of the UFWD). There are more, probably hundreds if not thousands, and the Firs was meant to be a vital tool by which British civil society could be informed about and protected from them.

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[The UK government] decided to turn an official blind eye, and let individual journalists and tiny organisations like UKCT do the government’s job, picking off one agent at a time, slowly, painstakingly, constantly outgunned by a CCP organ of some 40,000 people. It’s almost as if some in government don’t want this problem tackled. They struggle to see that you can enjoy the lion dance, admire Chinese civilisation and welcome its talented diaspora without kowtowing to the sinister, meddlesome flunkies of its mafioso-communist regime.

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