Dec. 17 (UPI) — The Chinese Embassy in London hit out at Britain on Tuesday, accusing it of “anti-China manipulation and clamors” in a row over an alleged Chinese spy whose close relationship with Prince Andrew, Duke of York, caused authorities to ban him from the country on national security grounds.
A spokesman said in a news release the “Chinese spy” was in fact a businessman — identified as Yang Tengbo after he asked a court to lift an anonymity order Monday — who had made it clear he had done nothing wrong or illegal and condemned the “twisted mentality of a handful of U.K. MPs towards China.”
“What they are really up to is to smear China, target against the Chinese community in the U.K. and undermine normal personnel exchanges between China and the UK. We strongly condemn this,” said the spokesman
He added that the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government strongly believed bilateral relations should be based on mutual respect for each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and non-interference in the internal affairs of the other side.
“This is what we have been saying and what we have been doing. This is also why China has so many friends around the world.”
The spokesman also attacked some U.K. politicians’ attempts to “demonize China’s United Front work” saying it was a part of CPC endeavors to bring together various political parties and people from all walks of life, ethnic groups and organizations to promote cooperation and promote people-to-people exchanges and friendship with other countries.
“This is above-board and beyond reproach,” adding the aspersions being cast by the MPs were doomed to failure.
“We urge the U.K. side to immediately stop creating trouble, stop anti-China political manipulations, and stop undermining normal personnel exchanges between China and the U.K,” said the spokesman.
Yang’s link to the UF work department was one of the grounds a special immigration panel on Monday threw out his appeal against a 2023 order issued by then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman banning him from entering Britain.
The Special Immigration Appeals Commission heard the businessman, who divided his time between China and Britain since being granted the equivalent of a Green Card in 2013, was associated with the Chinese Communist Party arm which MI5 said was involved in “mounting patient, well-funded, deceptive campaigns to buy and exert influence.”
A search of his electronic devices when he was stopped as he entered the U.K. in November 2021 found a letter addressed to the Beijing UFWD, a list of people traveling in a delegation including a UFWD member and members with job roles listed as both UFWD and the Beijing Overseas Friendship Association, and a text message introducing himself as an overseas representative of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
Together with Yang’s position as a close confidant of the duke in the prince’s role as an international ambassador for British business, backed up by letters and invitations to Prince Andrew’s official residence, the three-judge tribunal backed Barverman’s assessment that Yang posed a risk to Britain.
Yang, 50, appealed on the grounds the decision was unlawful and that the procedure had been unfair.
However, the court agreed Yang had failed to provide a full and open account of his relationship with the duke, which had a “covert and clandestine” element.
The Home Office argued Yang’s downplaying in a witness statement of his relationships with both the UFWD and the Duke “represented a threat to national security.”
Yang asked the high court in London to lift the anonymity order to allow him to publicly defend himself against accusations he said were “ill-founded.”
In a statement, Yang, who set up two companies in Britain after attending the University of York in the early 2000s, insisted he had “done nothing wrong or unlawful” and that the “widespread description of me as a ‘spy’ is entirely untrue”.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said he was “concerned about the challenge” posed by China, but his overall policy was to engage with China “cooperating where we need to cooperate” and taking issue with its actions “where we must and where we should.”
However, former Conservative Party leader, Iain Duncan Smith, MP, who is under Chinese sanctions and banned from entering the country, attacked Starmer’s Labor administration for being “weak” by tiptoeing around China on the issue, saying Yang was not the only Chinese national Britain had to worry about.
“He was one of some 40,000 members of the United [Front] Work Department, which the intelligence security committee report last year said, and I quote, ‘had penetrated every sector of the U.K. economy, spying, stealing intellectual property, influencing and shaping our institutions’,” said Duncan Smith.
