Finn Lau thought he had escaped China’s reach when he got to London. He’d come from Hong Kong, where Chinese authorities were rapidly consolidating control. An extensive protest movement had sprung up in response, which Lau was helping to lead. But he fled after local officials arrested him at a pro-democracy demonstration in 2020. Months later, while he was walking down a quiet street in London, three masked men jumped him and beat him unconscious. Now 31, Lau still has a faint scar on his boyish face.
British authorities called the incident a hate crime, but Lau was convinced that Beijing had sent the men to silence him. He wasn’t being paranoid: Last year, Chinese authorities declared that Lau would be “pursued for life.” They froze his remaining assets in Hong Kong and offered a bounty for information leading to his arrest. Since then, fake journalists have approached Lau seeking interviews, dozens of social-media accounts have impersonated him, and he’s received death threats. A group on Telegram posted his address in London, forcing him to move multiple times. The intimidation extended to his family members in Hong Kong. Eventually they had to flee too.
Lau is one of thousands who fled Hong Kong to Britain once the protests started—and particularly since June 2020, when China passed a national-security law that led to often-violent suppression. I’ve spoken with more than 30 activists like Lau who have come to the United Kingdom, where the harassment and surveillance they tried to escape has followed them. Assailants have stalked them in public and smeared them online. Letters have shown up at their neighbors’ doors promising a reward for turning over dissidents to the Chinese embassy. Back home, government authorities have suspended their retirement savings and interrogated their families. Some have been attacked.
Their stories illustrate a campaign that China is waging against dissidents across the globe. Not all of the incidents in the U.K. can be tied directly to the Chinese government, but the tactics mirror those Beijing has used to discredit and silence critics in Europe, Canada, Australia, and the United States. Last month, Freedom House found that China was responsible for more recorded cases of repression beyond its borders than any other country over the past decade. The nonprofit had already concluded that the Chinese Communist Party’s war on exiles is “the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign” of its kind in the world. “This is the product of a top-down system, ordered by Xi Jinping,” Yaqiu Wang, a senior researcher at Freedom House, told me. “Whether this comes directly from Beijing or from Hong Kong, it’s ultimately a part of the CCP’s global, transnational campaign to silence anyone who is critical.”
Even though China’s responsibility is an open secret, Western governments have struggled to deter the country from interfering on their soil. Xi’s crusade appears so brazen and far-reaching that it suggests he has little fear of provoking the West. By the same measure, it seems to reveal that something else really does scare him: China’s exiles.
Photographs by Emily Garthwaite
Last month, demonstrators protested plans for China to relocate and expand its embassy in London.
The United Kingdom is home to the largest Hong Kong diaspora in the world. Since relinquishing its former colony in 1997, the country has admitted hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers, who represent a growing threat to China’s leaders. Thanks to globalization and social media, dissidents can organize and inspire political opposition from abroad more easily than before. That helps explain why the Hong Kong government has steadily escalated its campaign against exiles. Last year, it enacted another national-security law, called Article 23, which carries penalties that extend to activists outside the country; authorities have used it to sanction organizers overseas and revoke their passports. Many exiles told me they no longer feel safe returning to Hong Kong because they fear interrogations, imprisonment, or the confiscation of their passports. They worry that Hong Kong authorities have started importing elements of Xi’s surveillance state in order to track them abroad. Xi “feels threatened by any kind of collective action,” Wang told me—whether it originates at home or overseas.
Since 2019, more than 5,000 emigrants have moved to the South London borough of Sutton, where a local group organized a camp in 2023 to educate children of the Hong Kong diaspora about Chinese repression. Then the former chief executive of Hong Kong heard about it—and warned on social media that the organizers would be reported to British and Hong Kong police.
Accounts of intimidation and harassment have emerged from virtually every corner of Britain where Hong Kongers have gathered. In 2019, a group of men dragged a refugee through the gates of the Chinese consulate in Manchester and assaulted him. Similar incidents have occurred in London’s Chinatown and on college campuses, including in Southampton, where Chinese students attacked Hong Kongers during a demonstration in 2023. Videos of the incident circulated on Weibo, China’s version of X, and prompted death threats against the victims.
One of the first activists I spoke with in London was Simon Cheng. The 34-year-old exile was working for the British consulate in Hong Kong when Beijing tightened its grip on the region. In 2019, he told me, Chinese officials abducted him while he was on a business trip in southern China. He said they beat him and placed him in stress positions for 15 days before forcing him to confess to allegations that he incited unrest in Hong Kong. Britain granted him asylum months later.
“It was a relief, at first, to touch down in a place where there is rule of law—where I felt I could speak freely again,” Cheng told me. After settling into the city, he established a group called Hong Kongers in Britain to help new arrivals find housing and other resources. Chinese authorities took note: In 2023, the Hong Kong government offered rewards for information leading to the arrests of Cheng and 12 other overseas dissidents, six of whom lived in Britain. Officials in Hong Kong interrogated Cheng’s family, who became a focus of attention in Chinese media. “Watching my father dodge the news cameras on television sent me into a deep depression,” Cheng said. In an effort to protect his parents, Cheng encouraged them to sever ties with him. “If needed, criticize me and cut me off,” he wrote on X. “My hope is that my parents can enjoy a dignified, peaceful, and serene old age—until our next life.”
Photographs by Emily Garthwaite
Simon Cheng fled Hong Kong after Chinese authorities detained him. Then they interrogated his family and offered a reward for information leading to his arrest.
On Christmas Eve, Hong Kong issued bounties on six more exiles, including Chloe Cheung, who was 19 at the time. “I came here to protect my future,” Cheung told me. She had moved to the city of Leeds with her family in 2020. “I had dreams of pursuing a career in business or finance,” she said. “The bounty has changed all of that.”
She showed me a video on her phone of a Chinese man shouting death threats at her during a protest she helped organize in November. After another demonstration, two Asian men followed her into a restaurant; she alerted the police, who opened an investigation. On Instagram and X, strangers send her sexually explicit messages written in Mandarin. Friends have asked her to stop contacting them, worried that ties to her could create problems for their relatives in Hong Kong. “It feels impossible, suddenly, to meet new people or apply for jobs,” she said. “I have no idea who I can trust.”
In October, I met another activist who’s had to cut off relationships. He asked me to use a pseudonym to protect his family, so I’ll call him Alvin. After the protests started in 2019, Alvin joined a loose network of organizers in Hong Kong who avoided direct confrontations with law enforcement but helped younger, bolder activists. Soon after he fled to London in 2020, he learned that government officials were pressing his family in China for information about him. Police had summoned some of his extended family to tea, where they unfurled printouts of Alvin’s posts on Telegram and photos of him demonstrating in London. One team of officers had traveled from mainland China to treat Alvin’s parents in Hong Kong to an extravagant dinner. The officials said he could face a lengthy prison sentence for helping “high profile” activists—a charge that could extend to his mother and father, too, unless they persuaded their son to become an informant.
Alvin heard about the meeting months later when his mother visited him in London. “My blood went cold,” he told me. She pleaded with him through tears to stop his activism so his family could live in peace. Alvin started to distance himself from other organizers and Hong Kongers. “I never could have imagined my actions would attract so much attention from the CCP,” he told me. “I am not a frontline activist.” He repeated the words, as if to assure himself.
Photographs by Emily Garthwaite
A Hong Kong activist in London says that Chinese officials have threatened his relatives back home.
In a parliamentary debate in October, Blair McDougall, a Scottish MP, said his Hong Kong constituents were frightened. Police had discovered an unauthorized Chinese outpost in the basement of a restaurant in Glasgow in 2023. British officials shut it down, along with at least three other outposts they suspected were monitoring and harassing diaspora communities.
McDougall and other lawmakers insist that similar attention should be directed toward Hong Kong’s trade office in London. Last May, U.K. authorities arrested the office’s manager along with two men he had allegedly hired to collect information for Hong Kong’s intelligence service and break into an exile’s home. The previous month, authorities had charged a British parliamentary researcher with spying. (All have pleaded not guilty except for one of the hired men, who died.) McDougall urged the British government to “review the diplomatic privileges” given to the trade office “to ensure they are not used as organs of transnational repression.”
Over the summer, I joined a group of about 30 Hong Kong demonstrators who had gathered at the trade office’s front gate in Central London. Many wore dark clothing, masks, scarves, and sunglasses. As I approached, they grew uneasy and declined to comment but pointed me to two men they had seen photographing and monitoring previous protests. The activists called them “ghosts.”
One of them, a young man who was filming the demonstration, introduced himself as a part-time journalist. He wouldn’t say who employed him, but he gave me the handle of his Instagram account, which I followed. A few hours later, my friends and family told me an account that was using my name—and a photo of me—had started following them. When I mentioned this to another organizer, he showed me his phone and scrolled through more than 30 automated accounts under his name; many of them posted lies about his activism. I thought of a conversation I had with Alberto Fittarelli, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog group, who told me China has two main goals when it targets activists online: to encourage self-censorship and to “discredit the targets in the eyes of the audience hosting them.”
That strategy nearly ruined the livelihoods of two exiled painters, who go by Lumli and Lumlong. When I visited their London apartment, which doubles as their studio, it was filled with oversize canvases depicting baroque scenes from the protests in Hong Kong. For years, mysterious accounts had posted hateful comments on the Facebook page they used to sell their artwork, which Lumli and Lumlong took with them when they fled Hong Kong in 2021. (A standard post: “You dogs and rioters will all die with your family.”) Many of the profiles showed signs of fakery; they were created recently, had few followers, rarely posted, and used simplified Chinese characters typical of mainland China. Experts at Citizen Lab told me the accounts’ features are “consistent with what has been observed over the years for pro-China networks.”
In 2022, someone hacked the artists’ page and replaced their profile photo with an image of an ISIS flag, which prompted Facebook to remove them. “That account held all our important connections from the past five years. They disappeared overnight,” Lumli and Lumlong told me. “It was like a company going bankrupt.”
In early February, I attended a demonstration outside Mint Court, a stately complex in southern London that the CCP bought in 2018. Hundreds of Chinese dissidents, including Uyghurs and Tibetans, had traveled from across the U.K. to protest Beijing’s plan to move its embassy there, which would entail a massive expansion relative to its current location in Central London. The demonstration came as the U.S. cut funding for groups that track the persecution of Chinese dissidents.
British officials at the protest echoed fears among the activists that the CCP would use the new embassy to carry out surveillance. “We know that courageous activists have been silenced, others have been followed, more have been intimidated,” Tom Tugendhat, a former security minister the Chinese government has sanctioned, told the protesters. “We will not tolerate the CCP doing to you here what they tried to do in China.”
Photographs by Emily Garthwaite
A poster painted by the Hong Kong exiles Lumli and Lumlong
A few feet from the speakers, Lumli and Lumlong displayed a hand-painted poster of Jimmy Lai, a newspaper publisher and British national who’s serving a prison sentence in Hong Kong for supporting the democracy movement. Cheng, the head of Hong Kongers in Britain, maneuvered to the front of the crowd to deliver a speech. “This proposed embassy is not just a diplomatic site,” he said. “It is a statement of abusive power over human rights—a glorified monument for the CCP’s diplomats.”
A few weeks earlier, Cheng had learned that the U.K.’s housing ministry, which had provided money for his advocacy group, had decided to scale back its support. He had spent the past weeks frantically applying for new jobs so he could avoid getting evicted from his apartment. He also told me that someone had infiltrated his group of friends and spread lies to turn them against him. For a time, several cut him off. “It felt like someone sent an invisible virus, designed to attack my sense of security—and my spirit.”
His anxiety has taken the form of recurring nightmares. In one of his dreams, he is back at his parents’ house in Hong Kong, but they aren’t home. The kitchen is in disarray. A strange woman assures Cheng that his parents left to buy groceries, but Cheng then realizes that she is an undercover officer. His parents have been taken to prison.
“When I wake up, I am relieved at first. I remember I am safe. I am worlds away. My parents are unharmed.” The feeling doesn’t last long before it’s eclipsed by a harder reality. “I am overcome with grief for those spaces and faces I may never see again.”
