A consortium of Hong Kong community groups have accused the UK government’s flagship programme for welcoming Hongkongers of funding an organisation with alleged links to the Chinese Communist party (CCP).
Last week, the government announced grants worth more than £3m to a range of organisations that support east and south-east Asian communities, including Hongkongers who have recently arrived in the UK via the bespoke British National (overseas) (BNO) immigration route.
Of the grants issued, £39,990 went to Wai Yin Society, a charity that runs three community centres in Manchester.
In an open letter published on Monday, 28 groups that support Hongkongers accused members of Wai Yin Society’s leadership team of having “an unusually close relationship” with “the Chinese Communist party and its apparatus in the UK”.
The specific concerns relate to Wai Yin’s chair, Juanita Yau, and vice-chair, Karen Wang.
In 2021, Yau attended a virtual celebration hosted by the Chinese consulate in Manchester to celebrate 100 years of the CCP. The signatories argue that this amounts to “a public display of political support” for the CCP.
Since 2010, Wang has been the deputy director of the University of Manchester’s Confucius Institute. In 2015, she was involved in a visit by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, to the University of Manchester.
In a statement published on Wednesday, the charity said: “Wai Yin is a fully independent organisation. It also is not affiliated with the Confucius Institute nor does it run any programmes with them.
“We are a charity dedicated to helping the community, and therefore our presence at any other organisation’s events is completely apolitical. Our attendance at any event should not be construed as an endorsement or indication of any alignment with any political belief or ideology.”
Separately, a spokesperson for Wai Yin said: “We go to every event: Muslim events, Jewish events, Buddhist events, we even go to the king’s birthday … we attend all these as a courtesy for community cohesion”.
The charity said it had received supportive messages from some BNO service users, but that some families had already started to retreat from the community centres. The spokesperson added there was a risk that “people who need support in the future will be reluctant to approach us because of social media”
Confucius Institutes provide Mandarin and Chinese cultural lessons through British universities but in recent years, they have been criticised for their links to the Chinese state. Rishi Sunak had pledged to close the institutes, but since taking office as prime minister he has said that such a move would be “disproportionate”.
Public concerns about the institutes started to mount after tens of thousands of Hongkongers, many of them critics of the CCP, started to arrive in the UK after the BNO scheme was launched in 2021. They, along with activists from other groups persecuted by Beijing, such as Uyghurs and political dissidents, have been vocal about the dangers of engaging with the Chinese government.
Some figures in Britain’s Chinese community fear that engagement with China that was previously welcomed by the government in the “golden era” of UK-China relations has since been cast in a negative light.
Last year, Lord Wei of Shoreditch, the only ethnically Chinese peer in the House of Lords, stepped down from the Hong Kong Welcoming Committee, a civil society group, after he was accused of having links with the United Front, the CCP’s overseas affairs outfit. At the time he wrote that he “genuinely wanted to build bridges” between the UK and China, and that “the CCP is literally everywhere [in China] so any visit or meeting … would have involved ultimately the Chinese government”.
But as awareness of transnational repression, in particular from Beijing, has increased, some argue that any form of engagement with the CCP presents risks to dissidents.
Jabez Lam, a community worker for Hackney Chinese Community Services, which signed the open letter, said: “Hongkongers have genuine concerns about their safety and security … the onus is on the organisations serving Hongkongers to gain the trust of the users they aim to serve.”
Ivan Yim, a member of Hong Kong Aid, another of the signatories, said: “The original intention of the grant was to help those Hongkongers who had escaped political persecution by the CCP to integrate into British life. Still, if they cannot trust the organisations that support them, it puts the cart before the horses and wastes taxpayers’ money.”
The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, which administers the funding, is looking into the claims made in the letter. A government spokesperson said: “We continually assess potential threats in the UK, and take protection of individuals’ rights, freedoms, and safety in the UK very seriously. Any attempt by any foreign power to intimidate, harass or harm individuals or communities in the UK via third parties will not be tolerated.
“We recognise the importance of building trust with the community, which is why the organisations we fund through the Welcome Programme have to go through a thorough application process.”
Wai Yin was founded in 1988 by a group of Chinese women, according to its website. It provides employment, education and community services such as food parcels, arts lessons and gardening workshops to more than 1,000 service users.
On Tuesday, John Lee, Hong Kong’s chief executive, warned that eight overseas activists, three of whom are in the UK, would be “pursued for life” for alleged violations of the territory’s national security law. He said the authorities would continue to “monitor” the actions of the wanted activists – Hongkongers in the UK fear that CCP-linked community groups could be one way of such monitoring.
