China’s plan for a new U.K. embassy foiled by Uyghur activists and local allies

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.

“The deadline for an appeal has now passed. As such the applicant has foregone the opportunity to appeal the issued decision,” a Tower Hamlets council spokesperson told The China Project via email.

The English firm charged with reworking the site the Chinese government bought for $325 million in 2018 into an embassy twice the size of its quarters in Washington, D.C., was David Chipperfield Architects (DCA).

“We are not commenting on this project at the present time,” Dionne Griffith, DCA’s head of London communications, said in an email. DCA’s website shows the firm has an office in Shanghai and has completed several architectural projects in China’s financial capital.

Objections to the plans for the new embassy were raised at a marathon meeting of the Tower Hamlets council in December 2022. The decision to reject the plan was formalized on February 10, 2023. Constituents expressed concern about local security, “desecration” of the Royal Mint and of the “priceless heritage” of the area, a borough due east of the country’s financial hub, The City.

Fifty-one letters of objection submitted stopped the project in its tracks.

The construction plan, now rejected for good, would have partially leveled some of the site’s protected buildings and refurbished and restored others. Some local residents expressed discomfort at the idea of becoming neighbors of the Chinese Communist Party and expressed opposition over fears of espionage, terror attacks, and large anti-China demonstrations.

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.

The Chinese embassy and its architect partner DCA had planned a refurbishment of the 700,000-square-foot Royal Mint building at the heart of the Tower of London conservation area, a stone’s throw from the Tower of London (a UNESCO World Heritage Site built in 1087), and from Tower Bridge itself, a mecca for tourists from around the world.

Beijing does not understand devolution of power

Beijing was angered in February 2023 when the embassy plan was rejected at the local level and London Mayor Sadik Khan refused to intervene. China’s embassy in London accused the U.K. of “failing to meet its diplomatic obligations.”

Three months prior, in December 2022, after planning for the new embassy met its first hurdle at the local level, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson cited an “international obligation to facilitate and support the building of premises of diplomatic missions.”

“The Chinese side urges the U.K. side to fulfill its relevant obligation,” he said.

Rabina Khan, a Tower Hamlets councilor for 10 years until May 2022, spearheaded the campaign against the embassy plan citing Beijing’s “human rights record” and its “appalling treatment of Uyghurs in China.”

Khan, a Muslim who moved to the U.K. from Bangladesh as a young child, was opposed to the embassy from the moment in 2020 when she first saw a planning application. Her co-campaigners were Rahima Mahmut, U.K. Director of the World Uyghur Congress, Simon Chen, founder of the diaspora group Hongkongers in Britain, and Tenzin Konger, chair of the Tibetan Community in Britain.

Although human rights did not figure into the 74-page planning report submitted to the full council for discussion by the local planning authority on December 1, 2022, Muslims of Tower Hamlets, who form 40% of the population of one of London’s smallest boroughs, read between the lines, standing with exiled Uyghurs, as many have since the start of the crisis in their homeland.

A tradition of standing up for rights

“Right from the start of the genocide in 2016, the first place we reached out to was the East London Mosque in Tower Hamlets,” Mahmut told The China Project. “The area already has a strong tradition of standing up to the oppressors, fascism, regardless of faith.”

The Royal Mint site adjoins the scene of the infamous Cable Street race riots of 1936. “Mosley shall not pass — bar the road to British Fascism,” reads a mural decrying the leader of the fascists on the wall of the former Tower Hamlets town hall.

As Hitler rose to power in Germany and fascism threatened to spread across Europe, several thousand Tower Hamlets residents joined forces with the local Jewish community against the British Union of Fascists intent on garnering support for their racist agenda.

“We always welcome people to live here,” Khan said. “We welcome Chinese people. But the East End has a rich history of standing up for rights and in this spirit we had to stand against them.”

Little did Khan expect that her fight would attract global attention and rebuff China.

Stage one of her campaign — passed by the Tower Hamlets council in March 2021 — would, if the Chinese embassy were cleared to go ahead, have renamed the surrounding roads “Tiananmen Square,” “Tibet Hill,” “Uyghur Court,” “Hong Kong Road” and/or “Xiaobo Road,” in honor of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liú Xiǎobō 刘晓波, who died in Chinese police custody in 2017 at the age of 61.

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.”

Uyghurs across Europe were pleased that China’s plan for a super embassy in the U.K. had crumbled.

“A bigger Chinese embassy in important European capitals means a more important presence, and this causes fear and anxiety in the Uyghur community that is constantly subjected to transnational repression,” Zumretay Arkin, a spokeswoman for the World Uyghur Congress in Munich, said. “It would have been viewed as an implicit threat to our community.”

Enwer Erdem, a spokesman for the Dutch Uyghur Human Rights Foundation, said the intelligence gathering potential of such a well staffed and large Chinese embassy site would have worried Uyghurs in Europe.

“I am glad that the U.K. government has allowed the council decision to go through,” Erdem said. “China is committing genocide against our people and the U.K. should not ally itself with this superpower.”

Luke de Pulford, the executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, IPAC, an international cross-party group of legislators working toward reform on how democratic countries approach China, told The China Project that the site proposed was “totally inappropriate for the new embassy.”

“There is a strong case for moving the current embassy, but not to a site of major historical interest, where protest outside would be difficult, if not impossible, and where there would be a disproportionate adverse impact upon residents,” de Pulford said. He congratulated the residents’ association for “winning the argument on purely pragmatic grounds” but added that “meanwhile, questions still haven’t been answered about how this deal to buy the Mint came about in the first place.”

In December, Rahima Mahmut wrote: “Allowing the Chinese state to upscale their embassy into a fortress in the center of London is a disrespect to my community’s suffering and a danger to our safety. Those of us that speak out do so at great personal cost, the least our local representatives can do is try their best to protect us.”

China’s offer during the planning application to allay local residents’ fears by providing extra surveillance to the tune of $260,000 failed to impress Mahmut.

“One of our main concerns has always been the high-tech surveillance systems they would introduce to track down dissidents,” Mahmut told The China Project. “They have a record of transnational repression and more cameras would put exiles and activists at risk. Having the cameras and surveillance in the heart of London, showing its muscle and power — it is intimidating.”

“I hope this brings an end to Beijing’s plans forever,” Mahmut said.