Excitement ahead of coronation celebrations risk being overshadowed by row over Chinese involvement

Rising excitement ahead of last night’s coronation threatened to be overshadowed by a furious row over China’s involvement in the historic event.

Beijing confirmed yesterday that Vice President Han Zheng — who oversaw a brutal crackdown on freedom in Hong Kong — will attend Saturday’s event.

Lord Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, said China’s decision to nominate Mr Han as his representative showed that the country did not care about the UK.

In 2006, The Mail on Sunday revealed that Charles was unhappy with the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997, calling it ‘The Great Chinese Takeaway’.

He also described Chinese government officials as “terrible old wax museum” in his personal diaries.

It comes as the Mail reveals today that Chinese-made surveillance cameras banned by British government departments will ‘spy’ on coronation crowds.

Some 38 Hikvision facial recognition devices have been placed along the parade route from Buckingham Palace to Trafalgar Square, fueling national security fears.

Hikvision has worked closely with the Chinese military in the past, and British MPs say its cameras have been deployed in Uyghur internment camps in Xinjiang province.

The US government has banned the company from all federal agencies, and last November the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Oliver Dowden, ordered all government departments to remove Hikvision cameras over security concerns. Hikvision declined to comment last night for security reasons.

Lord Patten said the decision to send Mr Han – and the Foreign Office’s offer to go with him – reflected how China sees the UK.

“It’s indicative of the fact that no matter how much you cringe at China, no matter how much you try to give them face, they don’t give a damn about giving us a face because they could have sent a lot of other people,” he said. he told the BBC.

“They chose to send the man responsible for breaking their word on Hong Kong.

“If it wasn’t intentional, then it shows how casually they actually treat us. So no matter how hard we try to sit back, sometimes horizontally, to accommodate their own political narrative, I don’t think they really care about us.”

Mr Han, who recently became President Xi Jinping’s deputy, was responsible for Hong Kong affairs for the Chinese government between 2018 and March this year and oversaw Beijing’s crackdown on civil liberties in the area.

Former Tory minister Tim Loughton said: ‘This is clearly a calculated move by the Chinese communist government to send the architect of Hong Kong repression to such a high-profile occasion.

He should never have been on the guest list. One of the world’s largest democracies is in danger of being sucked out by one of the world’s largest totalitarian regimes.”

Former Foreign Secretary and Labor MP Chris Bryant added: “Why on earth should we invite this man who has deliberately trampled on democracy in Hong Kong and torn up China’s deal with us? It makes us seem weak and careless about democracy and international treaties.’

Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs spokesman Layla Moran said: “The presence of the Vice President of China at the coronation is a kick in the teeth for all those who have spoken out against the crackdown in Hong Kong – and for all Hong Kongers who have. has since fled to the UK.

“How did the Secretary of State let this happen?”

Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said this week he expected to meet Mr Han while he was in the UK.

Iran, Belarus, Russia, Afghanistan and Syria were all blacklisted from the coronation invitation list, but China and North Korea are welcome.

Mark Sabah, from the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, added: ‘It’s amazing that the line James Cleverly has put out is that the UK is tough – this is extremely kowtowing.

“The man responsible for the destruction of an international treaty is welcomed by the State Department. It’s like inviting your abuser into your own home. China poses a threat to our national security and we must harden our stance.”

Decisions about inviting foreign leaders to the coronation were made by the government, not Buckingham Palace.

The Foreign Office said: “Invitations have been issued to the heads of state of nations with which the UK maintains full diplomatic relations.”

Cheeky Puppeteer invitation should startle any lover of freedom, by Mark Almond

Some weddings have a nightmare guest who casts a shadow over the celebrations.

And since the coronation is a kind of wedding ceremony between King Charles and his people in the eyes of God, it is no surprise that it has just such a figure – his name is Han Zheng.

Communist China’s decision to send the man most responsible for cracking down on pro-democracy campaigners and press freedom in Hong Kong seems like a calculated disapproval of Charles III and this country.

And Lord (Chris) Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, is quite right not to join the establishment’s conspiracy to keep quiet about Beijing’s choice of the head of its delegation to the coronation celebrations.

After all, it was Patten who oversaw the transfer of Britain’s former colony to Beijing in 1997 on the principle of ‘one country, two systems’, a system negotiated and designed by Margaret Thatcher 13 years earlier to protect the democratic rights of his country. Residents.

In the quarter of a century since then, those rights have been completely destroyed and the architect of this policy was Han.

In the five years since his appointment as chairman of the Central Coordination Group on Hong Kong and Macau Affairs in 2018, the bespectacled, 69-year-old apparatchik led a brutal crackdown that saw no fewer than 150,000 Hong Kong citizens seek asylum in the country.

Within a year of taking up residence in a villa in Shenzhen, a sprawling metropolis on China’s border with Hong Kong, Han had proposed an extradition bill that could have allowed Hong Kong suspects to be sent to China for trial. democratic protests.

In June 2019, more than a million people took to the streets and authorities responded by detaining more than 10,000 protesters, many of them students, while 15 protesters were killed and thousands injured.

In the wake of this unrest, China passed a national security law that undermined Hong Kong’s autonomy and made it easier to prosecute demonstrators. And if Carrie Lam, then-CEO of Hong Kong, was the public face of the crackdown, Han was the puppeteer behind the scenes.

“This type of extremely violent, destructive activity would not be tolerated or accepted in any country or society in the world today,” Han said during a meeting with Ms Lam, who had been instructed to refer all decisions related to the protests to his office . .

As the man who served as mayor of Shanghai, China’s most important foreign trade center, for nine years, Han has mastered the art of muzzling rather than killing the geese that lay the golden eggs. That is the strategy he initiated in Hong Kong after taking charge of Beijing’s policy there. And while his actions received widespread international condemnation, many Western companies remained silent.

The behavior of banks such as HSBC has been particularly embarrassing.

At Beijing’s behest, it has frozen the accounts of activists and human rights groups, allowed the establishment of Chinese Communist Party teams at its headquarters, and even held hostage the pension assets of 96,000 Hong Kong citizens who moved to the UK. according to the Wall Street Journal.

Apologists for Han present him as an elder statesman, moved sideways from the Politburo last October to the largely ceremonial role of vice president.

But the idea that he’s playing a benign role on the international stage, like a Chinese version of Princess Anne, couldn’t be further from the truth. Indeed, some say that he is the eighth most powerful man in the country.

And China’s status as the West’s most menacing rival superpower should be no reason to kowtow when its imperious ruler, Xi Jinping, sends as his representative to the coronation the living embodiment of one determined to reject the freedoms that our monarch swears to uphold.

In this context, Han’s coronation invitation tells Beijing that we are too captivated by his economic power to confront it. And that will send shivers down the spines of freedom-loving people everywhere.