The Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London has been gathering intelligence on diaspora activists. Bounties have been placed on people who live in Britain. A democracy campaigner's father was arrested in Hong Kong while she was speaking in Washington. The arm is long.

 

 

 

In May 2025, Anna Kwok, executive director of the Washington-based Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, was in the United States when she received news that her father had been arrested in Hong Kong. She had a HK$1 million bounty on her head — placed there by Hong Kong authorities in 2023 — and the arrest of her father was, as she and human rights organisations observed, a transparent act of pressure against a family member as a proxy for a daughter beyond their jurisdictional reach. This is how transnational repression works in practice: when you cannot reach the person, you reach the people they love.

 

Kwok is one of nineteen people placed under HK$1 million bounties by the Hong Kong government since 2023, all living in diaspora communities in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada. The bounties — payable to anyone providing information leading to arrest under the National Security Law — are formally extraterritorial: the NSL claims jurisdiction over activities conducted anywhere in the world, by anyone, regardless of citizenship or residence. The legal reach of this position is contested internationally. The chilling effect it produces is not.

 

The HKETO London Operation

 

Perhaps the most significant documented case of Chinese transnational repression on British soil involves the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, a quasi-diplomatic body operating in London with diplomatic-style privileges under Hong Kong government authority. In May 2024, it emerged that the HKETO London had been gathering intelligence on pro-democracy activists in the UK and relaying information to Hong Kong security services.

 

This is not alleged. It is documented. The HKETO operates on British soil, under British tolerance of its quasi-diplomatic status, and has been conducting surveillance activities against British residents — some of whom hold BNO visas, some of whom have British citizenship, some of whom are pursuing legitimate political advocacy protected under UK law. The UK government's response has been muted. The HKETO remains operational.

"The Chinese Communist Party conducts the world's most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression."— Freedom House, Transnational Repression Global Report

The Self-Censorship Effect

 

The documented cases of transnational repression — the bounties, the passport revocations, the family member arrests, the HKETO intelligence operation — have a purpose beyond their immediate targets. They are messages, sent not just to the named individuals but to the entire diaspora community. The message: political activity in the UK is observed. Consequences may follow. Family members in Hong Kong are reachable.

 

Research on BN(O) diaspora citizenship published in 2025 found that, despite their deep engagement with Hong Kong political news and their strong political identities, many BN(O) migrants have refrained from collective political mobilisation in the UK. The researchers attributed this partly to low political efficacy — a sense that diaspora activism cannot change outcomes in Hong Kong — and partly to explicit fear of transnational repression. People with family still in Hong Kong are acutely aware that public political activity in the UK could have consequences for parents, siblings, and children they have left behind.

 

The Frances Hui and Chloe Cheung Cases

 

Frances Hui and Chloe Cheung, both staffers of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, are among the nineteen people under HK$1 million bounties. Both are based outside Hong Kong. Both have had their Hong Kong passports revoked — a practical tool of repression designed to create legal limbo: they cannot use their Hong Kong documentation, and must rely entirely on other travel documents, including the BNO passport that Hong Kong simultaneously refuses to recognise as valid identification for MPF withdrawal purposes.

 

The coordination of these tools — bounties, passport revocation, family member pressure, intelligence gathering through HKETO — reflects the sophistication Freedom House describes: not a blunt instrument but a calibrated system designed to deter, isolate, and discredit activists without necessarily resorting to the kind of direct action that would generate unambiguous international condemnation. It is repression with plausible deniability built in at every stage.

 

What the UK Government Can Do

 

The UK government has options it has not fully exercised. It could close or restrict the HKETO London pending investigation of its intelligence activities. It could formally designate Hong Kong's extraterritorial NSL claims as incompatible with UK law and publish that position publicly. It could impose consequences on companies like HSBC that are, in effect, enforcing Hong Kong government policy on British soil through the MPF freeze. It could, at minimum, make clear that surveillance of BNO holders by any foreign entity on UK territory will be treated as a hostile act.

 

What it should not do — and what the community has been watching carefully — is allow the rhetorical commitment to Hong Kong to serve as a substitute for the operational commitment to protecting the people who took that rhetoric seriously enough to reorganise their entire lives around it.