Tengbo Yang, a Chinese who became Prince Andrew’s confidante in the UK, is said to have worked for a senior part of the Chinese hierarchy that Beijing calls a “magic weapon”. But this week in London, that weapon backfired badly.

While the United Front Work Department, where the UK intelligence agency MI5 says Yang worked, is considered by Beijing to be officially separate from the spy agencies, its overseas operations seek to gain influence for on China by using different methods – some open, some shady – to make friends and inveigle with senior figures to serve his cause, analysts say.

Yang, a 50-year-old Chinese national who has been banned from entering the UK for security reasons, was publicly named on Tuesday after a British judge lifted an anonymity order.

Separately on Tuesday, Christine Lee, a lawyer was charged by MI5 of “political interference” in 2022, lost a legal challenge against the security services. Lee made a large donation to Labor MP Barry Gardiner.

“Prince Andrew, Christine Lee and Barry Gardiner have done more in five days to push the issue of Chinese influence onto the political agenda than MPs, the media and others have done in five years,” Charles said. Parton, a fellow at the Geostrategy Council think-tank and a former UK diplomat in China.

“Useful idiots? You bet,” said Parton.

Alleged cases of Chinese political influence touching high-profile UK lives raise a series of uncomfortable questions for Sir Keir Starmer’s government, which is hopes to strengthen relations with China to boost economic growth and address common issues such as climate change.

The Chinese embassy in London warned the UK on Tuesday that “stop making trouble”, and slammed the “twisted mentality” of MPs in Yang’s case, saying he had developed business ties with Prince Andrew and access to a network of other senior British figures. in business.

An embassy spokesman described the United Front as “impeachable” and a means of “promoting . . . friendship with other countries”, and accused UK lawmakers of “arrogance and shamelessness”.

The United Front has long been known to operate abroad in the UK, the US, and other western countries, but the organization has a different agenda and thousands of people on its payroll, according to analysts. In addition to influencing foreign figures and the Chinese diaspora, it also conducts a wide range of domestic operationsincluding the “Sinicization” of oppressed ethnic minority groups in Tibet and Xinjiang.

The ultimate head of the organization is Wang Huning, Xi Jinping’s chief ideologue and propagandist who is a member of the seven-member ruling Politburo Standing Committee, the top leadership of the Chinese Communist party.

Wang also chairs the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Beijing’s advisory body, which meets annually alongside the country’s rubber-stamp parliament. Analysts see the CPPCC as a leading organization of the United Front, which brings together important representatives of organizations and companies from inside and outside the party.

“It is important to ensure that the general leadership of the Chinese Communist Party . . . developed in all aspects and at every stage of the United Front’s work,” Wang Huning told a United Front work conference in southern China in January.

Yang is an overseas delegate of the CPPCC and has been featured in state media interviews, highlighting the importance of his work in the UK to Chinese propaganda.

While the central mission of the United Front is to “unite all forces that can be united” under the will of the Communist Party and neutralize or weaken the invincible, Beijing views the organization as distinct from agencies of the Chinese spy agency, such as the Ministry of State Security. , whose operations in China and abroad it is mostly secret.

Besides the MSS, China’s Ministry of Public Security and military also conduct covert intelligence operations.

A sensitive part of the United Front’s operation abroad is the students. According to RESEARCH REVEALS last year the Henry Jackson Society, a think-tank, had more than 90 Chinese Students and Scholars Associations in the UK, drawing membership from nearly 150,000 mainland Chinese students at British universities.

But the report argues that CSSA is far from normal student societies. “The reality is that the CSSAs are branches of a central CSSAUK, managed by Chinese diplomats in the UK, and part of the United Front Work system in China,” it said.

Indeed, the report argues that the real role of CSSAs in the UK and in other countries is challenge mainland Chinese students who have views that are not in line with the orthodoxies of Beijing, especially the tensions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

“In the UK, individuals and organizations with clear and concrete links to (UFWD) are involved in technology transfer efforts, community monitoring, political influence and propaganda,” said Sam Dunning, director of UK-China Transparency, a campaign group.

But the amorphous nature of the United Front creates space for denial while also suspecting those who have contact with the organization, no matter how tenuous the links.

Several current and former Chinese students in the UK told the Financial Times that not all CSSA members were actively involved in the United Front. “Only a small minority of students seem interested,” said a former student at a top UK university, adding that “it’s very easy to avoid the attention of CSSAs”.

This ambiguity in the United Front’s operations is also reflected in some of the statements of the UK commission that ruled on Yang’s case.

It found that Yang “was in a position to create relationships with prominent figures in the UK and senior Chinese officials that could be used for political interference in the interests of the CCP . . . or the Chinese State”.

The judges further found that there was “insufficient evidence of links to the UFWD”, but noted a contradiction between some of the evidence and Yang’s “claims that he has no connection to any of the Chinese politics”.

In a statement this week, Yang did not directly refer to the United Front but insisted that he had done nothing “wrong or unlawful” and that the concerns raised by the Home Office were “unfounded”. .

“The widespread description of me as a ‘spy’ is completely false,” he said.