One morning last August, a troubling message appeared in a social media group for Hongkongers in the UK. It was already a tense time to be an immigrant. Rioters, propelled by false claims online that the man who had murdered children in Southport was an asylum seeker, were descending on hotels housing refugees, trying to burn them alive.
The message alerted the Hongkongers to posts on far-right channels suggesting some new targets. “They all help refugees who come to the UK to take resources,” one of them read.
WhenFinn Lausaw the message he felt a pulse of dread. Not only was his name on the list of targets but so were two addresses where he had recently lived. In the London office where he works as a chartered surveyor, Lau stared at the posts. They looked like just more examples of the flood of hatred that poured through social media during the riots. But Lau believed this was something more sinister.
Lau, now 31, was among the activists whose role leading Hong Kong’s democracy movement catapulted them into confrontation with China’s authoritarian rulers. Many have fled into exile in the UK, where they continue to campaign. Educated, organised and articulate, they rank among the dissidents Beijing is most determined to crush.
Lau and his fellow activists have been called traitors, with bounties on their heads that are three times what the authorities offer for murderers. Relatives back home have been arrested and intimidated. As he read the posts, Lau suspected a chilling new tactic: an attempt to harness far-right violence.
Working with the anti-racism group Hope Not Hate, the Guardian found more than 150 posts from 29 accounts on three days in August 2024 that sought to draw the attention of anti-immigrant groups and the far right to Lau and other Hong Kong exiles. Cybersecurity experts who have reviewed the posts say they exhibited some similarities toa major online influence operation that a Chinese security agency is suspected of orchestrating.
As Keir Starmer courts Beijing in search of economic growth, his security minister, Dan Jarvis, told the Guardian: “National security is the first duty of this government. Any attempt by a foreign government to coerce, intimidate or harm their critics overseas, undermining democracy and the rule of law, is wholly unacceptable.
“We continue to assess potential threats and work with our partners to counter foreign interference. We will make sure the security services and law enforcement agencies have the tools they need to deter, detect and disrupt modern-day state threats.”
Posts on X inciting attacks on Lau and others were directed at far-right figures, including Tommy Robinson. “They’re even supporting the Muslim minorities too!” read one post denouncing Hongkongers, sent to the Reform UK MP Richard Tice. It gave the date and location of a planned gathering of Hongkongers a few days later. Posts on Telegram appeared in the channels of the leaders of the white nationalist group Patriotic Alternative.
Online incitement appears to represent a novel weapon in the arsenal that projects Beijing’s power. Lau is one of the opponents of the regime – Hongkongers as well as Tibetans, Uyghurs, Taiwanese and campaigners for democracy – subjected to what the US-based advocacy group Freedom House calls “the most sophisticated, global and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world”.
The Guardian has worked with a team of reporters convened by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) to document this campaign. TheChina Targetsreporting team has identified 105 victims in 23 countries and catalogued the techniques the regime uses as it pursues its opponentsbeyond its borders.
There have beenabductions,forced renditionsand harrowing accounts of China’s “black jails”. Compared with some of the more lethal methods used against opponents of Russian, Iranian, Indian and Saudi authoritarians, China’s model seems subtler, which may make it more effective. It relies on a powerful force: fear.
When the first posts identified by the Guardian appeared on 12 August last year, the targets had every reason to take the threat seriously. After a wave of riots, Starmer had said the government remained on high alert. He had cancelled his summer holiday to oversee the deployment of 6,000 police officers to deter further unrest. “We had Hongkongers in refugee hotels,” says Lau. “Some of them were extremely scared.”
The fake accounts tried to imitate genuine online interaction.
Minutes later, “Curry Curry” replied with a list of UK addresses of Hong Kong pro-democracy groups and activists, including one whose profile was even higher than Lau’s. “Everyone knows what to do now, right? I recommend visiting Nathan Law first!” read a post from an account under the name Declan Dene McFly. This account then posted a screenshot of Apple Maps with the location pointer hanging over an address for Law.
The Chinese regime saysNathan Lawis a criminal suspect wanted by Hong Kong police for endangering national security. Law, a leader of the movement that sought to salvage the freedoms promised to Hongkongers when they reverted from British to Chinese control, was imprisoned for months in 2017. He fought on. But when the national security law that Beijing imposed in 2020 meant protesters faced life sentences, Law joined anexodusof 100,000 Hongkongers who have come to the UK since the crackdown.
After Law was granted UK asylum in 2021, China’s foreign ministry spokespersonsaidthe UK “should immediately correct its mistakes and stop interfering in Hong Kong affairs, which are China’s domestic affairs”. After members of the US Congress nominated Law for a Nobel peace prize, Time magazine named him among 2020’smost influential peopleand Joe Biden invited him to a summit on democracy, an “extremely furious” Hong Kong security chiefcalledLaw a “modern-day traitor” who was spreading “lies”.
Boyish, bespectacled but toughened by years of struggle, Law, 31, has endured one of the most testing methods in the regime’s repressive playbook. His mother and brother were detained by Hong Kong police and interrogated in 2023. Though they were released – after his brotherdenouncedhim on Instagram – Law and his relatives know the authorities could come for them again.
The detentions came shortly after the Hong Kong government offered a HK$1m (about £100,000)bountyfor information leading to the arrest of Law, Lau, and other exiled dissidents. In May 2024, British police disrupted a suspected surveillance operation apparently directed by China. Law and Lau are believed to have been among the targets.
A few months later, the social media posts urging far-right groups to attack Hong Kong activists began. “It’s outrageous,” says Law, “the way they try to inciteviolence towards me and try to divide society. I hope no one will take them seriously.”
At first glance, the posts read as though British bigots were calling for attacks on the Hongkongers. But the language was oddly stilted. One read: “There are too many foreigners in my community now, and the security is worse.” Grammatical errors suggested a limited command of English. “They are all helping asylum seeker,” a profile named Yannie posted to Laura Towler, the deputy leader ofPatriotic Alternative. Members of this group have since been jailed for offences during the riots.
That post, like many of the others, appeared on Telegram, a Russian-founded app with few restrictions on what users can say. Others were published on X. Patriotic Alternative is banned from Elon Musk’s platform but he has allowed the far-right figurehead Tommy Robinson to return. “HK refugees keeps coming our country attributing to the effort of the following organisations and people,” someone going by MaryAnnie posted to Robinson. There followed a list of four Hong Kong pro-democracy organisations and two addresses for Lau.
One curious aspect to MaryAnnie’s tweet was that it was sent at 3.58am. Dozens more, from this account and others were sent at similar times – during the working day inChina. And many of the 29 profiles shared the same image of a list of addresses in a typeface usually used for Chinese. Several of the Telegram accounts have changed their profile names to Chinese characters. Three of the X profiles went on to post in Chinese. One of them follows only one account: China’s vice-minister of foreign affairs.
Experts at Graphika, a New York-based social media analysis company, reviewed the posts identified by the Guardian. The activity “echoes aspects” of a major Chinese online influence campaign that Graphika identified in 2019 and namedSpamouflage Dragon, the analysts said.
The Graphika analysts agreed with other experts who said the social media campaign against Hongkongers could not definitively be attributed to Spamouflage Dragon because of differences in the style of posting. But they said posts identified by the Guardian showed “similarities to past activity Graphika and others have attributed to Chinese state-linked influence operations”.
Analysts at the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center say Spamouflage Dragon’s “impact is limited but its ability to rapidly respond to current events and propagate narratives across various platforms highlights its potential to fuel division”. They believe “with high confidence” that it is orchestrated by China’s ministry of public security (MPS), a key agency in the authoritarian system.
In 2023, American prosecutors broughtchargesagainst 34 MPS officers in Beijing, accusing them of running “transnational repression schemes” in the US and worldwide. The MPS officers allegedly deployed a troll farm “to target people of Chinese descent who had the courage to speak out against the Chinese Communist Party”.
In response to the Guardian’s findings, a spokesperson for China’s embassy in the UK said: “The so-called ‘transnational repression’ by China is pure fabrication. China always respects the sovereignty of other countries and conducts law enforcement and judicial cooperation with other countries in accordance with the law.”
Under Xi Jinping, who since taking power in 2012 has gripped the country more tightly than any leader since Mao Zedong, what politburo members call “the overseas struggle” has been vigorously pursued. The ICIJ team has found China-backed groups monitoring and intimidating human rights activists at the UN in Geneva.
Chinese cyber-attackers – groups of whom have allegedlyhackedinto US presidential campaigns and critical infrastructure as well as UK parliamentarians’ emails – have been turned on the party’s opponents worldwide. And the posts inciting far-right attacks on Hongkongers matched a pattern identified by thecybersecurity experts who reviewed them. They say social media campaigns believed to be orchestrated by the Chinese regime use a vast network of accounts to give the impression of grassroots support.
At least one other authoritarian regime is suspected of using social media to exploit the UK’s social divisions. A network of Telegram channels with Russian links was recentlydiscovered, offering cryptocurrency payments as rewards for attacks on British Muslims and mosques. Gregory Davis, of Hope Not Hate, said the British far right were “seen as ‘useful idiots’ and a potential tool to destabilise the country on behalf of foreign powers”.
Laura Harth, of Safeguard Defenders, a group that documents the Chinese regime’s abuses, said Chinese troll accounts had been seizing on current events around the world as opportunities to target their victims. “Their aim is to make people afraid but also keep them occupied and distracted,” she said.
The message in the Hongkongers’ social media group alerting them to the posts was accompanied by a few words in Chinese: “Someone on the internet posted these photos and their addresses, and now people are worried about going to visit them and whether they will end up visiting someone else.”
Lau, scrutinising the message in his London office, spotted that it came from an account in the same name as one of those disseminating addresses for him and others to the far right. This convinced him that its purpose was to ensure he and the rest of the targets knew they were in danger.
Scrupulously polite, Lau is at pains to emphasise he bears no ill will towards Britons who, he says, may have been driven to unrest by deindustrialisation, the crime rate or the consequences of the 2008 banking crash. Nonetheless, the menacing social media posts have added to his sense of foreboding.
Lau was already watchful. In 2020, three masked men set on him as he walked along the Thames in west London. His last thought as he passed out was that he was going to die. He feels sure the Chinese regime had a hand in the attack. The police classified it as a hate crime but no charges have been brought.
Lau moves house often. By the time of the social media posts in August 2024, he was no longer at either of the addresses that were published. But he could not know whether his current address would also be posted. He has since moved again.
Although there are no reports that the online incitement succeeded in triggering physical attacks, Lau and at least one of the others targeted in the posts reported them to the Metropolitan police.
The force said it did not comment on “matters of protective security in relation to any specific individuals”, but it added: “Counter-terrorism policing remains alive to any attempts from across borders to target or threaten individuals who are in the UK and we continue to work extremely closely with our intelligence and security partners in the UK and abroad to combat any such activity.”
As far as the Hongkongers know, the force has taken no action in their cases. They are left to wonder who, if anyone, is protecting them.
Lau hopes that the police will look again at the attempted incitement. “I have become extremely cautious when I am on the street,” he said. “That’s the direct consequence. I keep looking round.”