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Journalism of Courage
Reports of an alleged Chinese spy having access to high levels of the UK government have taken centre stage in recent days, with allegations of him leveraging a close relationship with Prince Andrew.
His identity was later revealed as Yang Tengbo, a 50-year-old businessman. According to UK court documents, Yang enjoyed an “unusual degree” of trust from Andrew, the younger brother of King Charles. Andrew was apparently ready to “enter into business activities with him (Yang).”
According to the BBC, Andrew said he “ceased all contact” with Yang after receiving advice from the government but did not specify when that happened. His office said they met “through official channels” and there was “nothing of a sensitive nature ever discussed”.
Yang was believed to be associated with an arm of the Chinese state known as the United Front Work Department (UFWD). He has denied the allegations, while a spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in the UK described them as an attempt to “smear China, target against the Chinese community in the UK and undermine normal personnel exchanges between China and the UK”. Here is what to know.
Yang is a Chinese national who studied at a university in China and then was a junior civil servant. In 2002, he came to the UK to study, eventually enrolling for a master’s degree in Public Administration and Public Policy at the University of York.
He founded a company in the UK in 2005 to provide travel services and later shifted into corporate consultancy. His details were released earlier this month when a Special Immigration Appeals Commission upheld a 2023 government order banning Yang from the UK on national security grounds.
In 2021, he was subjected to a port stop for unknown reasons and told to surrender his electronic devices temporarily. He later went to court to demand the deletion of his data. During this case, Yang was informed that he was believed to be associated with the United Front Work Department (UFWD).
The Investigatory Powers Commissioner ultimately allowed the data to be retained with the government in 2022. The next year, then Home Secretary Suella Braverman directed him to be excluded from the UK, saying it would be “conducive to the public good”. He challenged this decision, which the commission dismissed in its December 12 judgment.
The court documents noted that Yang had been in a position to generate relationships between prominent UK figures and senior Chinese officials that could be “leveraged for political interference purposes by the Chinese Communist Party (including the UFWD) or the Chinese State.”
They also had reason to believe that a senior adviser to Andrew sent a letter to Yang, confirming he could “act on behalf of the Duke in engagements with potential partners and investors in China.”
Yang said in his statement that as a Chinese national, “contact with the UFWD is unavoidable” for him, though he earlier said he “has no connection to the UFWD”.
The agency is not a part of the Ministry of State Security, the principal intelligence and security arm of China. The UFWD was established sometime before the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949. At the time, the CCP was rallying people to become its members, with the Nationalist Party (or the Kuomintang) as its main rival for political control of China. They eventually went to war, which the Communists won.
In his book Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping, author Roger Faligot wrote: “Through discreet and painstaking work within social, political, cultural, economic and religious organizations, the UFWD brought significant segments of the population over to the CCP’s cause. Both within China and overseas, it targeted Chinese people who were beyond the Kuomintang’s sphere of influence, or prepared to break away.”
Li Weihan, a friend of Zhou Enlai (who later became China’s first premier) was chosen to head the department. “…As far back as the 1940s, Zhou Enlai and his colleagues had set out to influence foreign parties and governments and obtain the support of public figures to help build a ‘new China’”, Faligot noted. The UFWD thus became “a major apparatus for influencing international opinion towards Chinese communism”.
One prominent example of its influence in pulling in “some big fish” was rocket engineer Qian Xuesen. Faligot wrote, “Trained in the US, Qian was working at the Caltech Aircraft Propulsion Laboratory in 1950 when the FBI was alerted to the fact that he was sending books and technical journals to China”.
“In 1955 Qian did return to Beijing to work on the development of Chinese missiles, and later the famous anti-ship missile Silkworm. He was not the only one: eighty-four Chinese scientists trained in the US returned to China because of the UFWD’s persuasive tactics,” he added.
But UFWD is far from being a thing of the past, with current Chinese President Xi Jinping calling it among the “magic weapons” of the Chinese state. Analyses from Western think tanks have said its messaging and activities have lately covered Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other regions traditionally critical of the CCP.
Globally too, suspected UFWD activities have been flagged by countries such as Canada, especially with the growing Chinese diaspora in many Western countries. A BBC report noted, “Cases like Yang’s are becoming increasingly common. In 2022, British Chinese lawyer Christine Lee was accused by the (UK intelligence agency) MI5 of acting through the UFWD to cultivate relationships with influential people in the UK. The following year, Liang Litang, a US citizen who ran a Chinese restaurant in Boston, was indicted for providing information about Chinese dissidents in the area to his contacts in the UFWD.”
