Christine Lee Exposed

Welcome to China Insider, I'm David Zhang. This is Christine Li, a CCP operative in the United Kingdom, who the MI5 British Intelligence calls quote, an agent of influence. She has shaken hands with Xi Jinping, and received awards in China for her excellence in overseas work. It was admitted by Meng Ying Liu, one of the CCP nationalists who confronted Dr. K, that Christine Li was at the scene. It could be this woman who remained behind but did not speak a single word, yet she was visibly commanding the scene and the situation. So who exactly is Christine Li, and why has the piano situation evolved into a spy warfare, and why has the MI5 sent out an alert for the first time in 80 years? And for me, the real question is, how many Christine Li is actually out there in the world doing this? Before we get started, let me talk about Blueberry Creative, my longtime partnership's ongoing health tea sale. It's almost Chinese New Year, and you can pick up a great tea product as a gift or for yourself, like this Taiwan High Mountain tea, or this Ginseng Oolong tea. There's also Korean Ginseng products on sale as well. If you spend $70 or more, you get free shipping in the United States, and for all other products, use code David for 15% off. So check it out if you want to support this channel or is looking for a gift for your loved ones. Christine Li is a UK-based lawyer, and she has reached the highest level of political connection, pictured here speaking to members of the British Parliament and at one point, the Prime Minister. She didn't start out doing influence operations on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. Having immigrated from Hong Kong at the age of 11 to Northern Ireland, she received her education and became a lawyer, got married twice, and had two children. After becoming a lawyer and having her own practice, she dealt with immigration and visa cases so she worked directly with the Chinese Embassy in the UK. Opening an immigration law firm naturally requires interactions with the Chinese Embassy. To do a good job in immigration cases, well, it definitely would not be possible without the cooperation of the Chinese Embassy. And this is when the Chinese Communist Party saw her potential and began to turn her into a spy. Since at least 2006, Christine has worked within the British political circle, Beijing, Hong Kong, to start multiple different organizations with one common goal, and that is to promote closer engagement between the UK and China. Now, believe it or not, this was rather common prior to, say, 2019-2020, before the world saw what happened in Hong Kong when the CCP brutally cracked down on protesters and of course the subsequent COVID situations, everybody thought that China was a nice one to play with. And Christine is now a part of what's called United Front Operations, which is co-opting local influential figures and organizations in the Chinese community to speak and act on behalf of the CCP. And she, of course, denies ties to the CCP. After the MI5 revealed her as an agent of influence, she subsequently filed a lawsuit against the MI5, citing alleged breaches of her human rights. Now, in this video, I'll be proving to you that her ties to the CCP are quite extensive, but before we talk about that, let's go back to St. Pancras for a second. And because we know that since 2022, MI5 has been watching her and they built a case against her, surveillance basically, it's a given that after giving out a notice about her activities of influence, since then she has been quite silent in terms of her public activities. But it is also every reason to believe that capturing her on camera at such an event to promote CCP media during the Chinese New Year would actually be a bad one for her case against the MI5. It would prove that she is involved in organizing events for China. After Meng Ying Liu stupidly revealed that she is in fact there accompanying her boyfriend, it is likely that Christine Li is either the organizer for this particular event or is now helping her with her public relations work in the subsequent days following the clash with Dr. K. Now, let's talk about her. Her law firm, Christine Li and Co, details their extensive work. For example, having served as legal advisor to the Chinese embassy in London, the law firm has offices in the UK as well as in China. They handle immigration, corporate and commercial law, and they claim to be able to build a bridge between Chinese and British cultures. Now, these are all words that sound very similar if you examine these overseas organizations or firms with close ties to China. It's always about building bridges for some reason. Obsession with infrastructure. Anyways, what's dangerous about Christine isn't actually her ability to lure politicians to extract information or sleeping with them. This is not what she does. That's a honeypot agent. Her access and influence combined with the ability, or I guess you would say fluency, in British culture, British law, having the money funneled by the CCP to buy her way into the British political discourse to exert Chinese Communist Party discourse power in the United Kingdom, that's the purpose. Ultimately, it is to serve as a megaphone for what the CCP wants to happen in Britain. Now, if you want to get to the CCP's cooperation, first you must get noticed, which means you have to cooperate with the CCP and their requirements. So Christine Li, of course, listened exactly to what the CCP wanted so that she can do her immigration law stuff in the UK. And she must do whatever it is required. In other words, you have to have a good relationship and to show that you are, I guess, say you have the potential to become one of the agents before they actually spend the effort on you. And this seems like what happened with Christine. Now, only this way can you actually get the results for what the CCP wants. And then they will start working with you. It's not clear to us, though, what exactly, you know, on the outside, we can tell sort of the deal that she's made with the Chinese embassy and turned the Chinese government. However, her subsequent development and performance really reflected the relationship is an unusual one. Now, public information shows that in 2008, Christine became the chief legal advisor for the Chinese embassy. And of course, providing legal services for the Chinese embassy already shows that she is a member of the embassy. And this is more than 10 years ago, right? This is when China, the UK and basically the rest of the world was still in the honeymoon period, so to speak. It was the golden age of international relationship for the Communist Party. She was once regarded as a guest by British officials. Whenever a CCP dignitary or a delegation came to visit, Christine would be appearing right in the middle of it. And she was sort of the bridge between the British Parliament and the Chinese side. Because of course, she was once served as the secretary general for the British Parliament's cross-party China group. And more on that later. But on March 9th, 2016, the British Chinese Hong Kong Network, an organization established by Christine in Hong Kong, held a New Year reception. At that particular cocktail reception, which was held on a yacht in Hong Kong, then deputy director of the coordination department of the liaison office, I did a video on this, Sung Wei, he was there as well. Now the liaison office is like the secretive spy agency of party-to-party engagement from the CCP. And I'll link that video here if you want to check it out. As well as pro-establishment legislative council members. So this tells you exactly what her goal is. It's to co-opt, to influence and to change the perception of other countries have on China. And of course, in this case is the UK. Now, as Christine's relationship with the CCP deepened, she was specially appointed as an overseas legal advisor by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council. And in 2018, this Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the CCP was placed under the United Front Department. And so then Christine is clearly becomes a United Front agent since 2018. And this is just four years before she was publicly made this agent of influence. So it shows that she was working for the United Front Department. And again, this is an influential organization, meaning that they want to influence a lot of different things. Then a year later in 2019, she appeared on a scene in CCTV, which is China's state media, as a representative of overseas Chinese. Now, Christine was invited to participate in the National Memorial Day activities of the CCP. She told the Communist Party official media that this history lesson of China's development has enhanced the, quote, dignity and self-confidence of overseas Chinese. Again, this is an influential talking point from the United Front. Now, before this, she took a group photo with Xi Jinping, as we now famously know, and they were all standing in the front row while they were watching the Memorial Day parade. And of course, when Xi Jinping also came to visit the UK prior to that, this was in 2015, by then Prime Minister David Cameron. Li was also accompanying Cameron as sort of a special, how do you say, advisor or VIP person, and also shook hands with Xi Jinping. All this tells you one thing. It is that Christine has expressed, has done actions, and has clearly participated directly in the influence work. And so that's all the evidence. Well, there's also more. In 2020, the Chinese embassy held a banquet with the former ambassador. And according to the report by The Times, Christine Li was invited to participate. There, she criticized the United Kingdom and other Western countries. Of course, this was after the CCP had started to beat up and essentially suppress the Hong Kong protesters in their democracy movement. And so according to the English version of the report, Christine Li told guests at The Times that the clashes between Hong Kong protesters and police were reported by Western media. This, of course, included the police brutality part. She said it wasn't accurate in representing the whole picture. Now, in addition, there's been many reports by Chinese Communist Party's official media saying, which also shows that Christine has a very close tie to the Chinese Communist Party. For example, in December 2018, she was invited by the United Front Work Department to attend an event which was commemorating the 40th anniversary of reform and opening up in Beijing. And she's also getting a bunch of awards for her role as Beijing's legal representative. So this set of very long record tells us two things, right? First, she speaks for the CCP in the UK. And second, her influence work carries that particular goal as well. So what exactly has she done? One of the ways is by donating to politicians. She has developed close relationships with at least one member of the British Parliament, Labour MP Barry Gardiner, who until 2022 was likely thinking that she was just trying to be a close friend who apparently believed in his political cause. When the MI5 sent out a parliament-wide notice, there was a sense of desperation. Everything Christine Li had done was technically legal. Donations and political contributions made legally, adopting advisory roles, the British Prime Minister vows legal, seeing her former interactions with David Cameron, all these things. Everything seems to be legal, right? But Christine's role until 2019 was basically a critical role in developing a warm UK-China tie. And so for the MI5, it's a problem because they need to find something that would actually prove she has caused damage. But she's done it so legally. Now, she founded or in part found, I guess, two really important organizations in terms of this line of work. First is the British China Project, which she started in 2006. That has received a now-rescinded award from the British Prime Minister, as well as the Chinese and Britain APPG, an informal group formerly chaired by none other than MP Barry Gardiner, the same guy who Christine gave money to. Now, I'm not here to bash all the members of parliament or anybody else, but it is to highlight the way that Christine operates is sort of playing through this line of law warfare, which is legality versus morality, so to speak, right? She's doing this legally, but is it moral? And then this is actually the influence process. But something strange did take place. Christine's son, one of her son, Daniel Welks, worked in Gardiner's office and was his diary manager or scheduler. And so on the day that Gardiner was questioned by the MI5, which is January 13th of 2022, her son resigned. Gardiner was named, of course, the shadow energy minister in 2015. And that's when Christine started to donate to him through the law firm. And one of the sum was about 180,000 pounds. That was actually used to pay for the salaries of two of Gardiner's associates or employees. One of them was her son. So why did Welks, the son, not resign earlier or later, but particularly had to happen on the day that Gardiner was being questioned? And then so you wonder the relationship, right? What exactly is happening? And how does all this fit into her infiltration into a spectrum of political differences across the palace of Westminster? There's another one, another MP named Davey, Ed Davey. In 2013, Christine personally donated 5,000 pounds to Davey, also donated to Davey's party. And Davey is the leader of the Liberal Democrats. As I said, Christine is doing this, but not out of the favor or fondness of them. She's doing this for something worse. The MI5 believes that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to cultivate a new generation of political candidates. They're doing this in the US as well. Ken McCallum, who is the director of MI5, said in 2022 that they're not always looking to influence a national leader, although sometimes they do, or someone at the cabinet level. What they're doing is they're willing to invest in the local level long term to develop capable people, somebody who has a great potential and is early in their stages of the political career. He also said that the Chinese Communist Party is increasingly mounting patient, well-funded deceptive campaigns to buy and exert influence. The CCP increasingly targets local officials in hopes that one day they get bigger. Just look at California with the case of Christine Fong. Now, Christine Fong and Christine Li, they're not related, but it makes me wonder if Christine is like a code name, you know, like 007, but Christine. Many British officials called the CCP's approach seeding, which is they believe that the Christine Li concept is to influence, but of course, she's done it much bigger, but part of it is to influence local officials willing to wait for years before getting the reward. Now, the CCP wants people in the UK to speak on behalf of Beijing, to engage in pro-China activities, ultimately to benefit the CCP on the international stage. But fortunately, I think to this point, the world's perception of the Chinese Communist Party has drastically deteriorated and decades of work is failing. And I think that's a really good thing. So for us to recognize the model of Christine Li is more important than ever to recognize how many more of the similar cases are happening, not just in the UK, but also across the world, Canada, the United States, parts of the European Union, South America, Asia, and yeah, there's much more to be discovered. Anyways, that's it today for the episode on who is Christine Li and what does she do. If you enjoyed the content, leave a like, comment below your thoughts and subscribe to our channel. Until next time, bye-bye.