According to the Telegraph, “China is funding pro-Palestine marches in UK.”

Let’s take a little look at the evidence as presented. US congressional investigators are examining £250,000 in “alleged” payments to a company “linked to” CodePink in the UK, from firms “connected to” Neville Roy Singham, a US businessman “accused of” financing pro-China content.

Four degrees of separation, with every link in the chain a massive hedge, from which emerges a headline asserting that the People’s Republic of China is funding the mass movement against genocide in Gaza. Not a single payment from the Chinese state has been identified. Singham is a US citizen who made his money building a software consultancy and now spends it on causes he believes in. Holding favourable views about China is not an offence in this country, however much some would like it to be.

What the “allegations” add up to, at most, is a US businessman with left-wing opinions funding a US peace group that has a British affiliate. From that, a national newspaper has manufactured a headline about Beijing directing the largest protest movement in modern British history.

Apart from anything else, we might expect the Chinese to be more generous. A trillion dollars in Belt and Road investments, but only a quarter of a million for London demonstrations? That princely sum presumably wouldn’t cover the cost of the placards; indeed it is slightly less than pro-Israel lobbyists donated to a total of 13 members of former Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s cabinet.

The charge sheet

What are the recipients of this funding charged with? Organising protests against Britain’s involvement in genocide. Campaigning for peace with Iran. Calling for the removal of British military bases in Cyprus. Visiting China and saying that it is not our enemy.

Every one of those is a lawful – not to mention obviously correct and principled – political position. Several are held by most of the British public: polling by YouGov in July found that 50 per cent believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza against just 17 per cent who believe it is not, and that 55 per cent think Britain should no longer treat Israel as an ally. Among people who voted Labour in 2024, 72 percent want arms sales suspended outright.

If Beijing has been buying British public opinion, it has secured remarkably good value, having apparently persuaded half the country at a cost of roughly £0.007 a head.

Cold War playbook

This is the same playbook as the original McCarthyite Red Scare. The historian Ellen Schrecker describes how segregationists in the American South had always insisted that the region’s black population was perfectly content with its subordinate status, and that demands for change were “the product of ‘outside agitators’.” Linking those agitators to the Communist Party, she writes, gave the segregationists “new allies as well as a more modern rationale” for their campaign against the Civil Rights movement. 

The same device had served US employers for decades before that: strikes were never the result of legitimate grievances but the work of outside agitators, “usually foreign-born.”

The point was never to prove foreign influence but to undermine the legitimacy of the cause.

The African-American civil rights group the NAACP – already by the 1950s a decidedly moderate organisation – was investigated for communist infiltration was, as Gerald Horne points out in his Black and Red (1986), among the first targets of the Red Scare. In 1950, singer and actor Paul Robeson had his passport confiscated for eight years and was systematically denied access to concert venues, the object being, as Horne puts it, to make him “radioactive.”

WEB Du Bois, a co-founder of the NAACP, then in his 80s, was indicted as an unregistered foreign agent as early as 1951. Martin Luther King was wiretapped by the FBI and briefed against as a communist instrument, with Hoover’s bureau formally designating him “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism” in 1963.

The attacks were not confined to those individuals. Schrecker’s verdict is that opposition to the Cold War became so inextricably identified with communism that “it was no longer possible to challenge the basic assumptions of American foreign policy without incurring suspicions of disloyalty.” That is the actual purpose of an exercise like this one: to make a set of opinions – against racism, war, genocide, apartheid – too expensive to hold.

Destabilising the West?

British people do not need the Communist Party of China to make them angry about the current state of affairs in Palestine. Nearly three years of televised mass killing. British-made components in the aircraft responsible. RAF surveillance flights out of the Akrotiri base in Cyprus feeding an army facing genocide proceedings at the International Court of Justice. Millions of people in this country have concluded that their government was complicit. Reaching that conclusion required no assistance whatsoever from Beijing.

As for China “destabilising the West,” that would be a huge waste of resources for a nation that has become known for its remarkable efficiency. Britain has produced a decade and a half of austerity, falling real wages, collapsing public services, sewage in the rivers and record levels of distrust in government, entirely without foreign help. If Beijing wanted to wreck British social cohesion it could act as the popular meme suggests: do nothing and win.

An authoritarian turn

Britain has already proscribed Palestine Action under terrorism legislation, and more than 3,500 people have since been arrested, many of them pensioners, under the Terrorism Act for holding pieces of cardboard. Only a small fraction of those arrested have been charged.

The machinery for the next step already exists. The Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (FIRS) went live last year, and its enhanced tier – which makes it a criminal offence to act at the direction of a specified foreign power without declaring it – currently applies to Russia and Iran. There is a sustained campaign to add China to the list.

If China is added to FIRS, and given the media’s role in establishing a link in the public imagination between the CPC and the Palestine movement, the state will acquire a mechanism for treating anti-war protest as a hostile foreign operation.

It’s essential that we see through this cynical manoeuvre, defend those being targeted, and resist the creeping authoritarianism that is being normalised in the name of “security.” The people marching for Palestine are not instruments of a foreign power. They are human beings who are disgusted with their own government’s complicity in genocide. On this issue at least, they represent the views of the majority.