‘They can reach me anywhere’: China uses financial tactics to force people to flee, report says | China

“YES didn’t feel safe, even though I’m not based on Hong Kong more,” Christopher Mung Siu-tat said after receiving tax bills from Hong Kong authorities. “The regime can reach me with their long arms wherever I am.”

Siu-tat, the executive director of the Hong Kong Labor Rights Monitor, a UK-based NGO, fled Beijing’s sweeping national security laws years ago. The letters are the latest example of a series of transnational repression (TNR) tactics the 54-year-old has faced over the past year.

“I was not surprised that the Hong Kong police and Chinese agents pursued me because of my political advocacy, but I was shocked that the authorities weaponized the revenue department as a political tool,” he said.

Two letters alleged that the UK-based trade unionist owed additional income tax and profit tax for the year 2018, as well as tax for a business he had never registered. Siu-tat then received another letter demanding retroactive taxes for the following year.

In 2023 he was one of several exiled dissidents with a premium placed for his arrest. The same year, his Family members in Hong Kong were interviewed. In 2024, Siu-tat’s Hong Kong passport was cancelled, and as recently as October 2025, he was visited by counter-terrorism police to discuss measures to improve his security in the UK.

The case is one of many that in a new report by the China Strategic Risk Institute on economic transnational repression, which analyzes how China uses financial leverage to force dissidents overseas.

Tensions between Beijing and the UK have thawed somewhat since Keir Starmer’s visit to Beijing in January. Further calls to deepen cooperation between the two nations came from China’s foreign minister on Monday during a meeting with British national security adviser Jonathan Powell, according to reports.

The report by the global think tank calls on the UK government to define economic TNR, to prevent politically motivated measures such as freezing bank accounts and funds, revoking professional qualifications and retroactive tax bills that leave individuals materially worse off.

“The reluctance of financial institutions to deal with economic TNR for alleged fear that it could harm their profits in jurisdictions such as China is precisely why the practice needs to be properly legislated,” the report says.

It highlights financial institutions in the UK and Germany that face obligations to uphold Chinese domestic security laws that are applied extraterritorially. The two nations signed an agreement to develop working groups with China to tackle money laundering, which the report says is at risk of being used to promote economic TNR.

It also points to coercion by Hong Kong’s Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF), in which the average Hongkonger has £26,376 in pension savings, according to official figures. Authorities in Hong Kong refuse to recognize British national (overseas) passports and BNO visas as valid for the early withdrawal of retirement funds. In 2023, those who moved to the UK on BNO visas raised concerns about HMRC sharing personal details with Chinese authorities as part of bilateral trade agreements.

A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy said: “These allegations are purely baseless and not worth refuting.

“Combating money laundering crimes is a shared responsibility of all countries, including China and the United Kingdom.”

Xiangui Fang, a former human rights lawyer, says he was forced to give up his license because he was outspoken about the decline of the rule of law in China.

After working on politically sensitive cases for a firm in Beijing, Fang left China in 2024 when he learned he was under investigation after raising human rights concerns at international conferences.

In a radio interview in 2025, he spoke critically about how the rule of law in China has deteriorated under Xi Jinping. After this, he was told that a judicial official in Beijing wanted Fang to apply to cancel his law license or face the suspension of his entire law firm.

In July 2025 he followed. Now he is out of work in the UK and unable to transfer his qualifications.

“I had no choice,” Fang said. “If the judicial bureau wants to punish lawyers, they should base (it) on a formal complaint,” he said, rather than “just based on political reasons.”