(Beijing) China on Friday joked about a James Bond scenario after Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, warned about the activities of a suspected Beijing agent in Westminster parliament.
Posted at 2:24 p.m.
“Some people may have watched too many 007 movies,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters.
Mr. Wang was reacting to the release Thursday by British media of an MI5 warning notice accusing a certain Christine Lee of having “knowingly engaged in political interference activities on behalf of the United Front Labor Department of the Chinese Communist Party”, an organization responsible for developing ties between the Chinese regime and foreign entities.
British Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith, very critical of Beijing, expressed concern that Mme Lee was not arrested, only barred from entering parliament.
According to MI5, it played an intermediary role in disbursing “financial donations to political parties, parliamentarians, aspiring parliamentarians and people considering political office in the UK” on behalf of people based in China or Hong Kong.
Christine Lee is said to have paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to former Labor Party leader Barry Gardiner, as well as to the party itself.
She was also pictured with former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron in 2015, and on another occasion with former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn.
In 2019, Christine Lee was decorated by Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May in recognition of her contribution to good relations with China.
In response, Chinese diplomacy has ensured that it respects the principle of non-interference in the affairs of other countries. “We don’t interfere and don’t need to,” Wang Wenbin said.
Last week, the two countries had already had a scathing exchange about the famous British spy, following a parody of a James Bond film broadcast by the New China agency.
In this video, the official news agency joked that the United Kingdom would be more the target of American services than of Chinese spies.
In response, the head of British foreign intelligence, MI6, went out of his usual discretion to ironically thank the agency for its “free publicity”.