Report: China paid European politician to attack VOC’s Dr. Zenz after exposing CCP crimes

The Financial Times released an article on recent evidence confirming that Beijing paid European far-right-wing politicians to shape public opinion on China, particularly attacking VOC’s Dr. Adrian Zenz Senior Fellow and Director in China Studies, for his work on the Xinjiang atrocities.

As the Financial Times writes, “Chinese spies ran a far-right Belgian politician as an intelligence asset for more than three years in a case that shows how Beijing has conducted influence operations in an effort to shape politics in its favour.

Daniel Woo, an officer in China’s Ministry of State Security spy agency, pushed Frank Creyelman, a former Belgian senator, to influence discussions in Europe on issues ranging from China’s crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong to its persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

As German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was about to visit China in late 2022, Woo asked Creyelman to convince two rightwing members of the European parliament to say publicly that the US and UK were undermining European energy security.

‘Our purpose is to divide the US-European relationship,’ Woo wrote in a text message to Creyelman.

The relationship between the Chinese case officer and his Belgian agent is documented in text messages from 2019 to late 2022 that were obtained from a western security source in a joint investigation by the Financial Times, Der Spiegel and Le Monde.

Creyelman did not respond to efforts to reach him by text, phone and email.

The exchanges reveal in explicit detail how Chinese intelligence tries to manipulate political discussion around the world in Beijing’s favour — a concern increasingly flagged by western security agencies.

While most big countries engage in spying, the MSS operation in Europe highlights one of the defining features of Chinese espionage: widespread influence operations aimed at shaping political debate that span Ottawa, London and Canberra. Washington has also repeatedly warned of covert efforts by Beijing to interfere with elections.

‘The MSS has spent decades trying to shape politics and global discourse on China. Recruiting and manipulating academics, policymakers, business leaders and, as this case shows, even politicians is part of that,’ said Alex Joske, a consultant at McGrathNicol and the author of Spies and Lies, a book about the MSS.

Woo operates from the Zhejiang branch of the MSS, according to intelligence officials from four western countries. Western intelligence has also tracked him operating in Poland and Romania.

In one exchange in 2021, Woo told Creyelman he had been tasked with ‘attacking Adrian Zenz’, a researcher who helped reveal how China detained hundreds of thousands of the mainly Muslim Uyghur minority in its far-western region of Xinjiang.”

Read the full article in the Financial Times.

Dr. Adrian Zenz is Senior Fellow and Director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Washington, D.C. (non-resident). His research focus is on China’s ethnic policy, Beijing’s campaign of mass internment, securitization and forced labor in Xinjiang, public recruitment and coercive poverty alleviation in Tibet and Xinjiang, and China’s domestic security budgets.