In 2018, a prime piece of real estate near the Tower of London that was once home to a Cistercian abbey and later became the historic manufacturing site for British coins was sold to the Chinese government.
The £255m deal, brokered by Eddie Lister, one of Boris Johnson’s closest aides, provided China with a site to build a new diplomatic complex stretching across 20,000 square metres. China’s then ambassador, Liu Xiaoming, expressed hopes that the deal would “write a new chapter for a China-UK golden era”.
But over the seven years that followed, this controversial “super-embassy” plan – staunchly opposed by local residents, human rights campaigners and backbench MPs – was plunged into the deep freeze.
Its troubles began in December 2022, when Tower Hamlets unexpectedly refused to grant permission for the project, citing concerns about its impact on the area and its residents.
Frustrated with the quagmire of the English planning system, Chinese officials wanted the UK central government to intervene. But Conservative ministers, under pressure from their hawkish backbenchers, refused to get involved. So did the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.
The plans seemed doomed until July 2024 when, days after Labour came to power, China resubmitted its application for planning permission to Tower Hamlets council. China’s president, Xi Jinping, raised the matter directly with Keir Starmer in their first phone call on 23 August 2024.
Soon afterwards Angela Rayner, then housing secretary, used her powers to take the decision out of the council’s hands and into her own. This triggered a planning inquiry, which concluded on 10 June 2025, when its recommendation landed on Rayner’s desk. She has since been replaced in her role by Steve Reed, a close ally of the prime minister who is tasked with making the final decision.
This is no run-of-the-mill planning matter for the government. The fate of the super-embassy has become a test of good faith for Beijing in its relations with London.
But green-lighting the plans will draw a backlash from opponents, including residents who are already exploring the possibility of a judicial review. Critics say the site’s proximity to the City of London presents a security risk, while pro-democracy Hongkongers living in the UK say the super-embassy will become a tool for the Chinese Communist party to harass and even detain its political opponents.
Ministers have pushed back the deadline for taking a decision to 21 October after China refused their request to send unredacted drawings of its plans. Ahead of the government verdict, the Guardian can disclose details of Beijing’s behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign to overturn the block on its proposals – before Labour ministers stepped in.
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The decision by Tower Hamlets council to block the super-embassy proposal in 2022 came as a surprise to everyone, not least Beijing.
The council’s planning officers had recommended that the project go ahead. But elected councillors, who had received representations from residents, including Hongkongers who had moved to the area to escape Beijing’s oppression, felt otherwise. Tower Hamlets is home to the largest Muslim population of any borough in England, and China’s treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang was a matter of community concern.
China began exploring ways to challenge the councillors’ decision. Over the coming months and years Chinese embassy officials in London would hold a succession of meetings with influential community figures in Tower Hamlets as they looked for a way through.
These private discussions centred on ways for the Chinese embassy to improve engagement with the Tower Hamlets community in an effort to overcome local opposition to the plans. They also touched on the avenues open to overturn the decision, whether via legal challenge or government intervention.
In late December 2022 and early January 2023 Chinese embassy officials held their first two meetings with two Tower Hamlets community figures at an address on Welbeck Street in Soho, where a company called the UK International Innovation Centre (UKIIC) is based.
Present at the first of these meetings was Yang Xiaoguang, then minister-counsellor at the Chinese embassy in London. The second meeting was attended by Xia Yuzi, the more junior official in charge of the embassy application.
Others attending included Yu Xiong, a professor in business analytics at the University of Surrey and former director at the UKIIC, who had held leadership roles in groups connected to the Chinese Communist party, and Manzila Pola Uddin, a non-affiliated member of the House of Lords who is a former Labour councillor in Tower Hamlets and has publicly expressed support for the embassy plans.
In early March 2023 Xiong asked one of the community figures invited to the meetings to produce a business proposal – including costs and timeframes – for advising the embassy on how to challenge the council’s decision. There were two formal routes for doing so: submitting an amended application seeking to address the council’s concerns or escalating the matter by seeking a judicial review.
Xiong said he never passed this proposal on to the Chinese embassy and strongly denied acting as an interlocutor between the embassy and other parties.
Meanwhile, China used the Royal Mint Court site to host cultural events, including traditional live music performances and dance workshops. Beijing began to raise the matter of the stalled planning application with UK politicians and officials as it sought a high-level intervention from the government.
In February 2023 Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, declined to step in. Faced with questions about whether they would intervene, Conservative ministers stalled for months. When the deadline to appeal against the council’s planning decision finally expired in August, the Chinese embassy issued a statement accusing the UK of failing to meet its diplomatic obligations.
After this point China’s only avenue to reviving the plan was to submit a fresh application to the council, but Beijing wanted assurances that this time ministers would step in to progress it. None was forthcoming. To the public eye, this impasse appeared to have killed off the plans.
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Behind the scenes, Chinese officials resumed their meetings with Tower Hamlets community figures as they tried to engineer a breakthrough.
In October 2023 Uddin sent a WhatsApp message discussing the need to “sit alongside Professor Yu Xiong with regards to the Chinese embassy”. Uddin, who denied ever advising the embassy on its plans or raising the matter with Tower Hamlets council, said through her lawyer that this message may have related to the embassy’s community impact. She and Xiong attended a buffet lunch with Chinese officials at Royal Mint Court on 20 December 2023. The pair of them travelled to China and Bangladesh together in the months that followed.
On 20 February 2024, after another meeting, a Chinese embassy official, Dingkun Zhu, emailed a third party saying: “Thank you for the meeting yesterday, that was very helpful for us. Please find attached some detailed information about the new embassy project for your reference.” He included documents related to the application, including details of the Chinese embassy’s efforts to engage with the local community by distributing more than 23,000 flyers and organising public exhibitions.
On 11 March a lunch meeting with Chinese officials was held at the Cinnamon Club, a restaurant in Westminster, with Xiong and Uddin both present. Zhu messaged the third party afterwards and said he would organise a meeting with a planning consultant.
The intended meeting never happened: it was superseded by events. Four months later Labour had won a landslide election victory; China quietly resubmitted its application to the council, and ministers responded to Beijing’s requests to intervene. Starmer told Xi on the margins of the G20 summit in Brazil in November 2024: “You raised the Chinese embassy building in London when we spoke on the telephone. We have since taken action by calling in that application.”
The super-embassy’s opponents claim that Labour ministers must have privately given China assurances that they would approve it, otherwise it would not have re-submitted an application to the council. This argument – and Starmer’s on-camera suggestion that he intervened after being urged to by Xi – could form the basis for a judicial review if ministers give the embassy the go-ahead.
Whichever way the government jumps, this saga is far from over.
