London’s new Chinese embassy attracts controversy and protests as Sino-British relations worsen
When Beijing purchased Royal Mint Court to use as its embassy in Britain’s capital, the investment was welcomed, but the intervening years have seen the British view of China sour over its treatment of Xinjiang and Hong Kong
At the heart of London’s East End, painted on the side of a former Tower Hamlets town hall, is a 12-metre-high depiction of a violent struggle – scenes of fists, police truncheons, interspersed with contorted, angry, defiant faces, black and white cheek by jowl, manning barricades. Mid-wall, Adolf Hitler is being swept away by the jeering crowd, to be duly exited from the scene far right.
The Battle of Cable Street mural retells how on October 4, 1936, London’s East Enders mustered a 30,000-strong ethnically and politically diverse crowd – Jews, Irish dockers, trade unionists, migrants, the English working class – to oppose a march by the British Union of Fascists led by Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts, goose-stepping with a raised armed salute like their German and Italian counterparts.
To the left of the mural, a banner is festooned with the slogan “Mosley shall not pass – bar the road to British Fascism”.
This epic street battle has for decades encapsulated the East Enders’ legendary character, the “Blitz spirit” that saw them through nightly Nazi bombing raids during World War II.
Local councillor Rabina Khan represents some of the Muslims who make up 38 per cent of the people living in this iconic London borough. She is helping to organise resistance to Beijing’s treatment of fellow Muslims and other alleged human rights abuses.
