Asked if China is an enemy of the UK, Chen Yonglin bursts out laughing, clearly thinking it’s a stupid question. “The Chinese regime,” he warns, “is the enemy of human beings.”

He continues: “China pretends to be friendly – always, always pretends to be friendly>” But he urges Britain and its allies to never forget: “China is very, extremely hostile.”

He doesn’t say this lightly. Twenty years ago, he was a diplomat at the Chinese consulate in Sydney. He was tasked with monitoring Chinese dissidents in Australia. Secretly, however, he was planning to defect.

His father had been murdered during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution , one of up to two million deaths in that depraved violence. A generation later, Chen was among the students in Tiananmen Square when a crackdown on their pro

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