Stirling teacher's Chinese 'blacklisting' claim tribunal dismissed

The Courier

24-04-2025

A Stirling teacher who claimed she was being blocked from certain teaching jobs has had her employment tribunal case dismissed.
During a dramatic two-day hearing earlier this month, Rong Rong MacLeod said she had been asked to 'be a spy' for her home country of China when she first moved to the UK in 1987, but refused.
She also accused specific Stirling Council staff of working to stop her from gaining employment in certain teaching roles, and of having links to the Chinese state through funding schemes.
Further claims included being asked to teach Mandarin for free, and being 'watched' by Chinese government officials due to previous political activism.
Mrs MacLeod's case argued she had been discriminated against by Stirling Council on grounds of her political beliefs and ethnicity.
However, the tribunal unanimously agreed the 63-year-old had not been subjected to direct discrimination under section 13 of the Equality Act 2010.
As a result, the claim was dismissed.
Several council employees appeared as witnesses during the hearings, including Stirling High School resource officer Fiona McGonigle and Bannockburn High School's head teacher, Karen Hook.
Both witnesses denied any improper behaviour or outside influence when it came to processing job applications submitted by the claimant, and said they had no awareness of the claimant's political beliefs.
Mrs MacLeod argued both Mrs Hook and Stirling High School Mandarin teacher Li Hong Yu had vendettas against her.
In their written decision, the tribunal said: 'There was no evidence we found of the decision-makers for either application taking race or belief into account consciously or subconsciously in any way at all.'
Throughout the tribunal, Mrs MacLeod maintained Chinese government interference was happening within Stirling Council schools via the Chinese state-sponsored Confucius Institute.
The tribunal's decision said: 'The tribunal must have an evidential basis for primary facts on which to make such a finding, and a belief from the claimant however genuinely held cannot be a sufficient basis for doing so.
'Ms McGonigle and Ms Hook rejected any suggestion of that, and we accepted their evidence.
'There was absolutely no primary fact evidence of any involvement by the Confucius Institute either directly or indirectly.'
There are currently four Confucius Institutes set up in Scottish universities, and dozens of Confucius classroom hubs servicing primary and secondary schools, as well as the influential Confucius Institute for Scotland's Schools (CISS).
These are mostly funded by Beijing to promote language and culture.
While giving evidence to the tribunal, Mrs MacLeod said she attended a public demonstration in London in response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in Beijing.
After that, she claims she received 'constant' telephone calls, and visits from three Chinese embassy workers who threatened her for speaking out against the Chinese government.
Prior to 1989, the teacher had been a member of the Chinese Communist Party, but gave up her membership following the events at Tiananmen Square.
She claims that when she moved to the UK to work in the textile industry, she was instructed to report back anything 'of interest to China'.
'I was asked to report everything I saw and learned,' she told the tribunal.
Mrs MacLeod's solicitor asked: 'Espionage? Spying? Were you asked, in effect, to be a spy?'
She replied: 'Yes.'
As The Courier reported in December 2024, Mrs MacLeod also claims she came face to face with a representative of the Chinese government more recently, just before the Covid pandemic began.