Original subtitles

Hello and welcome to Global Eye from the BBC World Service,

bringing you the very best

of our global investigative journalism and reportage.

I'm Shawn Yuan, a reporter with the BBC's Global China unit,

and today I'm in the Pacific Island nation of Palau.

You may have never heard of it,

or be able to point to it on a map,

but its critical location means it's now the staging ground

of a geopolitical flash point

between China, Taiwan and the US.

Also on this week's programme...

Police! Police! Stay where you are!

..BBC Eye tells the incredible story

of the so-called "Goddess of Wealth",

the Chinese woman behind the scam

that led to Europe's biggest Bitcoin seizure...

..and we'll hear how the Arctic has become a new front

in a strategic battle between global superpowers,

with tensions rising as the region warms faster.

The landscape here is breathtaking.

This cluster of more than 300 islands

is home to fewer than 20,000 people,

but every year, tourists from across the world flock here

for its world-class diving sites -

but its location puts you right in the crosshairs.

Palau has geographical proximity to China,

but at the same time formally recognised Taiwan

as a sovereign state.

Experts have warned that China is ready to retake Taiwan,

which it sees as its own - and, at the same time,

Palau enjoys extensive aid from the US

in exchange for Washington's unfettered

and exclusive military access -

and all of this means that this nation

has now become a front line

for a battle for influence among hostile superpowers.

Palau sits on the so-called Second Island Chain,

a strategic line of islands

stretching from Japan to Indonesia.

Control of Palau was critical

in the US's fight against Japan in World War II...

..and today is part of a line of defence

that the US sees as essential

to deter Chinese influence in the Western Pacific -

a fact that the US Secretary of Defense

emphasised on a trip to the region earlier this year.

Our goal is to achieve peace through strength,

by putting America first,

but that means working with partners and allies

throughout the region,

and in re-establishing

deterrence-building capabilities right here.

A series of military outposts on this chain

could be rapidly mobilised if a war breaks out with China.

This is Malakal Harbor, Palau's main port,

where diving boats and cargo ships dock.

It is also a site which Washington plans to upgrade

to enable access for larger military vessels,

and is part of an escalation of US military presence here.

On the northern and southern tips of the archipelago,

including where I'm standing right now in Angaur State,

you can see clear evidence of a soon-to-be-completed

American long-range radar system.

This could become crucial

for monitoring China's military activities

in the western Pacific.

Now China has taken notice.

Washington claims that Beijing

is trying to stealthily keep a close eye

on US military infrastructure by leasing land here.

While in Palau, we reviewed official documents

and found that Chinese businessmen

had leased swathes of land close to a US airstrip

and the planned over-the-horizon

long-range radar.

China's Foreign Ministry did not respond

to requests for comment on matters related to land leases.

The land has not been developed yet,

but it is causing concern in Washington.

The US's strong military presence isn't the only reason

why China is interested in Palau.

Behind me is a building

that makes this country even more important for Beijing.

This is the Taiwanese embassy.

China does not have any formal diplomatic presence here,

because Palau recognised Taiwan as a sovereign state.

Isolating Taiwan is key to Chinese foreign policy,

and that's why Beijing has been exerting its influence here

in every way it can.

Its trump card - tourism.

Over the years,

Beijing has banned state-run tour packages from China,

which was the biggest source of visitors to Palau,

in order to punish the country's relations

with Taiwan, according to Palauan officials.

It also reportedly offered Palau millions of tourists

in 2020 to pressure Palau to sever ties with Taiwan.

I caught up with the President of Palau,

Surangel Whipps Jr, while I was here,

and asked him about these geopolitical tensions.

We've had a relationship with Taiwan,

we continue to have a relationship with Taiwan,

and I think that should be clear to China,

and they shouldn't tell us that we have to choose.

If China wants to have a relationship with Palau,

by all means, you can - but you cannot tell us

that we cannot have a relationship with Taiwan.

Behind this geopolitical power struggle

are local Palauans who have expressed frustrations

of becoming pawns in this tug-of-war.

People have told me that they're worried

the US military expansion

might be inviting unwanted wars to the country,

and others are worried about mass tourism

impacts on their environment.

In the face of intensifying global competition,

Palau's future seems to be once again

in the hands of the world's major powers.

Now to the extraordinary story

of a woman jailed for over ten years for money laundering

in one of the world's largest ever seizures

of cryptocurrency,

which is now worth billions of pounds.

Qian Zhimin wanted to use her vast wealth

to become queen of her own land -

but following a seven-year

international money laundering investigation,

her past finally caught up with her.

The Global China unit has more.

Police! Police! Stay where you are!

Caught in bed - the Chinese woman at the centre

of the UK's biggest ever cryptocurrency seizure.

After several years on the run,

police finally arrest Qian Zhimin.

The Chinese cryptoqueen pled guilty to money laundering,

and that's kicked off a struggle

over who gets to keep the seized Bitcoin.

So, how did she end up in the UK,

and are her investors ever going to see their money again?

CALL AND RESPONSE

The story starts here in 2014,

in Tianjin, a city in northern China.

Qian Zhimin set up an investment firm

called Lantian Gerui.

The company promised investors huge profits

if they invested in their range of technology projects.

This early promotional video

claims the company used investors' money

to mine or generate new cryptocurrency.

These were the bitcoin mines.

An investor we're calling Mr Yu says the company drip-fed him

apparent earnings, just over £10, every working day.

That made everyone feel good.

It even gave us the confidence to borrow more to invest.

Including these loans, Mr Yu and his wife ended up

investing around £100,000.

I suppose we were just too weak to resist.

They pumped up our dreams, until we lost all self-control,

all critical judgment.

Investors got paid extra for each new person they signed up,

helping the scheme to reach every one of China's provinces,

pulling in 128,000 people.

The company's marketing targeted the middle-aged

and elderly, partly by

trumpeting its love of China as a nation.

Our love of country was our Achilles heel.

That's what they exploited.

They said they wanted to make China number one in the world,

to lift the Chinese people to

their rightful place in the world.

Investors like Mr Yu saw Qian as the genius behind

the company's incredible success.

Here, a group of investors hold up a flag

declaring their love for her.

One investor we spoke to said that, in person, she was

incredibly sharp and persuasive.

The company held events in

glitzy banquet halls and hotel ballrooms.

But Qian was famously secretive.

She wore masks at large events,

and used frontpeople to make sure

her name wasn't on any of the company's paperwork.

In mid-2017, the Chinese police launched an investigation

into Lantian Gerui, and the pay-outs stopped.

Investors were left high and dry.

Several hundred million pounds' worth

of investments disappeared,

and Qia was nowhere to be seen.

So, where did she go?

We now know this is where she ended up -

one of London's most exclusive neighbourhoods, Hampstead.

She had arrived on her fake passport

under the alias Yadi Zhang.

One of the first things she did,

posing as an antiques and diamond dealer who'd made her

fortune in East Asia,

was to rent this property for about £17,000 a month.

In her guise as an international businesswoman,

she recruited a former takeaway worker, Wen Jian,

as her personal assistant.

Messages Qian Zhimin sent to Wen

whilst they were looking for a cleaner

showed Qian was obsessed with security.

The new assistant Wen's search history

reveals a dawning awareness

that her boss is not who she says she is.

Before fleeing China,

Qian bought bitcoin using investors' money,

which she took for herself when she fled.

Using bitcoin to fund a lavish lifestyle proved difficult,

as she found out when she tried

to buy this home worth £11.5 million.

So, we're here now in the North London neighbourhood

of Totteridge Common.

This is the house - it's very grand, but also very discreet.

It's ringed with thick hedges and trees.

Now, when she tried to pay for the property with bitcoin,

her lawyers asked what the source of the bitcoin was,

to which she was unable to give a convincing answer,

and that raised their suspicions.

UK legislation aimed at tackling money laundering

led Qian's solicitors to

identify a potential compliance issue

with her bitcoin wealth.

One said that her boss had

started mining the cryptocurrency

and amassing coins just for fun.

But a check of the blockchain, the public ledger,

proved that the story didn't add up.

Solicitors alerted the police,

and in late 2018 they raided the Hampstead mansion.

Mr Qian was in a bedroom at the back,

and in a different room to Miss Wen.

Very large house, fairly messy,

and there was cash almost everywhere.

Thousands of pounds - bundles of £20,000 here,

£12,000 there, envelopes with money in.

There was even a coat hanging up in a cupboard

that had £3,000 in the pocket.

Hello, madam. I appreciate you're in bed.

I've just got a record down your name,

if that is all right.

So, what's your first name, please?

Yadi Zhang.

I know this is wrong, but my impression of her

was that she wasn't especially bright.

Years later, knowing a lot more about her,

that was an act, and she's very good at acting.

See, she needs lots of assistance. Yeah.

DC Ryan's team also found a document in which Qian set out

her dreams and ambitions,

all carefully itemised and costed,

some of them running into the millions of pounds.

These ranged from things like buying jewellery

and entering into UK high society...

Oh, here, for "Kingdom Design."

Well, I suppose that must be the kingdom of Liberland.

..to becoming Queen of Liberland,

an unrecognised micronation on the Croatian-Serbian border.

Ultimately, the pair weren't arrested.

But Qian, seemingly spooked, disappeared again.

She still needed to convert her bitcoin stash back into money.

And from afar, Qian continued

to supervise her assistant Wen Jian.

In desperation, Wen turned to a now defunct online forum

and found a stranger, calling himself Ricky,

who was willing to exchange crypto for cash.

On one occasion, she met him outside a pub

to pick up 20 grand for two bitcoin.

During a later search in 2021,

DC Ryan's team found this ominous note written by Wen.

Sadly for her, officers had already uncovered another note

containing passcodes for Qian's bitcoin accounts.

In reality, it was very basic.

The impression that I get is that Ms Wen and Ms Qian

didn't mix in criminal circles in the UK,

so they didn't really know the best way of laundering,

and they were trying to do the best that they could,

which wasn't particularly good.

It's also in 2021 that the Metropolitan Police

discover the true scale of Qian's wealth.

They finally unlock all the cryptocurrency wallets found on

laptops and hard drives they had seized three years earlier.

In total, they seized 61,000 bitcoin -

at the time, worth nearly £2 billion.

Police officers.

SHOUTING

Wait, wherever you are!

Qian was finally arrested in 2024, in York,

after she was spotted on CCTV

walking into a rented home.

Police!

I was surprised that she was in the UK.

I thought she would have left.

Her passport indicates that she did leave,

but we don't know how she got back into the UK.

She was very meek.

I went to get her from the cell,

to bring her into the interview room,

and she was walking very hunched over,

walking very slowly, very small steps.

Now, bear in mind, I'd seen her on CCTV

a couple of weeks earlier,

so I knew she could walk normally,

so this was all part of the act that she's trying to portray,

that she's infirm,

trying to encourage people to feel sorry for her.

After her arrest, Qian denied everything.

Qian argued she left China because of a crackdown

against crypto entrepreneurs in 2017.

But finally, at trial, she dramatically pleaded guilty

to charges of money laundering.

So, what now for the cryptoqueen's investors?

And what will happen to the 61,000 bitcoins

seized by the Metropolitan Police?

The Crown Prosecution Service

launched a civil proceeds of crime case in September

last year, which will try and identify

the rightful owners of the seized money.

The difficulty with this case

is that it's very hard for the victims

to prove their claim to the money.

Lawyers representing victims have told us

that only a tiny fraction of the total number of victims

have actually stepped forward.

And so, last month, the CPS revealed that it was thinking

about setting up an

unprecedented compensation mechanism.

But it's unclear if victims would get back

the initial value of what they put in,

or if they could also claim the massive rise in the value

of that investment, given the price of Bitcoin

has grown around 20 times since 2017.

But the UK Treasury could also stand to benefit.

Thanks to the incredible rise in the value of bitcoin,

that haul of 61,000 bitcoin is now worth more than £5 billion.

That's three times what the Government would have saved

through its proposed winter fuel allowance reforms.

Back in China, Mr Yu says his failed investments

led to his marriage breaking up.

I owed a lot of money.

I was afraid it would ruin my son's future,

so I gave up custody of him

and took on all the debt myself.

Sometimes I had no money to buy food.

I remember I bought a box of instant noodles

and lived on that for 15 days.

CALL AND RESPONSE

In 2022, some of Qian's investors called on

the Chinese government to make good their losses.

They're now calling on the UK Government.

We all read Sherlock Holmes,

and that's still the image of the ultimate detective.

To find all this bitcoin,

we are very grateful.

We hope we get our money back.

That's our great hope. To save the victims who are struggling

and suffering would be a noble act.

So, is it possible that there's

any of this bitcoin that's still kind of out there and

that hasn't been identified and seized yet? Yes.

We've got a wallet with 20,008 bitcoins

that in Ms Qian's notebook says "lost",

and those 20,008 bitcoins haven't moved since 2017.

And what would that be worth nowadays?

Well, we'll go for a billion-and-a-half.

Something like that.

Billion-and-a-half lost, just in the wind? Yeah.

Here's another piece of content the World Service has produced

in the last few days.

On this programme a few weeks ago,

we showed a BBC Eye Investigation

about last year's mass protest in Bangladesh,

where hundreds of people were killed.

EXPLOSIONS

Leaked audio suggested that

former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina

authorised the crackdown.

Now, Hasina has been found guilty of

crimes against humanity

and sentenced to death in absentia.

To hear more about this monumental case

and what this might mean for the future of Bangladesh,

you can find the full story, among others,

on the Global News Podcast on BBC Sounds,

or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's not just the Pacific region that's a battleground

for superpower rivalry.

Global powers have turned

their focus north to the Arctic.

Russia and NATO have increased

their military presence in the region,

China is expanding its influence,

and countries are vying for the resources

the melting ice might reveal.

The World Service's global journalism team explains now

why the Arctic has become one of the world's most

hotly contested regions.

Here's Natasha Peach's report.

What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.

There are things happening in the Arctic now

that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.

This is the region warming faster

than anywhere else on Earth.

And as the climate changes,

so does its strategic importance.

We need Greenland for national security,

and even international security.

Major powers are turning their eyes north,

looking for resources, new routes through the ice,

and a way to strengthen their position on the global stage.

A lot of countries have come out with Arctic strategies.

It's part of how the

international order is being challenged.

To understand this, we need to

look at the world in a different way.

Far from just a frozen ocean,

eight countries have territory

in the Arctic Circle -

the United States, Canada,

Greenland - which is a

semi-autonomous part of Denmark -

Iceland, Norway, Sweden,

Finland and Russia.

During the Cold War

between the US and Soviet Union,

going over the pole was a

potential route for missile strikes.

Both countries expanded their military operations,

with the US establishing a base in the north of Greenland.

But in 1987,

with the Cold War coming to an end,

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev

proposed the scaling down

of military activity in the Arctic.

What Gorbachev was trying to articulate

was a vision where the Arctic parties would focus

on areas where they could find common cause.

In the years that followed, the eight Arctic nations formed

the Arctic Council and agreed to work together

on research and environmental protection.

Arctic and non-Arctic states opened research bases,

with countries like China,

India and South Korea investigating

how the region impacts weather patterns

thousands of kilometres away in Asia.

The Arctic has had this reputation

of being sort of an exceptional

place of peace and cooperation.

That narrative continued

until Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

In 2022, Russia reopened the Cold War's fault lines.

Within months, Finland and Sweden applied to join Nato,

the Western military alliance.

The Arctic map became Russia on one side

and Nato members on the other.

The border between Norway, Finland and Russia

is effectively a front line for Russia and Nato.

The Arctic saw direct conflict when a Russian air base

in the Arctic Circle was attacked by Ukrainian drones.

The region is critical to Russia's military.

Most of its nuclear capability is based there.

Russia has reopened dozens of Soviet-era bases

and used Arctic waters

to test hypersonic cruise missiles.

Russian and American fighter jets have come

into close proximity in the skies near Alaska.

And the West is also expanding its Arctic presence.

2024 saw Nato's biggest drills

in the region since the Cold War.

The US Army has reactivated

a specialised Arctic force in Alaska,

and President Trump has proposed something bolder.

We need Greenland for national security,

and international security,

so I think we'll go as far as we have to go.

The US still has a military base in Greenland,

and the response to Mr Trump's suggestion was clear.

Polls suggest most Greenlanders

don't want to be part of the US.

The majority want to be independent.

For Donald Trump, a strong presence in the Arctic is key

to countering the partnership between Russia and China,

which the two countries

describe as "a friendship without limits".

You don't even need binoculars.

You look outside, you have China,

ships all over the place,

you have Russian ships all over the place.

We're not letting that happen.

Russian and Chinese coastguard ships have carried out

joint patrols in the Arctic Ocean,

and bombers from both countries

have flown together near Alaska.

The worry is that some of those drills, exercises,

patrols might generate a risky escalation,

a miscalculation.

China says its actions are

about deepening cooperation with Russia

and aren't aimed at third parties.

However, this relationship has tensions of its own.

There's been a danger, that Russia's fully aware of,

is that the more and more it collaborates with China,

the more it's giving China legitimacy

to act as a very powerful near-Arctic state.

China describes itself as a near-Arctic state,

despite being 1,400km from the Arctic Circle.

In 2018, it launched a range of investment projects

it called the Polar Silk Road, but it's hit roadblocks

in communities wary of being over-reliant on China.

They want to be a polar superpower.

We want a relationship to China,

but we do not want to be dependent on China.

There's no question that it was trying to sort of have

a significant impact in the Arctic,

but it hasn't come to fruition.

Most of China's economic success in the Arctic

has come from partnering with Russia on projects like

this natural gas extraction field,

and shipping this gas has been made easier

by the Arctic ocean's melting sea ice.

This was how much there was in summer 1979,

and this is in 2024 -

a reduction of 2.6 million square kilometres,

which is roughly the size of Argentina.

Many see this as an opportunity

to exploit the Arctic for shipping

during the summer months.

The Arctic Ocean is frozen for most of the year.

Even in summer, it's an unpredictable environment.

You're going to have a situation

where there are very small windows of time

where there could be the potential to transit,

and that doesn't offer

the certainty the shipping industry needs.

While questions remain about shipping,

there's something else the melting ice may reveal.

There's been this narrative of the last frontier of sort of

rich access to resources that

haven't been accessible in the past.

It's estimated that 30% of the world's undiscovered gas

and 13% of undiscovered oil is there.

Minerals, too, particularly in Greenland.

If the US were to gain access to Greenland's resources,

it could significantly reduce

our dependence on foreign suppliers,

particularly China, which currently operates

a virtual monopoly on the rare earth market.

But getting these resources is far from simple.

You're dealing with environments that are remote,

expensive to operate in, lacking infrastructure,

and where there is very little skilled labour close by.

Despite this, global interest in the region

and what further ice melt might reveal remains,

and that could introduce further competition

to this already contested region.

Thanks for joining me in Palau.

We want your feedback on Global Eye.

Let us know what you think

on social media, using

We'll be back next week. Goodbye.