In its long-awaited report, a UK watchdog has slammed the British government for its “completely inadequate” response to Chinese espionage and interference, whereby it risked an “existential threat to liberal democratic systems.”
Four years in the making, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee’s 222-page indictment lays out how the government has systematically fallen short of putting adequate safeguards in place to prevent the public sector and “every sector” of the UK’s economy (even its nuclear industry), including universities, from being penetrated by Beijing.
China’s intelligence services, which boast hundreds of thousands of workers, were “aggressively” targeting the UK, the scathing report said.
To illustrate the point, just one day before the report’s publication, The Daily Mail brought an exclusive which reported on how a Chinese spy had allegedly infiltrated a House of Commons briefing by Hong Kong dissidents, who last week had bounties put on their heads by Beijing-controlled Hong Kong authorities.
The fact that it is “China’s global ambition to become a technological and economic superpower, on which other countries are reliant,” the report continued, “represents the greatest risk to the UK.”
To achieve its aim, CCP-led China “seeks to influence elites and decision-makers, to acquire information and Intellectual Property using covert and overt methods, and to gain technological supremacy.”
“The nature of China’s engagement, influence and interference activity may be difficult to detect,” the report stressed, adding that “even more concerning” was the fact that the government “may not previously have been looking for it.”
Intelligence agencies’ focus on covert Chinese activity, the committee says, meant that “they did not even recognise that they had any responsibility for countering Chinese interference activity in the UK.”
The UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee chairman, the Rt. Hon. Sir Julian Lewis MP, told fellow senior MPs how “China is increasingly thinking of a future in which it could be the world power.”
In this, Lewis added, the government is playing a part, as it has placed too much emphasis on investment over potential security harms. “The government has been readily accepting Chinese money with few questions asked,” he told reporters.
“But without swift and decisive action, we are on a trajectory to the nightmare scenario where China steals blueprints, sets standards and builds products, exerting political and economic influence at every step,” he warned.
Speaking to The Independent, former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, currently under Beijing’s sanctions, called the report “absolutely damning,” and the UK government’s policy on China a “shambolic mess.”
“It is one of the most damning reports of government security failings that I have read in the 30 years I have been here,” Sir Iain added.
Senior Tory MP Bob Seely, told the publication: “It basically substantiates everything China-skeptics have been saying. There is a battle of values in the 21st century, between open societies like our own and closed societies like China.”
Responding to the report, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak insisted,
we are not complacent and we are keenly aware that there is more to do. Wherever China’s actions or intent threaten the national interest, we will continue to take swift action.
As recently as December 2020, Ken McCallum, head of the UK’s domestic Security Service agency known as MI5, stated he thought the “challenge of the rise of China absolutely raises huge questions for the future of the Western alliance … None of us can give a confident long-term answer to exactly how the balance of power plays out globally across the next few decades but it is clear for all of us that this is, I think, the central intelligence challenge for us across the next decade.”
