Since taking office in July, United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer has signaled a more conciliatory stance toward China. Chinese President Xi Jinping has rewarded this effort with an early phone call, hoping to woo Starmer just as he has wooed Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese away from his predecessor’s closer U.S. alignment. As in his policy toward Australia and the European Union, Xi wants to divide the U.S. alliance structure, creating space for the Chinese Communist Party’s gradual global supremacy.
For his part, Starmer wants increased Chinese investment into the U.K. and greater Chinese imports of U.K. goods and services. But Starmer knows that in order to win these Chinese favors, Beijing expects him to distance the U.K. from U.S. efforts to confront China’s aggression toward the Philippines and Taiwan and to address China’s intellectual property theft and human rights abuses. The center-left Labour Party prime minister appears willing to play ball. As compared to the preceding Conservative government, Starmer and his top ministers are adopting more hesitant rhetoric toward Chinese threats. And the message is clearly being sent to the rest of the government to do the same.
Enter Ken McCallum, the director general of the U.K.’s domestic intelligence service, MI5. Always a career member of MI5 rather than a political appointee, the director general reports to the Home Secretary. This government minister is roughly equivalent to the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security.
This background is relevant in light of McCallum’s annual threat assessment this week. Outlining Russian and Iranian efforts to variously blow up factories and assassinate dissidents, McCallum added that “China is different. The U.K.-China economic relationship supports UK growth, which underpins our security. And there are also risks to be managed. The choices are complex, and it rightly falls to Ministers to make the big strategic judgments on our relationship with China: where it’s in the UK’s interests to co-operate, and how we do so safely… Proportionate and targeted security protections are part of the foundation for a confident relationship with China that both enables economic growth and maintains the UK’s values… engaging with China on real opportunities where the risks can be sufficiently managed.”
What to make of this?
First, note McCallum’s emphasis on the responsibility of Ministers to set policy. This is a careful way for McCallum to let his audience know that he may not agree with government policy even as he is bound to follow it. Now note McCallum’s equally careful identification of China as a “complex” challenge deserving of “proportionate and targeted” security measures to avoid losing “real opportunities.” This is very different China-related rhetoric than that which McCallum offered in 2023 and 2022.
In a landmark July 2022 speech alongside FBI Director Christopher Wray, McCallum lamented MI5’s “previously constrained effort” targeting the “massive shared challenge” presented by “Chinese Communist Party aggression.” Last October, McCallum warned that 20,000 U.K. residents had been approached by Chinese intelligence officers on the networking website LinkedIn. He added that “Week by week, our teams detect massive amounts of covert activity by the likes of China in particular….” In another speech last June, McCallum explicitly identified “the restrictions of freedoms in Hong Kong and human rights violations in Xinjiang,” and “China’s escalatory activity around Taiwan.”
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McCallum is no idiot. Indeed, he is widely regarded as the most capable of the three U.K. intelligence chiefs (the others being GCHQ’s Anne Keast-Butler and MI6/SIS’s Richard Moore). The director general knew what he was doing in 2022 and 2023 when he called out Chinese human rights abuses, concerns over Taiwan, and “Communist Party aggression.” He knew his rhetoric would infuriate Beijing and possibly complicate U.K.-China economic cooperation. But he also knew that the government of the day was broadly supportive of his more hawkish statements. That has clearly now changed. That’s why McCallum’s rhetoric, likewise, now has changed.
Whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump takes office in January, they should be aware of this U.K. policy shift. It is increasingly clear that America’s closest ally is moving closer to China. And considering Xi’s aggression in cyberspace, in the air and on sea, and its broader strategic ambitions, this is no small concern.