UK government aggravates everyone with China espionage response
Tom Rogan
The British government has ended up aggravating everyone concerned in its effort to manage a Chinese spying scandal.
The situation involves two men who were arrested in the United Kingdom in March on suspicion of spying for China. The arrests were first reported this month, with a government announcement likely delayed so that Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence service could potentially identify other members of the suspected spying cell.
Particular attention has fallen on one of the men, 28 year-old parliamentary researcher Chris Cash. The other man has not been identified but may have been Cash’s conduit back to the Chinese intelligence apparatus. While Cash denies being a Chinese agent, he is believed by MI5 to have been recruited during a former stay in that nation. China’s Ministry of State Security prioritizes its recruitment of young Westerners who can then become long term agents inside foreign governments, defense establishments or high-tech industries.
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Yet, while revelations of Beijing’s spying on parliament have rocked London, we’ve seen some exaggerated outrage by British politicians and the media.
After all, it’s not exactly shocking that China wanted to get a spy inside Westminster. The U.K.’s MI6 human intelligence service and its CIA counterpart actively do the very same thing. Getting spies inside foreign governments is the nuts-and-bolts of human intelligence. Indeed, reflecting the vast diversity of its espionage efforts, China has even managed to get its agents elected in foreign parliaments, such as in New Zealand. The real scandal is not that China did this (everyone knows it does a lot of spying in lots of places), but rather that U.K. authorities detected Beijing’s espionage too late and that Beijing failed the number one espionage test: it got caught. That said, more pernicious Chinese intelligence activities centering on cyber-operations, intellectual property theft and its threatening of Western politicians are far greater causes for moral outrage.
The problem for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government is how it has responded to the spying incident. Which is to say, with a mixture of politically-motivated secrecy and hesitating weakness.
Alongside his foreign secretary James Cleverly and his new defense minister Grant Shapps, Sunak wants to maximize Chinese trade opportunities by attempting to keep Beijing happy. That means carefully but unambiguously distancing the U.K. from the U.S. on critical matters such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and scrutiny of Chinese investments. Cleverly sought to advance this interest in a visit to China last month.
On Sunday, however, the foreign secretary struggled as he was challenged by the media on whether he had raised the parliamentary spying case during his visit to Beijing. Even though there was no feasible security concern to his answering of that question, Cleverly offered the thin excuse that the government does not comment on intelligence matters. This shows either that Cleverly likely did not mention the matter, or that he fears stating he did so would aggravate Beijing. Regardless, this political secrecy will further aggravate parliamentarians who believe Sunak’s government is too weak when it comes to addressing Beijing’s threats.
Further complicating matters for the British government, Beijing is trying to pressure Sunak against responding more forcefully over its espionage.
In a Global Times editorial on Sunday, Beijing’s state media outlet warned that the “U.K.’s continued playing up of the spying allegations will damage relations with China, and the ball is in the U.K. court now to cut the losses in time.” This rhetoric reflects Beijing’s desperate lament over the end of former Prime Minister David Cameron’s “Golden Age” appeasement policy towards it. But Beijing’s rhetoric also illustrates its belief that pressuring Sunak remains key towards ensuring he does not align more closely with the U.S. Beijing wants to avoid new U.K. naval patrols in the South and East China Seas, for example.
Put simply, Sunak has caught himself between the need to show credibility that he’ll confront Chinese threats and the hard place of Beijing’s pursuit of his greater supplication.