By Andrew Stuttaford
Saturday, October 18, 2025
According to Britain’s Labour government, the Beijing
regime is not really that unfriendly.
The accusations were sensational.
Prosecutors said that a young British teacher and a researcher at the heart of
Parliament had worked together as spies for China, funneling sensitive
information to Beijing’s officials.
But weeks before their trial was to
begin, the case collapsed. Prosecutors said it had fallen apart because the government
would not confirm that at the time of the spying, China represented an enemy or
a threat to national security. The two men, who had always denied the charges,
were acquitted.
Chinese state operatives present a
daily national security threat to the UK, the head of MI5 Sir Ken McCallum has
said.
In a speech, he said MI5 had
intervened operationally to disrupt Chinese activity of national security
concern in the past week.
Addressing a row over the collapse
of a case involving alleged spying on behalf of China in the UK, Sir Ken said
the alleged activity was disrupted by MI5 and that it was “frustrating when
prosecutions fall through” . . .
But witness statements from the
UK’s deputy national security adviser Matthew Collins – published late on
Wednesday – are clear that the Chinese are carrying out spying operations
against the UK.
In the documents, he said China was
carrying out “large scale espionage” against the UK and was “the biggest
state-based threat to the country’s economic security”.
Sir Ken described Mr Collins as a
“man of high integrity and a professional of considerable quality.”
In other China news, here’s Euractiv:
Chinese lawmakers told members of
the European Parliament that NATO shouldn’t exist, and spouted Russian talking
points about the war in Ukraine at a rare meeting in Brussels on Thursday.
The three-hour meeting between the
EU Parliament’s China delegation and members of China’s National People’s
Congress was the first of its kind in seven years, and came after Beijing’s decision earlier this year to lift sanctions on
current and former MEPs.
But rather than a diplomatic thaw, the meeting was tense and testy,
marked by the Chinese side challenging NATO’s legitimacy.
“During the meeting, the Chinese
side has questioned NATO’s right to exist. I haven’t heard this stated publicly
in this way before,” said Engin Eroglu, a liberal German MEP who chairs the
delegation.
“From the Chinese perspective,
there is no longer any reason for NATO to exist after the end of the USSR. I
find this absurd in light of Russian aggressions against Ukraine and Eastern
European countries,” he said.
Hal Brands in Bloomberg:
Chinese meddling in Europe isn’t
nearly as aggressive as Putin’s. But Chinese ships have been involved in cable-cutting incidents in the Baltic.
Chinese cyberattacks have become more ambitious and more common.
Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph:
China has overthrown the
Sino-British Agreement which governs Hong Kong for 50 years after the 1997
handover. Free speech and the rule of law have been subverted. Hong Kong
dissidents are held indefinitely without trial and/or tried on trumped up
charges. Some, notably the media entrepreneur, Jimmy Lai, are British citizens.
China spies on Chinese and Hong Kong people in Britain who
criticize the CCP. It even offers a large bounty to those who manage to lure
named individuals home. Here in Britain, dissidents are tailed and threatened,
barely protected by British authorities, and subject to attempts to hack their
emails. Dissidents have been physically attacked too.
Well, at least China doesn’t have a chokehold on the
West’s supply of essential rare earths.
Checks notes.
Oh.
No comments:
Post a Comment