Does China spy on Britain? Of course. But we have more important things to discuss with them
Once upon a time Britain would have sent a gunboat up the Yangtze River. That would teach those Chinese a lesson. To hear some MPs talk about Beijing’s espionage activities, you would think gunboats were already on their way.
Of course, it is malicious and hurtful for a foreign state patently to hack into Britain’s Electoral Commission and target senior parliamentarians – as the government on Monday claimed China did in 2021. It is equally malicious to fabricate MPs’ emails and use a Commons researcher as an informant. No less evil is the culture of fear sown among Britain’s 150,000 Chinese students by agents of Beijing, albeit tolerated by British universities greedy for money.
How to react is another matter. Rishi Sunak was quick to the fray. “We’ve been very clear that the situation now is that China is behaving in an increasingly assertive way abroad, authoritarian at home, and it represents an epoch-defining challenge, and also the greatest state-based threat to our economic security,” he said. “So, it’s right that we take measures to protect ourselves, which is what we are doing.” That was clear. It was also ridiculous. On Sunday night, an equally absurd BBC political bubble programme, the Westminster Hour on Radio 4, seemed to regard war as at hand. MPs demanded that the deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, “call out China”, rather as though it had broken a Garrick Club rule. Beijing was “unacceptable”. There should be “consequences”. The Yangtze gunboat was clearing its decks.
But ahead of that, Dowden was indeed having his say. There will be a reckoning, he promised MPs, more sanctions. Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, who is said to have been targeted alongside other parliamentarians in the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, was also blunt. China is not just a challenge to us, he said. It must be framed as a threat. “As they grow in power and potency, we are shrinking before them,” he said.
Still, I doubt if this gets even a news-in-brief in the People’s Daily. Britain’s parliament cannot be a big deal in the hierarchy of Beijing security. The fulminations of Duncan Smith will hardly have had the People’s Liberation Army straining at the leash. It is sound and fury, much like at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when any British minister meeting a Chinese host was told always “to raise issues concerning Uyghur human rights”. A Chinese acquaintance told me it became comical, “like the Brits saying grace or asking about the weather”.
British diplomacy still exists in a mist of lost imperial power. China, meanwhile, is expanding its global influence exactly as the west once did. Its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) now extends across Asia, Africa and Europe. Its investments have advanced China’s interests but also the lives of those it assists. BRI has, incidentally, been much to the gain of the City of London, in construction, banking, insurance and professional services. Realpolitik is how it works. The fate of the Uyghurs never stopped David Cameron and George Osborne begging for Chinese cash for power stations and railways; business was business.
Today the world’s relations with China are in one area crucial. That country is responsible for more than a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and rising. Britain is now actively participating in China’s proposed “greening” of its BRI programme, which is largely about infrastructure. Given that a third of all greenhouse gas emissions are from construction – a fact still ignored by British planning policy – this collaboration with China is central to fighting the climate crisis. It is not about diplomatic posturing. It is about something essential.
The reality is that all states spy on each other, mostly to no effect and at vast cost. Nothing justifies hacking other people’s emails, but a helping of public outrage and a few Chinese diplomats sent packing should be enough to restore Westminster’s machismo. It is also clear that international action is needed to police the darker regions of the digital universe, where the entire world is wandering without a candle.
But, for all these concerns, a sense of proportion remains the hardest but most necessary quality to maintain in international relations. We are told daily that global heating is the greatest threat now facing the world. Unless that applies only before lunch, then it should surely lie at the centre of all relations with China.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
jing allegedly accessing the personal details of about 40 million voters, held by the Electoral Commission. According to the government the attack – which occurred between late 2021 and October 2022 – had no impact on the electoral process or electoral registrations.
The second campaign appears more targeted. UK intelligence has said that it’s “highly likely” that APT 31 conducted “reconnaissance activity against UK parliamentarians”. The politicians targeted in the attempted hack were all prominent critics of China. British intelligence has said that none of their accounts were compromised.
In its statement on Monday, the US justice department, outlined a 14year-long global campaign that appears much larger in scale. Among the targets identified are political dissidents, critics of China, US government officials, political candidates and American companies.
Altogether, the targets number in their thousands and the justice department has confirmed that some of the activity successfully compromised “email accounts, cloud storage accounts, and telephone call records”. It adds that some of the surveillance of email accounts lasted “many years”.
Critics of China’s governments and supporters of Chinese political dissidents appear to have been a common target of the hackers.
The US alleges that in 2021, APT 31 targeted the email accounts of a number of foreign governments officials that were members of the InterParliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) whose stated purpose is to “counter the threats posed by the Chinese Communist party”. Among them were EU and UK politicians.
And in response to the 2019 prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong, APT 31 were said to have stepped up their targeting of activists and journalists associated with the movement.
New Zealand has said that some data was taken during the cyber-attack on its parliamentary counsel office and parliamentary service, but none that was considered sensitive or strategic.
How did the attacks occur?
Both the UK and the US allege that APT 31 used phishing techniques – in which victims are sent emails containing links that steal their private details – in order to access sensitive information.
US deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco said more than 10,000 emails – which appeared to come from news outlets, politicians and critics of China – were sent as part of the campaign.
According to the US, the phishing emails contained hidden tracking links; if the victims opened these emails, information including the recipient’s location, device and IP were transmitted to a server controlled by the hackers. APT 31 then used this information to enable more targeted hacking, such as compromising the recipients’ home routers and other electronic devices.
What was their goal?
Monaco has said the aim of the operation was to “repress critics of the Chinese regime, compromise government institutions and steal trade secrets”.
The US says APT 31 targeted “dozens of companies operating in areas of national economic importance”. They include businesses working in defence, telecommunications and manufacturing.
These activities resulted in the “confirmed … compromise of economic plans, intellectual property and trade secrets”.
The spouses of high-ranking White House officials and US senators were also targeted, along with campaign staff from both major US political parties. Despite the group targeting Biden’s election campaign in 2020, the justice department report says that the hacking did not further any “Chinese government efforts to influence the election”.
What’s next?
Tensions over issues relating to cyber espionage have been rising between Beijing and Washington for some time, with western intelligence agencies increasingly sounding the alarm on alleged Chinese state-backed hacking activity.
In the UK, the government has been criticised for being too slow to respond to the cyber-attacks, which took place between 2021 and 2022.
Luke de Pulford, the executive director of Ipac, said the government appeared “a little bit reluctant to say that China had actually done this”.
Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith, who was among those targeted by the hacking operation, described the UK response as “like an elephant giving birth to a mouse” adding “we must now enter a new era of relations with China, dealing with the contemporary Chinese Communist party as it really is, not as we would wish it to be.”
China has rejected the allegations that it or state-affiliated organisations were responsible for the attacks.
“China has always firmly fought all forms of cyber-attacks according to law,” a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Britain said “China does not encourage, support or condone cyber attacks.”