When news of DeepSeek’s triumph hit America, the markets descended into pandemonium. In a day, hundreds of millions of dollars were wiped off American technology stocks, with Nvidia leading the fall. Washington had restricted the sale of highly complex chips like Nvidia’s to Chinese companies in the hope of stunting their AI advances — and yet Chinese developers had succeeded even without them.

The naysayers soon piled in. American AI executives, aware that they had been brutally shown up, belittled DeepSeek’s advances. Cold warriors accused DeepSeek of ripping off Western research, pointing to the fact that its model appeared to “think” it was ChatGPT (for which there is a perfectly reasonable explanation), as well as lambasting R1’s reluctance to discuss political subjects that are taboo in China, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre.

They were all missing the point. This was not a fluke, nor the result of foul play, but a show of China’s engineering ingenuity. The real revolution lay in DeepSeek’s willingness to go “open source”. Unlike OpenAI’s products, any designer can look under the hood of a DeepSeek AI model to see how it works. DeepSeek has even released a detailed scientific paper explaining how it designed R1. Western coders are now busy remaking its model, independently and from scratch, using information released to the public.

Another extraordinary aspect of DeepSeek is that its models, once trained, require very little computing power to use. In the industry, this is called “inference”. Up until now, AI companies have tended to rely on vast data centers — energy-hungry buildings humming with interconnected computers — to run their AI models. A company will license out its AI model to other companies — a bank, let’s say, that wants to create a chatbot to field customer questions. For a fee, that bank can then send questions to the data center, where the AI model will process the questions and send back answers. That’s why you need internet connection to use ChatGPT.

DeepSeek works differently. Its free, open-source model can be installed wholesale onto a (slightly specialized) personal computer. A “distilled” or simplified (that is, still as adept at reasoning if not as knowledgeable) version of DeepSeek’s model can then be used and edited offline, for no extra cost. This is a colossal development. It means that any Chinese user wishing to discuss Tiananmen Square would simply need to download DeepSeek onto an offline computer, without fear of a CCP hack, and edit the model. Voilà: you’ll have permanent access to a high-performance AI that will talk to you about any heretical subject you like.

Why would a Chinese company share its secrets in the middle of a global tech race? From DeepSeek’s perspective, there may be a great advantage to remaining open source. Open-source technologies create communities of mutual benefit and learning that benefit everyone involved. In the world of cybersecurity, for example, there is a vigorous and partly open community of cyber-defense analysts all trying to locate, publicize and eventually “patch” up weak points in hardware and software. In such a scenario, there is advantage in collaboration.

Like any community, an open-source community is ruled by hierarchies. A company at the leading edge of such a network is likely to attract collaborators, and gain trust and credit. Since DeepSeek published its models, it has been contacted by dozens of leading AI researchers and companies in the US and China. It will now be busy making powerful new friends, and discussing new techniques. If it can build quickly on its successes, DeepSeek will gain much from sharing its research.

Having cottoned on to this approach, American companies are now scrambling to design their own open-source models. It looks like a new paradigm and has been compared to the release of the first open-source internet browser.

American tech leaders are still right to be alarmed. DeepSeek didn’t come out of nowhere, but has emerged from a vast ecosystem of Chinese tech talent. How many Westerners have heard of CATL, Hesai, DJI, SMIC, Oppo, Pony.ai, Zhiyuan? — among the world’s best companies in robotics, autonomous driving, drones, lidar, AI and battery technology. DeepSeek is really only the tip of the iceberg — one which the US is about to crash straight into.

For one thing, Huawei makes chips now — and it has been on the warpath ever since the US had one of its leading executives arrested in 2018 and then tried to destroy its phones and network technology business. Given DeepSeek’s very low inference costs, it doesn’t depend on sanctioned Nvidia ultra-advanced chips to run. It can work with cheaper Huawei chips — which are anyway growing more sophisticated every year.

Nor is DeepSeek the only up-and-coming Chinese AI company. Other impressive Chinese models have been released recently, such as that of sanctioned firm iFlytek, or Alibaba. All of this has taken place in spite of America’s best efforts to prevent or slow down the rise of Chinese technology. Some have even suggested that American sanctions helped Chinese chipmakers — since sanctions made it profitable to innovate domestic chips instead of just buying American ones.

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A clear narrative is emerging here. The Chinese, quite apart from IP theft, are bloody good at technology. They are not going to stop innovating. America can’t stop them, and they are well past merely “catching up”.

How did it all go wrong for the West? Steve Hsu, an American physicist, argues that China is eclipsing America when it comes to cultivating human capital in the sciences, math and engineering. Within a couple of generations, malnutrition (which stunts brain development) has been all but eliminated in China; the majority of children now graduate from high school, and roughly 60% go on to university. Nearly a third of students study STEM subjects at university, compared to just 3% a generation ago. And China’s best universities are now ranked as highly as those in the West.

Due to the size of China’s population, these reforms have left the country with a much larger, and still growing, pool of very smart and highly STEM-educated citizens. This pool is much larger than in India, whose comparable population continues to be blighted by illiteracy, malnutrition, and a lack of educational opportunity. And the long era of Chinese brain drain is finally over: more and more, Chinese STEM graduates remain in or return to China rather than trying their luck in the West, their prospects at home bolstered by a dynamic economy and improved standards of living. In fact, the humiliating trend has begun to reverse, with the annual number of scientists leaving the US for China increasing by a factor of five or so in the last 15 years.

Critically, and unlike in the West, China’s STEM graduates gravitate towards jobs in engineering, design, technology, and basic research rather than in finance. DeepSeek itself illustrates the precarity of China’s finance industry — it grew out of a quantitative investment fund that was hit eight months ago by a government crackdown on computer-driven high-speed trading.

Might an aversion to finance be a blessing for China? Steve Hsu likes to quote what billionaire investor Charlie Munger said of America’s elite culture: “I regard the amount of brainpower going into money management as a national scandal. […] We have armies of people with advanced degrees in physics and math in various hedge funds and private-equity funds trying to outsmart the market. […] It’s crazy to have incentives that drive your most intelligent people into a very sophisticated gaming system.”

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Not only are Chinese keeping more AI-ready engineers and designers, but theirs have a massive industrial ecosystem to play with — a contrast with deindustrialized America. In April 2022, Sun Ninghai, the director of the Institute of Computing Technology at China’ Academy of Sciences, gave a lecture to the 200-odd strong standing committee of China’s National People’s Congress, which comprises some very senior leaders. He warned that China must not go down America’s path of “contempt for the real economy” and diversion of IT talent into the “virtual economy” — consisting of virtual reality, the meta-universe, blockchain, and the like.

Sun’s argument is a persuasive one. America has neglected making useful physical goods, he says, with the percentage of jobs in manufacturing falling dramatically since 2000. He argues that far too much intellectual energy has gone into the false economy of financial speculation or virtual tech that doesn’t produce tangible goods. Google and Facebook’s revenue comes mostly from advertisements (77% and 98% respectively), while Amazon’s revenue comes from selling Chinese goods, which make up 71% of their products.

By contrast, Sun urged China to apply its AI innovation to the “real economy”. This means integrating AI algorithms into physical mechanisms across industry. The idea is to build AI innovation into China’s successful manufacturing and export-based model, bolstering the government’s existing efforts to surpass America technologically in as many industrial categories and supply chains as possible.

For China’s innovations are already coming in thick and fast. First there was Huawei’s superior 5G, then the PLA’s world-leading hypersonic missiles, which stunned the US military establishment. The story some media missed last week was the discovery of a vast and apparently secret experimental fusion research center in Sichuan province. If China could invent cold fusion, a means of generating energy by joining atoms together, that would be the ultimate Sputnik moment.

None of this is going to stop. We should expect more stunning advances from Chinese science and technology in the coming months and years. And unless the West begins to nurture and direct STEM talent more effectively, it risks falling behind. We must ensure more incentives for ultra-bright math graduates; the science faculties at top institutions must be insulated from campus culture wars; policymakers must listen more to scientists and technologists. But, above all, the West must start making things again, fostering the physical and intellectual proximity between industry and research that breeds real advances. We need to get our heads out of the cloud, and into the real world. For the Chinese have entered their era of innovation.

***

The views expressed here are personal, not those of UKCT.

At the root of Germany’s industrial woes is electricity, which is now nearly twice as expensive as it is for their American counterparts, and three times more expensive than in China. Prices have been rising since the early 2000s, but a policy embraced by the German government in 2011, following the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, sealed the nation’s fate. The proponents of the Energiewende (“energy revolution”) policy made the astonishing argument that Germany could rapidly abandon both fossil fuels and nuclear energy without losing its industrial edge. This was, as one Oxford study put it, a “gamble”. Or a game of Russian roulette, a cynic might have added.

The gamble hasn’t paid off. Even Germany’s gas-related dealings with Russia — a source of Russo-American tension since the Sixties — couldn’t stop prices rising throughout the 2010s. They were significant enough, however, to make the shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 nearly lethal for German industry. Today, electricity prices are at their highest since 2000, with total production hitting its lowest point since then.

This makes it incredibly tough for Germany to compete with China. Not only does Russian gas continue to flow to China in ever greater quantities, but the Chinese are also receiving sanctioned Iranian oil; installing more than 90% of the world’s new coal power capacity; putting the finishing touches on a hydroelectric infrastructure that already generates more power than Japan; and building ever more nuclear power plants. All this has ensured a fundamental manufacturing advantage over Germany.

But there’s more to the tale of German decline than cheap electricity. The past two decades have also witnessed an industrial revolution of sorts: at the turn of the millennium, China churned out cheap junk and not much else. Now, though, it is shaping up to be a formidable and sophisticated rival.

The car industry is a prime example. Today, Chinese electric vehicles are among the best and cheapest in the world, posing a menace to domestic production in Germany and the rest of Europe. But this was not always the case. As one post on r/CarTalkUK, a Reddit group with half-a-million users, puts it: “I remember only a few years ago when Top Gear went to China and showed us all those horrific knock-off death trap shit-boxes that looked like mutilated Minis… now those things are seemingly a thing of the past.” The EU is well aware of this development, having just slapped tariffs on Chinese cars that would make Trump blush. And it’s not just cars — China dominates many key markets, including drones, shipbuilding, solar panels, and wind turbine components to name just a few, and is making strides in other areas too.

Consider its acceleration. The nation started out by hawking junk, leveraging cheap labour to build up healthy export surpluses. This provided Chinese companies with the cash to invest in moving up the supply chain and, critically, to go shopping abroad. In 2004 and 2005, Chinese state-owned enterprises bought up F Zimmerman and Kelch, two of the world’s leading machine tool companies whose highly specialised equipment is vital for thousands of manufacturing processes. Of course, buying companies doesn’t necessarily hand its new owners the keys to the kingdom: transferring high-end R&D and manufacturing processes to China and training up loyal Chinese engineers and scientists who won’t emigrate can still be scuppered by export control laws, union action, political intervention and so on. But it’s a pretty useful strategy that sooner or later creates opportunities.

Another tool at China’s disposal has been the joint venture system, whereby German manufacturers who wish to set up shop in China are expected to share their critical knowledge and technology with their Chinese competitors. This kind of pact may seem utterly Faustian, but dozens upon dozens of high-profile companies have signed up. This includes Volkswagen, which now finds itself shutting down its German factories for the first time in history, in the face of ever more daunting competition from Chinese rivals.

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China’s twin strategies — joint ventures and purchases — were both turbocharged by the financial crisis. And still Germany did nothing. A series of new laws that might have enabled better government screening and intervention were passed in 2013, but not used for years.

By 2016, the threat could no longer be ignored. That year, Chinese interests took control of a hugely important German company, the robotics giant KUKA. Their products are used in a whole range of industries: from carmakers and battery manufacturers to medical device companies and aerospace companies such as Airbus. Along with another big deal that year, the purchase of the plastics processing machine company KraussMaffei, the alarm was sounded.

Yet Germany kept on hitting snooze. It wasn’t until 2018 that the government first cited security concerns to block a major takeover, this time of the metal forming specialist Leifeld Metal Spinning. The same year, then economic minister Peter Altmaier proposed a special government fund to buy German firms facing a foreign takeover. The idea came to nothing.

Slowly, however, the Germans have been wising up to the competition. A series of legislative changes have updated the 2013 foreign takeover screening tools, enabling more intervention in recent years. There have been around a dozen or so measures taken against acquisitions every year since 2019, with hundreds more scrutinised but left to proceed.

Arguably, this is all too little, too late. Thanks to decades of investment in tech acquisition through takeovers, industrial espionage and joint ventures, as well as complementary investments in human capital, China now has its own high-tech innovation ecosystem. The days of Chinese copying are not over per se, it’s just that copying is now accompanied by homegrown invention.

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Last year, China accounted for more than half of the world’s industrial robot installations and surpassed Germany and Japan in industrial robot density, a key measure of automation. This will potentially enable China to avoid old trade-offs associated with the transition from low- to high-end industry. In a contrast with the historical experience of some developed nations, China may not need to offshore low-end industry to wherever labour is cheaper, instead leaning on automation and cheap energy to keep supply chains national — a strategic boon in an era of growing tensions.

The US cottoned on to China’s industrial coup in 2016 and began responding. Donald Trump’s China policy, his “trade war”, was adopted and further developed by Joe Biden after 2020. The focus on technology, industry and China is now a central pillar of US foreign policy, and historians will surely view 2016 as a historical turning point in China-US relations.

By contrast, it has taken the EU eight years of damage to start a serious conversation about China — despite being a prime victim of high-tech industrialisation. And it only began in September, when former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi published a report on European competitiveness for the European Commission. This has since been promoted by the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen in the context of the escalating dispute about European protectionism against Chinese electric vehicles.

And still it seems that the EU’s response to China’s innovation boom will once again be late and ineffective. One only needs to look at the battery sector to see why. In an attempt to turn the tables, the EU has hinted that it will block Chinese companies from accessing its electric battery grants when investing in Europe: unless they hand over their superior battery technology. This is the very same trick that China played on Europe for years, but the EU’s hand is undermined by the weakness of European battery initiatives. Just last month, “Europe’s Tesla”, the “battery champion” Northvolt, declared bankruptcy.

Add to this EU infighting. The troublemaker in chief is Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, which argues against an “economic cold war” with China, having received nearly half of all Chinese investment into Europe in 2023, including funding for a major automotive plant that is now subject to retaliatory probes from the EU Commission. Germany must balance its own interests with those of an increasingly fragmented trading bloc.

With German industry collapsing, nationalism is on the rise once again. Since July 2023, the anti-EU, anti-immigration AfD has consistently been rated the second most popular party in national polls. And in June’s European Parliament elections, the AfD came second, winning most support in the old East. In September, it won a plurality in the eastern state of Thuringia, but has yet to form a governing coalition.

The region is also home to another radical political force: Sahra Wagenknecht, whose nascent Left-wing populist party is named after her. A half-Iranian former Stalinist and self-described “Left conservative”, Wagenknecht has attempted to unite anti-immigration, anti-Nato and pro-Russian politics, arguing that “Nato must be dissolved and replaced by a collective security system including Russia”.

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Both Wagenknecht and the AfD have been investigated by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) — Germany’s equivalent to MI5. In particular, the BfV has embroiled itself in legal disputes with the AfD, which it has successfully argued in court should be subject to surveillance on the basis it is a suspected anti-constitutional organisation. This is due to its supposed anti-Muslim, anti-refugee and anti-democratic rhetoric. The AfD has also endured espionage investigations involving Russian and Chinese financial and personnel infiltration.

For such a popular party to be treated as if it is a terrorist organisation raises questions about the strength of Germany’s post-Cold War regime. Does it risk shedding legitimacy by stigmatising widely held concerns? Or can it accommodate and temper the emerging political forces that have been nurtured by years of mass immigration and are now best set to capitalise on looming de-industrialisation? There is already evidence that voters in Western industrial areas may be the vanguard of possible AfD gains outside the old East — AfD politicians continually attack Net Zero, responding to fears about industrial jobs. Then there’s Wagenknecht, who warned ominously in 2022 that Germany risks experiencing “incredible deindustrialisation” without major reform. Her solution is peace with Russia and renewed gas imports. This autumn’s state elections in Thuringia, Brandenburg and Saxony suggest these messages are hitting home.

Despite the swell of popular discontent, there is little sign that Germany’s February election will change enough to reverse the energy crisis. At this rate, Germany’s industrial woes are set to continue, multiplying opportunities for China to steal a lead in key areas. Meanwhile, Russia will dangle the promise of unlimited gas before the eyes of the growing AfD and Wagenknecht movements. These insurgents may yet experience breakthroughs outside of the former Soviet East, prompting a constitutional crisis at worst, or otherwise forcing the established parties into major policy adjustments. Already, Scholz has announced unilateral steps effectively to suspend Schengen, Europe’s free movement system, after coming under pressure over immigration.

This is without doubt the most severe crisis Germany has faced since its rebirth 34 years ago, when the former president Richard von Weizsäcker promised that the fledgling republic would “serve peace in the world in a united Europe”. How, though, can Germany do so when both peace and a united Europe have proven so elusive? Uncomfortable as it is to admit it, history is far from over for Germany. The nation may yet decide that it is better simply to serve itself.

The saga isn’t over yet. David Johnston, a “special rapporteur” appointed by Trudeau to investigate the matter in March 2023, quit just three months later, blaming a “highly partisan atmosphere around my appointment and work”. Yet he was hardly the ideal candidate, coming across as a pal of both Trudeau and the CCP. Social media abounded with pictures of him beaming next to Chinese officials including Xi Jinping, who he’d met more than once while serving as the late Queen’s representative to Canada. Trudeau, meanwhile, described Johnston as a “family friend”.

China’s interference in Canadian politics has allegedly taken many forms. There are accusations of officials bussing in Chinese students to vote in Liberal Party nominations and whispers of covert donations, compromised staffers and the intimidation of political candidates and activists.

Before his resignation in June, Johnston issued a lengthy paper addressing the principal allegations. This included a quietly damning verdict on Han Dong: “Irregularities were observed with Mr Dong’s nomination in 2019, and there is well-grounded suspicion that the irregularities were tied to the PRC Consulate in Toronto, with whom Mr. Dong maintains relationships.” However, Johnston’s paper contained conceptual errors, downplayed certain claims and urged against a public inquiry.

For months afterwards, Trudeau appeared keen to avoid an inquiry, while his opponents pressured him to go ahead. Michael Chong, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, became a prominent voice in favour. For Chong, the issue was personal: in 2021, the CCP had launched a campaign targeting his family in Hong Kong after he had spoken out about ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang. Chong claimed that the CSIS withheld information from him about the CCP campaign, and that Trudeau also knew about it but did nothing to help. Trudeau, however, insists that he didn’t find out about it until early 2023 when it was leaked to the press. Neither version of the story is very encouraging.

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In September 2023, Trudeau finally announced the “Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions”. Its public hearings began in January 2024, accompanied by classified in camera interviews and disclosures. The focus so far has been on what was known by whom and when, and why information was or was not passed on or otherwise acted upon. Looming over Trudeau is a damning insinuation: that concerns about CCP activity dissipated in a mist of procedure because that activity benefitted the Liberals.

The inquiry has not gone smoothly. In February, two diaspora groups withdrew from the process. One, Canadian Friends of Hong Kong, which claims to have been targeted by the CCP, pulled out to protest the role that three Canadian politicians were to play in the inquiry: Han Dong, former provincial cabinet minister Michael Chan, and a controversial senator, Yuen Pau Woo. The group stated that giving these figures a chance to cross-examine witnesses and access non-public evidence presented a security threat and gave them a platform for propaganda.

It is, indeed, remarkable that Han Dong has been given a privileged role in the inquiry. This is a man accused of benefitting from the CCP “coercing” busloads of private Chinese high-school students into voting for him in 2019. (Liberal nominations do not exclude those who are not Canadian citizens and allow people as young as 14 to vote.) Chan, too, is open about his “close relationships” with Chinese diplomats. Leaked CSIS intel accuses him of meeting with Chinese intelligence and orchestrating Dong’s problematic nomination. In neither case is any criminal behaviour alleged.

This surreal situation raises an important question: whose responsibility is it to prevent foreign interference? To answer it, Canadians need to consider what should count as criminal conduct in a democracy where nearly a quarter of the population was born abroad, and many retain ties with foreign governments.

The case of Kenny Chiu illustrates the delicacy of this question. From 2019 to 2021, Chiu served as MP for Steveston-Richmond East, a swing seat where more than half of the population claim East Asian ancestry. Many were born in China and Hong Kong. In the lead up to and during the 2021 election, Chiu put forward proposals for a foreign influence registry, which if implemented might have forced groups working with the CCP to publicly declare their ties. Chiu’s bill raised hairs in Beijing. On WeChat, a social media network controlled by the Chinese government, Chiu was painted as an “anti-Chinese” fanatic who wanted to force Chinese Canadians to register as foreign agents or else face deportation. His goal, according to CCP propaganda, was to destroy Canada’s relationship with China.

When Chiu first raised concerns about this online crusade against him — alongside the then-Conservative leader Erin O’Toole — he was fobbed off by the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) body, which withheld information supporting his case. SITE determined that the propaganda wasn’t significant enough to publicise, nor the evidence it was “state-directed” clear enough. Yet an intelligence document tabled at the inquiry this year came to a different conclusion. It claimed that the timing and language of the campaign, as well as the fact that the outlets involved had partnerships with Chinese state media, “all suggest that these efforts were orchestrated or directed by the PRC”.

If this was the case, why did SITE belittle the issue? Such revelations expose the inadequacy of Canada’s pre-leak anti-interference systems, which  operated on the basis that there is an acceptable level of interference that is determined privately in government. The existence of foreign interference campaigns below this level should not be communicated to victim candidates or the opposition, let alone to the public. The decision appears to have been that WeChat should be given the benefit of the doubt and only deemed to be involved in manipulation if very high evidentiary thresholds could be met. But who could realistically expect to receive this sort of evidence? This lies solely in the hands of the China-based CCP members running WeChat, who have vowed to “keep the Party’s secrets” and who face imprisonment should they break their oath. We are not going to get hold of it.

Meanwhile, there is strong experimental evidence that WeChat’s CCP-directed censorship and manipulation systems operate for users abroad. This was ignored or treated as insignificant in Canada, which is peculiar considering that WeChat is used by roughly one million Canadian voters.

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The fate of Han Dong is no less bewildering. Sam Cooper, an investigative journalist who covers foreign interference in Canada, points to a series of meetings in 2019 between Canadian spies and Trudeau’s national security advisor. Officials have since told the inquiry that these meetings resulted in reports on Han Dong being repeatedly altered and not shared as widely or as quickly within government as they should have been. CSIS’s head was recalled to the inquiry because of a lack of clarity about the matter. Having led on its reporting and as a direct recipient of CSIS leaks, Cooper is now deep in the weeds of the scandal. He believes there may be a Watergate-scale coverup at play here.

Yet the evolution of CSIS briefings might reflect incompetence more than conspiracy. It could be that Canadian spies simply aren’t up to the task and are either making mistakes or failing to grasp the precise contours of the situation. This would fit patterns seen in other Western countries, where spooks have been struggling to follow the CCP’s influence networks. Britain’s leading spies are not alone in admitting they are playing catch-up in the fight against CCP interference and espionage.

When asked last year whether he was told about the allegations surrounding Han Dong before the 2019 election, Trudeau’s answer smacked of emotional manipulation. “There are 1.7 million Canadians who proudly trace their origin back to China,” he said. “Those Canadians should always be welcomed as full Canadians and encouraged to stand for office and […] We are extraordinarily lucky to have a member of parliament like Han Dong in our midst.” Eventually, he got to his point: “It is not up to unelected security officials to dictate who can or cannot run.”

Trudeau was careful not to make the same mistake when he faced the inquiry this April. Instead, he admitted that he had been told about Dong before the 2019 election, and that he had decided to keep Dong in place, with an eye on revisiting the matter after the election. But he never did. The Initial Report released in May of this year states that, even after interviews with Trudeau and his officials, “the specifics of any follow-up are at this point unclear, and I am not certain what steps were taken”. It is another quietly damning comment.

Throughout this mess, senior Liberals have downplayed the gravity of the CCP’s interference. As well as distracting from serious issues — raised most vociferously by Chinese Canadians — with oblique references to racism, they have been obsessive in underlining that the elections were “free and fair” overall. This seems to be an attempt to conjure up fears about a wave of Trump-style election denialism. But this is to pretend that swathes of the population have decided that CCP puppetry actually swung the election. As all Canadians who have followed this story know, that is not the point.

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A second wave of hearings are set to take place in the autumn, but the inquiry will not spell the end of the matter. Earlier this month, a 90-page report by the Canadian parliament’s National Security and Intelligence Committee (NSICOP) accused unnamed Canadian parliamentarians of “witting or semi-witting” participation in foreign interference, including attempts to influence parliamentary business and “wilful blindness” in the acceptance of funds. The report names China and India as the main perpetrators, saying of the former: “the PRC believes that its relationship with some members of Parliament rests on a quid pro quo that any member’s engagement with the PRC will result in the PRC mobilising its network in the member’s favour.” The Conservatives are calling for the names of these MPs to be published, while Canada’s public broadcaster has covered this latest phase of the scandal with reference to potential “treason”. Meanwhile, both NSICOP and the public inquiry’s commissioner continue to complain that Trudeau’s cabinet is withholding information from them — lending some credence to the suspicions of Cooper and others that the Liberal party is engaged in a coverup.

For anyone remotely versed in the CCP’s strategic framework, the idea that it should seek to lay down a bridgehead abroad is nothing new. One CCP handbook that I have been reading was printed 10 years ago. It states quite plainly the CCP’s intent to turn Chinese diasporic groups into a “new force for unifying the ancestor-land and rejuvenating China”. This is a reference to the CCP’s hopes for territorial expansion in Taiwan, the South China Sea and elsewhere, which will require compliance from Western powers. The CCP hopes that ethnic Chinese people in countries such as Canada will help secure that compliance.

Most of the diaspora want nothing to do with Xi’s dictatorship, but the CCP’s financial clout and its use of intimidation, censorship and aggressive espionage mean that Chinese Canadians need proper support from governments and civil society. This is where Canada’s Liberals have clearly failed. Wherever this scandal leads, the CCP’s goals are clear, and it is in this fight for the long haul. Multicultural democracies must be too.

His vision was fated to become reality. More than 70 years later, in October 2021, Western media outlets reported that the Chinese military had conducted two top-secret tests on a new kind of hypersonic weapon. Its flight closely resembled Qian’s sketch: an object was fired into near-Earth orbit, which then descended further before releasing a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) travelling at more than five times the speed of sound.

China denies this event had anything to do with the military. But Western experts believe it was a successful test of a fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS) weapon with an HGV element — in other words, a rapid and stealthy means of delivering nuclear or conventional ballistic payloads. Such a weapon could alter America’s nuclear “calculus”, creating the possibility of a nuclear attack hitting the US before it has time to react.

When the US tried to test a similar weapon in October 2021, it failed. And since then, at least one more successful Chinese test has taken place. The knowledge that the Chinese military is most probably ahead on hypersonic weapon delivery technology has ignited debate in Washington defence circles.

It didn’t have to be this way. Qian came to America as a “Boxer Scholar”, on a scholarship granted to Chinese students to make amends for America’s invasion and looting of China during the Boxer Rebellion. His career as a top defence scientist began in the service of the United States. He served as one of the leading aeronautics experts in the American military during the Second World War and went on to become a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-founder of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was described by his friend and supervisor, the Hungarian-American aerospace engineer Theodore von Kármán, as an “undisputed genius”.

But in 1950, Qian’s adopted home turned against him. A paranoid fog settled over America and Mao Zedong’s Communists, once supported in their fight against the fascist Japanese invader, came to be seen as ideological enemies. In the summer of 1950, Qian was visited by the FBI. Despite the fact he was married to the daughter of a prominent Chinese Nationalist, he was accused of socialising with American Communists. His classified security clearance was revoked, which forbade him from working on some of his most ambitious projects.

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Qian felt suffocated “under a cloud of suspicion”. He told his senior colleagues and the FBI that “the only gentlemanly thing left to do is to depart”. His friends in the military and at Caltech begged him to stay and fought to get his clearance reinstated. But after tentatively delaying his departure to China, he was arrested. His luggage was seized for containing boxes marked “secret”. Yet his allies continued to praise his talents and loyalty; J. Robert Oppenheimer even tried to tempt him to Princeton to work on computing alongside the celebrated “Man from the Future”, John von Neumann.

Later that year, the American immigration service announced its intention to deport Qian, though the plan was foiled by the State Department, which was wary of sending military experts to the Chinese Communists. In the end, Qian was condemned to a half-life in America: he and his wife lived under constant surveillance, and although he was able to continue working, his activities were strictly curtailed.

For a man of such talent, who had been devoted to America and felt torn about leaving, this intellectual ostracism proved unbearable. In 1955, Qian smuggled a note to the Chinese Communist Party, pleading for their help to get him out of America. Later that year, President Eisenhower authorised Qian’s release as part of a high-stakes prisoner swap with China in Geneva. In return, America brought home a dozen or so pilots captured during the Korean War. Zhou Enlai, a towering figure in 20th-century Chinese politics, remarked: “We had won back Qian Xuesen. That alone made the talks worthwhile.”

America would come to regret hounding him out. On his return in September 1955, Qian instantly became one of China’s most influential military scientists. Within a year he had helped to establish the National Defence Ministry’s 5th Institute, of which he served as founding director. As the Chinese government now puts it, this “marked the beginning of China’s aerospace industry and missile development”. The 5th Institute has since morphed into China Aerospace Science & Technology Corporation, the main contractor for China’s space programme.

When Qian set up the Institute, China barely had the technology to build a decent car, let alone satellites and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The supply chain for basic materials, including rubber, aluminium and stainless steel, was poorly developed, and the techniques for conjuring advanced parts from them were unknown.

One of the first things Qian did was join a delegation to the USSR to ask for military assistance. Joseph Stalin coughed up around 10,000 volumes of technical guidance, 100 advisors and a dozen or so missiles for the Chinese to copy. But the circumstances of China’s research programmes remained primitive. In the first few years of the Institute’s life, thousands of scientists worked for Qian using the most basic tools and under challenging conditions. Many toiled shirtless in a vast hangar with no windows or air conditioning, operating mechanical calculators by hand. According to Iris Chang, author of the exquisite 1995 account of Qian’s work, The Thread of the Silkworm, the first rocket tested by the 5th Institute was filled with fuel using a bike pump.

In 1960, the Soviets withdrew their support. But under Qian’s leadership, China made extraordinary progress in developing its armoury. In 1966, China became the first country to test “a nuclear warhead mounted on a ballistic missile flying over populated areas”. It was incredibly risky, but it worked. An atomic bomb was delivered from Jiuquan in Gansu to its target in the Xinjiang desert atop a Dongfeng-2 missile developed by Qian’s 5th Institute.

As one protégé put it, Qian was always “10 years ahead of time”. But once America realised his value, it was too late. Within a year of the Dongfeng-2 missile test, two American authors published The China Cloud: America’s Tragic Blunder and China’s Rise to Nuclear Power, in which they blamed China’s advances on the hysteria of McCarthyism, arguing that “without the intentional aid of United States authorities, China’s nuclear weapons and the rockets to carry them would not have been built until the late Seventies”. They also suggested that, had Qian been treated well, he might have stayed and become a leading figure in the American space programme.

This lesson mustn’t be lost on today’s cold warriors. Qian’s story — that of a brilliant and loyal scientist hounded out of America — is not unique. For all the talk of “China stealing US tech”, there is increasingly a risk that brilliant Chinese American scientists will be driven into the CCP’s arms. With science and technology more important than ever in the contest between the great powers, the US risks repeating old mistakes.

Consider the China Initiative, launched by the Trump administration in November 2018. Its stated goal was to stop the Chinese from stealing American technology and intellectual property. But it was ill-defined from the start: referring to both Chinese hacking of leading companies and to the only tangentially related charge of “Chinese propaganda disseminated on our campuses”. When it was shut down in 2022, officials noted that it was nothing more than a “grouping” of cases “under the China Initiative rubric”. “[This] helped give rise to a harmful perception that the department applies a lower standard to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct related to that country or that we in some way view people with racial, ethnic or familial ties to China differently.”

This wasn’t aided by the fact that the Initiative appeared to lack a competent, sensitive and indeed honest approach. In one case, the FBI admitted to falsifying evidence. In another, the prosecutors admitted to misunderstanding the funding disclosure rules a Chinese-origin scientists was alleged to have broken, and dropped the case. Most of the cases involved scientists, including white Americans, failing to disclose links to China in applications for American funding.

The Initiative left a deep impression on Chinese talent in America, and helped create an atmosphere of hostility that would have been familiar to Qian. One study suggests that significant portions of Chinese-descent American scientists feel unwelcome, unsafe and fearful of conducting research or applying for grants. The American scientific community is not happy about this: articles in science magazines and a growing body of evidence point to the damage it has done to America’s ability to attract and retain precious Chinese scientific talent.

It’s not just Republicans scaring off scholars. The liberal establishment’s insistence on affirmative action for black and Hispanic students has long resulted in discrimination against Asian Americans, who tend to outperform other ethnic groups academically. At Harvard, an internal study estimated that if admissions were based on academic performance alone, the proportion of Asian Americans would double to 43%. It’s a similar story at other Ivy League universities.  Some Chinese scientists considering raising a family in America look upon this discrimination and despair.

Is it any surprise then that America is losing Chinese talent? Now, more than ever, brilliant young Chinese scientists who have studied in the US seem to end up going back home. According to one report on Tsinghua University, by many accounts China’s finest, the number of graduates going to the US to continue their studies has plummeted — while the numbers going to Singapore and the UK have risen and remained stable respectively. One study focusing on leading researchers in the field of artificial intelligence concludes that America still receives a net benefit from the Chinese brain drain — but much less so than a few years ago.

Meanwhile, China has gone to great lengths to grow its pool of top scientists. A focus on investment into education, on sponsoring study abroad, on promoting Chinese traditions that encourage intensive schooling, and on providing grants, materiel, sponsorship and prestige to mature scientists via the “Thousand Talents” programme and others like it have paid off. According to one report, analysing the top 10% most highly cited research publications from the past five years in 44 key technology areas, China’s institutions and their scientists are leading the world in 37 of 44 key technology areas such as batteries, synthetic biology, 6G, quantum sensing, and drone swarms. By 2050, according to one estimate, the highly-able STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) workforce in China could be 10 times larger than in the US and comparable with or larger than the rest of the world combined.

In this context, America’s efforts to limit Chinese companies’ access to high-tech chips have proved futile. Last October, the launch of a new Huawei phone shocked Washington because it contained a chip of a quality that US sanctions were supposed to have rendered unattainable. Starved of American chips, Huawei has had to innovate or perish. It has innovated.

What Washington failed to realise is that Chinese technology theft is no longer the only problem. IP heists have been crucial to China’s rise. But now, the greatest “threat” comes not from copycats but innovators. Washington, however, continues to respond in a way that might have been effective 20 years ago — but may have undesired consequences today. The paradigm of “China stealing our technology” is not a full reflection of the reality; Chinese scientists, working in China and elsewhere, are already among the world’s finest.

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All is not lost. Plenty of Chinese scientists still wish to escape Xi Jinping’s oppressive regime and its spiralling nationalism. As the tale of Qian Xuesen shows, there is much at stake in the battle for great minds. For one thing, we should all fear the prospect of great technological might in the hands of a tyrant. Even Nikita Khrushchev wrote of his horror at Chairman Mao making light of nuclear holocaust at a 1957 meeting of Communist leaders in Moscow: “We may lose more than 300 million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before.”

The madness of Mao touched Qian’s life too. These were the days of China’s blossoming missile programme, but also of an evangelical Communist-religious fervour and the Great Leap Forward. By some accounts, Qian took part in Mao’s campaign against flies, rats, sparrows and mosquitos, and was spotted kneeling in an alley near the Institute of Mechanics in Beijing, smashing fly larvae with a spade or screaming and waving a bamboo cane around in order to scare away sparrows. In 1958, he published a series of sermon-like articles in the People’s Daily extolling Maoist themes: “For our scientists — the leaders of the scientific ranks — their responsibility is great. They must be able to mobilise the masses and rely on the masses. But if they are to be able to do this, they must not only resolve to be red, they have to really be red, red all the way through.”

Qian’s writings would become even more disturbing: one article claimed that since the only hard limit on the agricultural productivity of a field is the availability of energy via sunlight, China could boost its food production twentyfold at least. In the eyes of some of his peers, this served as inspiration and justification for Mao’s plan to merge peasant collectives into huge bureaucratic farming units. This programme — combined with an insane initiative to force everyone, Qian and his colleagues included, into operating steel furnaces — led to a famine that killed tens of millions of people.

For a brilliant man to engage in such nonsense is baffling. For a man leading a WMD programme to engage in such nonsense is terrifying. As Qian’s would-be colleague John von Neumann put it: “The combination of physics and politics could render the surface of the earth uninhabitable.” In the era of Chairman Xi, Donald Trump and Taiwan, these are words worth remembering.

***

The views expressed here are personal, not those of UKCT.

Shipworth is not the first to run into trouble. And that’s because the problem is more profound than many realise. Many universities need these students. Were their fees to disappear entirely from Britain, with no other income found to replace them, many institutions would go under within a year or two. Some universities will even accept Chinese students without proper qualifications or basic English-language skills, so great is their desire for the fees.

Sometimes, issues arise because many Chinese students have been moulded by the jingoistic politics of authoritarian China. Xi Jinping’s promises to deliver the “Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and “Reunification of the Ancestor-land” make Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” mantra seem gentle by comparison. The emotion this inspires can move people to respond aggressively to perceived slights upon China’s character. Such displays of nationalism may be sincere, or they may be a means of improving one’s own reputation, fishing for a reward or promotion, or going viral on CCP-controlled social media. Universities should back academics in the face of pressure from these nationalists.

The problem, however, is more complicated than a bunch of young chauvinists making noise on UK campuses. As the charity I run, UK-China Transparency, has shown, the CCP has institutionalised its presence at British universities. Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs) are present on roughly 100 British campuses. Most are formally registered as student societies under the authority of university student unions and typically describe themselves as “branches” of a central UK CSSA based at the Chinese embassy in London. This acts as an overseas office for an organisation controlled by the CCP’s United Front Work Department, which conducts influence operations abroad and was name-checked by MI5 in 2022. Most CSSAs publicly admit — though sometimes only in official documents published in Mandarin — that they are under the “guidance”, “control” or “leadership” of the embassy, which runs training programmes and networking events for CSSA leaders.

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We also have Confucius Institutes on 30 campuses. These centres are typically organised as partnerships between one Chinese university, one British university and the Chinese government. Although nominally for language teaching, they have in fact been involved in a whole range of activities, from events in Parliament to teaching undergraduate courses. One teaches Chinese traditional medicine and offers massages to the general public, for a fee. UK-China Transparency has shown how staff from China teaching in British Institutes have to follow CCP “discipline” rules that would oblige them to inform on university members if requested. Rishi Sunak promised to ban them but, as former foreign secretary James Cleverly admitted in an interview, the decision was reversed because of fears about CCP retaliation.

And if that’s not “surreal” enough, consider the China Scholarship Council’s footprint in Britain. This Chinese government body gives stipends to hundreds of PhD scholars in the UK, selecting them on the basis of their political leanings as well as their academic merit. British universities then pay these scholars’ fees. Like CSSAs, scholarship recipients are formally obliged to accept “guidance and management” from Chinese diplomats in the UK — with penalties imposed on them and their families if they fail to do so or otherwise negatively impact China’s national security. As with Confucius Institutes and CSSAs, all these expectations are spelled out in official documents — in Mandarin.

Meanwhile, the CCP has active eyes and ears on British campuses in the form of party members, which includes, for example, many visiting academics. All CCP members have taken an admission oath, by which they vow to obey the CCP, uphold its “discipline” and guard CCP secrets. They agree to act on the CCP’s behalf, and face special sanctions and punishments if they fail to do so, along with rewards for good behaviour.

Although the subject receives periodic attention from politicians, this scandal has essentially been ignored for a decade or more. Britain is only now beginning to come to terms with the CCP’s presence on our campuses. Likened by one scholar to a “python in the chandelier”, the Party is always looming — even if it strikes only occasionally. And it is those students and academics with family in China who feel most keenly the CCP’s presence. Most simply self-censor, knowing that their university is not a “safe space” for free discussion. Better to keep schtum than say something about Tibet or democracy in China which is reported back, because the consequences can be dire.

A minority ignore the warning signs, and courageously persist past the first clear indication that they are being watched. Most often, these brave individuals are called by family members in China, who explain that they have been visited by the police forces. Family members pass on a clear message from the authorities: stop now and come home. If you don’t, then you will never see your family again and they too will be affected, in their careers, in their access to government support, in their community. These are the consequences for Chinese students and academics in our country if they defy the CCP and stand by it.

It is worth underlining how much speech the CCP forbids and how ridiculously broad its definition of “national security” is. In China, forbidden speech is treated as terrorism — and includes any discussion of Tibet, Taiwan, the Uyghurs, human rights, politics, corruption and religion that transgresses the party’s red lines. So restrictive is the speech environment in China that, during the anti-lockdown protests of 2023, people took to holding up blank pieces of paper as a sign of protest. Hundreds at least were arrested. Displaying “White Paper” remains a sign of protest. Given these sensitivities and the university sector’s dependence on Chinese money, one can see how difficult it might be to have a meaningful discussion about China’s history, politics, society or economy.

British academics beginning their careers know that if they put a foot wrong in this regard, they will find it difficult to go to China, let alone gain access to any interesting material or interesting sources. Last year, for instance, I and others working on a Channel 4 documentary about China exposed how Professor Steve Tsang, a leading British China expert, was censored by Nottingham University, which closed down his China studies centre because of CCP pressure. Elsewhere, Dr Jo Smith Finley of Newcastle University was sanctioned directly by the Chinese government for her work. One academic in New Zealand had her home and office broken into because of her research into CCP influence abroad. Even those who are not China specialists, such as Shipworth, may find that their teaching leads to “problems”. They need and deserve their universities’ support.

The strategic aim here isn’t hard to glean: over time, such interference has the potential to distort our knowledge of China itself, which is, of course, exactly what the CCP wants. This is also reflected in new restrictions on foreign access to corporate data, academic journals, and national statistics. Some sinologists tell me that this process started decades ago and that the well has already been poisoned. Only the courage of Shipworth, Tsang and whistleblowers like them can stop the creeping extension of CCP authority into our universities. Our academic freedom depends on it.

***

If you have been affected by any of the issues in this article, contact UK-China Transparency at info@ukctransparency.org

Shocked by such raw aggression, the man being accused, public pianist Dr K, withdraws. It’s hard to tell if he did touch anyone, since his hand is just out of shot in the film of the incident. He appears to be reaching for the miniature People’s Republic of China flag the young woman was holding.

The outburst was the climax of a row that started when a group of flag-wavers accosted the station’s public pianist and tried to prevent him from broadcasting any footage showing their faces or voices.

The whole group, who were waiting to play after Dr K, had voluntarily interacted with Dr K in a friendly way just 10 minutes earlier. But as he sat up from the piano, inviting them for a jam, one of the party, Ms Liu asked him not to show their faces in his livestream. “We are filming for Chinese TV […] You’re not allowed [to film us at the piano] because we are for Chinese TV. This is non-disclosable.” At one point, the pianist responded: “We’re in a free country, mate. We’re not in Communist China now, you know.” In response, Mr Leng, another of the group, cried racism, claims since echoed online by Ms Liu.

After the clip went viral, an interview with Piers Morgan followed, as did tabloid headlines, memes and remixes. But why such excitement? Weren’t these merely normal British-Chinese people driven by a concern for their personal privacy? Or was something more sinister going on?

To answer this question, we must to turn to Ms Adelina Zhang (张宁), Dr K’s third interlocutor and supposed hand-touching victim. A decade ago, Zhang surfaced at the coalface of the American branch of China Daily, a regime mouthpiece, writing a range of generally anodyne English-language articles, her only sensitive piece being an investigation of a religious cult banned in China. By 2016, Zhang was in the UK. That year, she triumphed at the “First British Chinese Supermodel Contest”, winning with it the opportunity to work with a company that produces shows for Chinese TV. (By the way, all Chinese TV is controlled by the CCP’s propaganda system, including whatever station the St Pancras crew were working for.)

Zhang has since built a career as a presenter of events associated one way or another with the CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) and its friends. The UFWD has bestowed upon itself responsibility for what it terms “qiaowu” 侨务, or “Overseas Chinese affairs”, meaning for Zhang’s purposes engagement with the Chinese immigrant community in Britain, which includes the likes of Leng and Liu.

UFWD guidance that I’ve been studying states that “Overseas Chinese” are the “sons and daughters of China connected by blood” and that their goal is “national reunification and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. This is of course nonsense. It is the CCP that wants to “reunify China”. (For “reunify China”, read annex Taiwan, gain control of some Malaysian, Philippines, Vietnamese and Japanese waters, plus hopefully various bits of India and Bhutan too.) The claim that the “Overseas Chinese” share this goal is an attempt to conjure a “broad United Front” in support of the CCP. The CCP thus claims to be speaking on behalf of all “Overseas Chinese”, asserting the right to monitor and guide these people, enticing collaboration and intimidating sources of opposition — all in the service of “national reunification and the great rejuvenation”.

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Happy-clappy galas and functions of the kind overseen by reliable hosts such as Adelina Zhang serve various functions. They are a great setting for propaganda. Attracting hangers-on from British commerce, academia and politics also make them a staple source of information and connections for the UFWD and a cosy ecosystem for hard-core spies in the employ of China’s intelligence agencies.

Testimony to Zhang’s personal sociability is provided by a healthy crop of political selfies, including with former Prime Minister Theresa May, former Home Secretary Amber Rudd, former Asia minister Mark Field, and serving Chancellor Jeremy Hunt. Here is an account of Zhang’s work offered last year by a magazine run by the UFWD:

“She has hosted numerous international events and interviewed various business leaders. She has thrice hosted a ‘Spring Festival Gala’ organized by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council [the Office is an alter ego for the UFWD under the characteristically Communist ‘two names, one organisation’ system], served as a bilingual host at the Chinese New Year dinner in the UK House of Lords twice, hosted the London Trafalgar Square Spring Festival gala four times, representing Asian women on the international stage, and hosted what BBC called the world’s largest Spring Festival event outside China, attracting up to 700,000 live viewers annually.”

What of Mr Leng and Ms Liu? Neither has enjoyed a career comparably close to the CCP. Leng’s LinkedIn initially identified him as a consultant for the Financial Times, but the paper has since clarified that it contracted him for just two days once. He used to work at a Confucius Institute and now runs gym classes. Liu, who has tried to capitalise on CCP jingoism online since the incident, runs a company placing Chinese grads in internships and jobs.

The three advanced upon Dr K in reverse order of seniority, first Liu, then Leng, then Zhang. The most intriguing aspect of the incident, though, is the presence in the background of another woman, perhaps in charge. In X posts published afterwards, Liu herself claimed that this was Christine Lee, who MI5 alleged to be a UFWD agent in 2022. Liu appeared to write:  “We were filming for Chinese TV, nothing to do with CCP, just a Chinese New Year Video to celebrate a Chinese new year from important figures in the Chinese community in the UK. […] Christine Lee was in the back with my boyfriend, but she was just accompanying.”

Liu then deleted the tweets and then her account was suspended. It is not known why. On top of that, the woman identified as Lee does not actually look like Lee.

It is not easy to see the full picture, but viral events like this act almost as a primer for those unfamiliar with the CCP’s influence efforts abroad: every aspect of the incident reflects some classic phenomenon. Perhaps more importantly, they are also an introduction to the resistance against CCP influence efforts among an emerging coalition of emigres: Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hongkongers, Christians, democratic activists, persecuted artists and lawyers. It is sometimes called a “united front against the united front”. This resistance is carried on above all by those that the CCP desperately wishes were loyal “Overseas Chinese” who support “reunification and rejuvenation”.

The aftermath of “Pianogate” abounds with examples. Take that of British Hong Konger, Jazzua Leung, who went to play his home city’s anthem (banned by the CCP) on the by-then infamous piano. After uploading a video of his performance, Leung’s YouTube account was suspended because of spam complaints by CCP trolls.

Or take the example of any member of the crowd of ethnically Chinese Dr K supporters who flocked to see the pianist on his return to St Pancras. One was my friend Lyndon Lee, a Christian refugee, journalist and human rights lawyer. Or there is Namewee, the Taiwanese musician known for satirising Xi’s CCP, who is now plotting a musical collaboration with Dr K, as well as the army of “Overseas Chinese” amateur sleuths from around the world who endeavoured to dissect every aspect of “Pianogate”.

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Look around the world and you will see countless examples of a twilight conflict pitting this resistance against the CCP’s United Front and its pets. Last year, Canada endured an astonishing CCP infiltration scandal that saw the resignation of a serving MP accused of covertly working with the CCP, an attack directed by Prime Minister Trudeau at Canadian intelligence agents leaking info to the media, and revelations of a $1 million plot to influence Trudeau himself. Then and since — a foreign interference inquiry has only just begun in the country — grassroots campaigners such as Natalie Hui and Mehmet Tohti, but also leading politicians such as Michael Chong, have been instrumental in de-stigmatising the conversation around CCP interference and demanding answers about the phenomenon from Trudeau’s government.

The UFWD is not particularly secretive about its intent to interfere in democratic processes: documents I have seen note the growing number of ethnic Chinese running for election in Canada and elsewhere and states a desire to mould them into “a new force in the reunification of the motherland and the rejuvenation of China”.

Ethnonationalist rhetoric such as this has led to radicalisation. This was evident in California last November, when Xi Jinping’s visit prompted both the United Front and its pets and the anti-CCP resistance to take to the streets. This led to brawls between Tibetan-American teenagers, refugees from Hong Kong and dissidents living in the US on the one hand, and middle-aged, red-armbanded Chinese men on the other. The previous year, the state witnessed a mass shooting of Taiwanese-American Christians by a radical opponent of Taiwan independence.

The CCP has long spoken of “Five Poisons”: those in favour of Taiwanese independence, those in favour of Uyghur independence, those in favour of Tibetan independence, practitioners of Falun Gong, and Chinese democrats. Hong Kong independence advocates have been informally added to the list and cast as “parasites” and “roaches” to be “eradicated”. Xi himself, in 2019, warned that anyone who tries to undermine China’s unification will end up with “bodies pulverised and bones crushed.”

This may be Xi’s dream, but the ragtag anti-CCP resistance is his nightmare — and, as Pianogate revealed, it’s not going anywhere.  What’s needed, however, is more awareness of their struggle. It is too significant to be relegated to social-media discourse. Far from being solely a threat to Chinese emigres, the CCP’s “war by other means” is an attack on democracy itself.

***

The views expressed here are personal, not those of UKCT.

There is less agreement about the onset of our second bout of David Cameron. His appointment as Foreign Secretary last month roughly coincided with Xi Jinping’s first visit to the United States since 2017. The two events conspired to convey a sense of things going “back to normal” on China. There were Biden and Xi smiling together. Here was Cameron, who during his time as prime minister instigated a “golden era” of relations with China, responsible for Britain’s foreign policy.

Have we learnt the lessons of that era? Or, pandemics aside, do we remain naive about the CCP? An exchange last month between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions offers some clues. Starmer began his attack with a jab at our new Foreign Secretary’s work with Beijing since leaving office in 2016, citing concerns expressed by the security services that Cameron’s jaunty and likely lucrative interim may have been “engineered” by the Chinese government, who clearly think they have a friend in Dave.

In response, Sunak delivered a string of official terminology: “The government’s position on China is clear: China represents an epoch-defining challenge, that’s why we have taken strong and robust steps to protect ourselves against the risk that it poses.” He went on to say he wouldn’t take lectures from Labour, who have “taken almost £700,000 from an alleged Chinese agent!” Their discussion of China ended there.

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Sunak’s accusation aimed to strike a nerve. In January 2022, MI5 issued a warning to MPs about Christine Lee, a lawyer known for her connections across the political spectrum and for donations to Labour and the Lib Dems. Lee was also known in the British Chinese community for having campaigned to raise its election turnout rates, and for an initiative to identify and promote young British-Chinese politicians.

This was not, however, a classic case of “spies expose secret information in service of public”. MI5 were alleging that Lee’s donations were engineered by the CCP, which no publicly available data seems to suggest. Lee’s work and closeness with the CCP, however, were openly described — albeit in Mandarin — on Chinese government websites, where she was named as a “director” of a body overseen by the CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD), which operates mostly in China but has a side-hustle running influence and interference operations abroad. This had been the case since 2018 and had been highlighted by news articles and a book on CCP infiltration published in 2020.

Lee’s connections in China were even older. In fact — and this is a key point routinely overlooked — they were a crucial part of her influence in the UK in the first place. MI5’s announcement was the first time the UFWD was named as a specific threat in the UK, but during Cameron’s “golden era”, those with connections to the UFWD were hailed by the British government as “bridge builders” and “ice breakers” and given opportunities to make money and friends in high places. Lee’s own law firm was listed as a preferred partner by the Department for International Trade up until a week or so before MI5 outed her in January 2022.

At that time, the rumour among China watchers was that MI5’s notice — which came to light amid the scandal over lockdown parties in No. 10 — had been, as one person put it, “sitting on a desk in the Home Office for a long time”. It was supposedly released by Priti Patel, then Home Secretary, to divert media attention from the lockdown parties.

Few people know whether this is true. Certainly, however, the notice has not been truly substantiated, the promise of further such notices (and an inquiry) has not materialised, and Lee is suing the Government. Hence Sunak’s surreal use of the phrase “alleged Chinese agent”. It is, after all, the Government that “alleged” Lee was an agent. There remains no alternative account of why the warning was released when it was.

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No similar notice has been issued about Xuelin Bates, a Conservative party donor who married Lord Michael Bates in 2012. During Bates’s nearly two-year stint at the Home Office, during which time he worked as under-secretary for Criminal Information, Xuelin worked as a consultant for the Chinese government while appearing at events to promote Chinese education and business alongside a convicted fraudster linked by court judgments to the proceeds of organised crime. Shortly after Bates stopped his work as a Minister of State in the Department for International Development in 2019, Xuelin was appointed to a role at the same UFWD-overseen body in China as Christine Lee.

This hardly sounds like a house well in order. Many within the British state are still surveying the damage, patching leaks, and wondering how deep the rot has set. Part of the problem is that China is not limited to conventional intelligence services such as the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) intelligence wing, which are comparable — though much less constrained in their operation — to Western intelligence agencies. Rather, it operates in a far more unfamiliar, sweeping, penetrating manner with intelligence and surveillance running through the CCP at every level.

Take the UFWD, which is one of the six main CCP departments. One of its formal responsibilities is to gather intelligence on the activities of what it calls “Overseas Chinese”, which mostly includes recent or temporary Chinese-born migrants in places including the UK. For the purposes of so-called “Overseas Chinese Affairs” — a category important and well-known enough to be given a two-syllable acronym, qiaowu (侨务) — the UFWD can call upon a senior official in the Chinese embassy in London, Jiang Lei.

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Part of Jiang’s job as “Overseas Chinese Affairs Counsellor” is to go to as many “Overseas Chinese” events as possible — from sports prize ceremonies and cultural evenings to business networking meet-ups and academic conferences. At these events, Jiang can network with and offer business opportunities to all manner of people. The British Chinese businessman at the centre of the “Chinese overseas police stations” furore openly discussed the UFWD’s assistance for “Overseas Chinese” entrepreneurs in an online interview with Chinese state media.

As well as micro-managing Chinese civil society outside of China, CCP surveillance also targets Westerners. UFWD cadres tend to zoom in on an influential British person or group who appear sympathetic to China — and then seduce them with promises of funding, prestige, paid work, and useful connections. This form of “soft espionage” targets business, research, public bodies, culture, industry, and politics, shaping narratives and gathering information.

The complexity of this holistic approach partly explains why British politicians disagree so much over how to define the threat China poses. The Government’s “Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy”, published in 2021, called China “the biggest state-based threat to the UK’s economic security”, “an increasingly important partner in tackling global challenges like pandemic preparedness, biodiversity and climate change”, and more simply as a “systemic competitor”. A later version of the review called China an “epoch-defining and systemic challenge” — hence Sunak’s recital.

Many have since lined up to criticise this nauseating pick-and-mix approach, calling for China to be labelled a “threat”. But the symbolic discussion about rhetoric has also morphed into a concrete one about policy. The Government is currently drawing up plans for a formal registry of foreign influence agents. This could classify China as a “threat” in such a way that would affect the “grey-zone” activities of Lee and Bates and their ilk.

Whatever form the registry takes, it is unlikely to be a panacea. The Australian and American versions are deeply flawed. In Australia’s case, the public register introduced in 2018 was at one point spammed by former PM Kevin Rudd in an act of protest. In the US, there are unfeasibly few China-related entries, and the system functions more than anything as a way of prosecuting those who fail to register, as in the case of individuals associated with one of China’s “overseas police service stations”.

The UK government is currently consulting over exactly how the register should work, with unenthusiastic parties, such as China-facing consultancies, asked to share their concerns. Businesses have also been given the chance to state objections regarding separate powers, legislated for in 2021, that enable the Government to scrutinise investments by Chinese entities in sensitive industries. There thus remain doubts about the “strong and robust steps” Sunak referred to in the Commons — especially since there has long been a sense that big business, hooked on China’s huge market, continues to pull the Government back.

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The paranoia behind China's spy war

By Nathan Levine

The response of the CCP-sceptic lobby to this dynamic has been to cast doing business with China as a “risk”, and to brand moving investments out of China — or “de-risking” — as a means of protecting future balance sheets. Key to this argument have been tensions over Taiwan. If China invades, so the story goes, and if the US sanctions China, then your company will pay for not “de-risking”.

The conversation about British “de-risking” ought to be fraught. Between 2012 and 2022, China was the UK’s seventh-fastest growing export market — a significant statistic given that the six countries ahead of China were all smaller geographically than England (North Macedonia, Panama, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Switzerland, Gibraltar). Most important, however, is the fact that the UK’s bloated financial sector is massively exposed to China, by some metrics more than any other Western country.

In October, UK banks held secretive meetings about this exposure and drew up an overview that they shared with Western governments. The UK’s largest bank, HSBC, is in a particularly tight spot following attempts by a Chinese shareholder — seen off for now — to split the bank in two, with its profitable Asian business going to a theoretical China-headquartered daughter firm. The coup attempt was dealt with partly by reference from executives to healthy profits. But given that nearly half of the bank’s profits are made in China, is there any way HSBC can perform an elegant “de-risking”? Probably not, which means that if the “Taiwan risk story” comes true, the UK will suffer an exceptional hit.

With Britain facing such towering risks and diplomatic sensitivities, good judgement is required. Lost amid the outpouring of disdain for Cameron’s lobbying for Beijing is the real scandal: our new Foreign Secretary’s “epoch-defining” record of poor judgement on China.

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The West and China share the same fate

By N.S. Lyons

The key is 2013. That year, Xi sealed his position as China’s undisputed leader by releasing a communique, Document Number Nine, which stated that China was being infiltrated by “Western anti-China forces” posing a threat to the existence of the CCP, and that an aggressive counter-offensive was required. Free media, free speech, academic freedom, economic liberalism, independence movements are all bad, per Document Number Nine, and must be obliterated within China.

This was the year that Cameron chose to launch an unprecedented period of UK-China cooperation. As British civil servants, university administrators, and business executives began to devise ways to make sure Britain became China’s “best friend in the West”, CCP cadres and officials executed Xi’s aggressive counterattack.

All the while, the CCP worked hard to propagate the image of a friendly Xi, peaceful and productive. Pumping money into academic institutions and the media helped (The Telegraph, The Financial Times and The Economist have all been paid to publish CCP propaganda). This was Xi the eco-warrior, the anti-corruption crusader, the defender of globalisation. Above all, this Xi was nothing to be feared. As he told the United Nations in 2017: “For several millennia, peace has been in the blood of us Chinese and a part of our DNA.”

Document Number Nine was largely ignored in the West, but it set the tone for a transformation in Chinese society: the implementation of Xi Jinping’s personality cult, the securitisation of society, a military build-up, political purges, the neutralisation of Hong Kong, the intensification of ethnic cleansing in China’s colonies of Tibet and Xinjiang, a revolution in “Overseas Chinese affairs” work, territorial clashes with China’s Indian and Bhutanese neighbours, support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and more assertive incursions against Taiwan and the coastal waters of the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam.

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The dismantling of the Chinese mind

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Taken together, these policies make the character of Xi and his regime clear. The writing is on the wall. Yet, even now, we have only half woken up to it. Some still see Xi as peaceful, at worst merely a committed and effective “CEO China” who has amassed power “without bloodshed”, as one prominent British professor, Kerry Brown, wishes us to believe.

This is not to say that our politicians and diplomats should go out and insult China or commit to defending Taiwan or the Philippines. Nor is it to say that it is Britain’s job to challenge China on the world stage, or to follow the United States in whatever Pacific tangle it might find itself in. It is just that whatever else Britain’s China policy does, it must never again make Cameron’s mistake of taking the CCP at its word. It must guard first and foremost against the illusions that would incapacitate us.

The Romans said “Fas est et ab hoste doceri” — right it is to learn, even from the enemy. Whether or not the UK government chooses to designate the CCP as an “enemy”, we should aspire to learn from one of its favourite slogans “shishi qiushi” — seek truth from facts.

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The views expressed here are personal, not those of UKCT.