Arrests reignite controversy over Chinese influence at Westminster
Security Minister Tom Tugendhat. One of two MPs alleged to have been targeted because of their criticisms of China (Parliament, CC BY 3.0).
The Sunday Times reports this morning that a researcher in the UK Parliament has been arrested over allegations of spying for China (ref 1).
Key details of the story can also be found in a twitter/x thread by one of the authors, Caroline Wheeler, who states that the researcher, ‘previously spent time living and working in China, where security officials fear he may have been recruited as a sleeper agent and sent back to Britain with the intention of infiltrating political networks critical of the regime in Beijing’ (ref 2).
The Metropolitan Police have confirmed that the researcher, who is in his 20s, was arrested in Edinburgh in March, while another man in his 30s was arrested in Oxfordshire (ref 3).
Targeted MPs are reported to include security minister Tom Tugendhat and Alicia Kearns, the chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee (ref 2). Both have been strong critics of China in recent years (ref 6).
Kearns said this morning, ‘I am aware of the Sunday Times report. I will not be commenting. While I recognise the public interest, we all have a duty to ensure any work of the Authorities is not jeopardised,’ (ref 4).
A similar allegation emerged last year, when MI5 issued an alert last year linking lawyer Christine Lee to Chinese influence operations. It was reported in July that Lee is bringing a civil case over the claims.
The anti-Beijing Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China has criticised the emergence of the new allegations through the media rather than via a similar alert from the authorities (ref 5).
According to the Sunday Times, Whitehall sources regard the latest developments as a major escalation by China, but others see it as par for the course in the world of espionage.
‘Spies spy’, said Dr Dan Lomas, an intelligence expert at the University of Nottingham, adding ‘Influence is extremely hard to assess. Gossip on MPs is potentially very useful, but this shouldn't be overplayed’ (ref 7).
The emergences of multiple allegations shouldn’t be surprising given western analysis characterises Chinese intelligence as employing scale and persistence rather than sophistication.
Peter Mattis of War on the Rocks offers this analogy:
If a beach was an espionage target, the Russians would send in a sub, frogmen would steal ashore in the dark of night and with great secrecy collect several buckets of sand and take them back to Moscow. The Americans would target the beach with satellites and produce reams of data. The Chinese would send in a thousand tourists, each assigned to collect a single grain of sand. When they returned, they would be asked to shake out their towels. And they would end up knowing more about the sand than anyone else (ref 8).
Mattis goes on to argue that the scope of such operations reflects the involvement of ‘multiple professional systems’ beyond formal intelligence organisations like the Ministry of State Security (ref 8).
A similar analysis is reflected in a report issued by the UK Parliament’s own Intelligence and Security Committee in July (ref 9).
In 2008, MI5 told the Committee:
What the Chinese do is a bit like … bees going out from the hive; they just go out and they collect little bits of pollen from all over the place and they bring it back to their hive and they turn it into honey. *** What they have is a pretty indiscriminate system of masses of students, officials, businessmen, et cetera, *** all of whom bring back little bits, which actually is jolly difficult – it’s the grains of sand problem (ref 9, 29).
More recently, MI5 has reported the emergence of more sophisticated Chinese operations, but a 2020 briefing by MI6/SIS emphasised the continuing importance of scale and scope.
Nevertheless, a vast swathe of information collected by the ChIS [Chinese intelligence services] would be considered to be ‘open source’: something they are able to do by virtue of the resources at their disposal – SIS explained that the ChIS are able to act in an opportunistic manner and gather everything they can without having to prioritise. Most Western intelligence services – usually due to resource constraints – focus primarily on the collection of classified information and much of the information collected by the ChIS would be considered anodyne or innocuous by Western standards. ChIS activities also therefore take them beyond what would be considered the remit of most Western intelligence services (for example, some of the efforts by the United Front Work Department to influence politicians and public perceptions of China could be regarded as traditional diplomacy) (ref 9, p.29).
If the resource factor is part of what distinguishes the Chinese approach, it could be asked whether that contrast applies to US intelligence as much as other western services. After all, the US has long had a significant open-source capability, and much of its array of soft-power institutions originated in early Cold War covert operations.
From this point of view, the scale and scope of Chinese operations maybe a reflection less of a distinct intelligence style than of its emergence as a potential peer competitor of the US, the very situation which is driving the increasing competition between the two states in the first place.
References
Ref 1: Caroline Wheeler, Harry Yorke, Dipesh Gadher, Tim Shipman, Commons worker arrested after allegedly spying for China, Sunday Times, 10 September 2023.
Ref 2: Caroline Wheeler, Twitter/x, 9 September 2023.
Ref 3: Two men arrested under Official Secrets Act, BBC News, 10 September 2023.
Ref 4: Alicia Kearns, Twitter/x, 10 September 2023.
Ref 5: Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, Twitter/x, 10 September 2023.
Ref 6: Kiran Stacey, Rishi Sunak challenges premier Li after ‘spying for China’ arrests, The Guardian, 10 September 2023.
Ref 7: Dan Lomas, Twitter/x, 10 September 2023.
Ref 8: Peter Mattis, A Guide to Chinese Intelligence Operations, War on the Rocks, 18 August 2015.
Ref 9: China, Intelligence and Security of Parliament, 13 July 2023.