LONDON (Parliament Politics Magazine) – To warn of threat from China, the heads of the UK and US security services made an unusual joint presentation.
According to Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, China poses the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security” and has meddled in recent elections as well as other political processes.
The chief of MI5, Ken McCallum, declared that his organisation would be more than doubling its efforts against the activities of China in the previous three years.
In comparison to 2018, MI5 is currently conducting seven times as many investigations into the actions of the Chinese Communist Party.
Wray of the FBI said that if China invaded Taiwan forcibly, it would represent one of the most terrible business disturbances the world has ever witnessed.
The two directors made their first-ever joint public appearance at the MI5 headquarters at London’s Thames House.
Wray cautioned the crowd, which included industry leaders and senior universities members, that the Chinese government was bent on taking their technology using a variety of methods.
It presented an even more significant danger to western businesses than even many sophisticated executives realised, he claimed. He described instances when individuals connected to Chinese businesses had dug up genetically modified seeds in rural America—seeds that would have cost them billions of dollars and nearly a decade to produce on their own.
Additionally, he claimed that China used cyberespionage to cheat and steal on a gigantic scale, boasting a hacking programme larger than the sum of all other major nations’ combined efforts.
The chief of MI5 claimed that information regarding cyber threats had been exchanged with 37 nations and that a sophisticated threat to aerospace had been neutralised in May.
McCallum gave a number of instances involving China. One of them was a British aviation expert who had been contacted online and presented with a lucrative job offer. Before being solicited for technical information on military aircraft by a corporation that was essentially a front for Chinese intelligence personnel, he travelled to China twice to be “wined and dined.”
“That’s where we came in”, McCallum added. He added that a Chinese company had contacted one engineering firm, leading to the theft of the company’s technology before the agreement was abandoned, prompting Smith’s Harlow to enter administration in 2020.
And he cited the interference warning that the Parliament had given in January on Christine Lee’s actions. According to him, these kinds of operations seek to stifle critics of the Chinese Communist Party and amp up voices in support of it. The head of MI5 stated, “It needs to be challenged.”
Because they did not want a candidate who was a critic and former protester at Tiananmen Square to be elected, the Chinese government intervened directly in a congressional election in New York this spring, according to the FBI director in the US.
He claimed that they had done this by using a private detective to unearth damaging information. Before even contemplating arranging a car accident, he claimed there had been an attempt to controversy using a sex worker when they could uncover nothing.
Wray claimed that China was learning all kinds of lessons from the Ukrainian crisis. This included making an effort to protect themselves from any upcoming sanctions of the same nature as those that hit Russia. He claimed that if China invaded Taiwan, there would be a considerably greater economic upheaval than this year, with western investments in China being “hostages” and supply networks being interrupted.
The FBI director, while speaking to the press after his speech said that he didn’t have any reason to assume their interest in Taiwan had lessened in any way.
The chief of MI5 stated that while new legislation would assist to address the threat, the UK also needs to become a “harder target” by raising awareness of the dangers among all facets of society. According to him, more than 50 students connected to the Chinese military had left the UK as a result of the visa system’s overhaul.
China was no longer flying under the radar, Wray said, adding that it had relied on everyone’s second-highest priority for far too long.
