China is Using Every Trick for World Domination

Spies spy, get over it. That's a quip frequently heard when a new China-related intelligence scandal breaks, like the revelation in The Sunday Times last week of an alleged spy operating in Westminster. Comments such as "all states do it" are, however, based on a fundamental misunderstanding about Chinese intelligence.

China is conducting an espionage onslaught against Britain unlike any undertaken by western governments. It is broad, deep and accelerating, across multiple domains, and lies beyond the realm of acceptable statecraft. China has been doing this for years while Britain's security resources were largely focused on counterterrorism.

While Britain may be able to take individual acts of Chinese espionage on the chin, it is only by understanding how all its malign activities fit together that their true magnitude can be countered.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses its intelligence services differently from the West. China's are not restrained by independent political or judicial oversight or a free press. It adopts a whole-of-society intelligence strategy, harnessing every part of its government and society to steal foreign secrets, influence governments and potentially digitally sabotage them. China's intelligence services target western parliaments and policymakers, and purloin passwords ,  fusing human intelligence and cyber capabilities.

China's clandestine services, such as the Ministry of State Security, are on the front line of Beijing's grand strategy: to keep the CCP in power and to make China the world's leading and selfsufficient military and economic power. The aim is to invert the technological landscape so other countries depend on Chinese, not western, technology....