Charles Parton | The Spectator columnists & writers

The China threat our politicians don’t seem to have noticed

The Chinese Communist party can congratulate itself on another sign of its rise: for the first time it has become a factor in deciding the fate of British politics. During Monday’s televised leadership debates, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak tried to appeal to Tory members by outdoing each other on their commitment to protect our national security, economic prosperity, data privacy and values from the CCP. They both referred to Chinese theft of our science and technology, but the problem is much, much wider than that. What is more serious is our blithe willingness to import Chinese control into the most sensitive areas of our economy and society. Neither aspiring prime minister mentioned the most crucial area – more crucial than 5G and Huawei.

The day I was tapped up by Chinese intelligence

Nigel Inkster, a former director of MI6, has described China as an ‘intelligence state’. This was true even before the Chinese Communist party (CCP) passed laws that all individuals and organisations must help the security forces when asked. Chinese officials, party members and citizens have long been active across a broad front in advancing the interests of the CCP, seeking out political, military, scientific, technological and commercial information. Britain has to be wary of more than just the Ministry of State Security (MSS) — China’s secret police agency — or the military intelligence department. The revelation last month that the Labour MP and former shadow minister Barry Gardiner had accepted £420,000 from Christine Lee, a CCP ‘agent of influence’, was not an isolated occurrence.

How to counter China

When another country does something to upset the Chinese Communist party, it gets accused of ‘a Cold War mentality’. This is psychological projection, in Freudian terms, a defence mechanism which projects onto others the negative aspects of one’s own self. But the CCP is right in a way: we should have more of a ‘Cold War mentality’ or at least a ‘values and systems war’ mentality. China is not the Soviet Union. We never co-operated with the USSR on trade and investment or science and technology. We do with China. Indeed the CCP sees itself as fighting a ‘values and systems war’. Xi Jinping, in his first speech to the Politburo in 2012, talked of the need for ‘Chinese socialism to gain the dominant position over western capitalism’.

Cult of Mao: Will the Olympics punish China?

As one of the embassy drivers I met in Beijing saw it, ferrying diplomats to meetings was secondary to his responsibility of lecturing us on China’s true place in the world. A conversational bully, to Mr Wang listening was a sign of weakness. Crossing Tiananmen with its vast picture of Chairman Mao, I interrupted his flow to ask his opinion of the Great Helmsman. ‘Great man. He made China great.’ ‘But,’ I asked, ‘what about the fact that he caused the avoidable deaths of a minimum of 36 million Chinese, the figure reached by a Chinese Communist party (CCP) member and official news agency journalist after years of research?’ ‘No, it was not so many.’ Eventually, after a negotiation in which I disingenuously suggested 10 million as the total, he generously conceded 15 million as reasonable.

What China wants from Britain

What are we to do about China? To turn a phrase beloved by the Chinese Communist party (CCP) on its head, Beijing is increasingly ‘interfering in our internal affairs’. Yet if you hoped to answer that question by reading the recent integrated review of defence and foreign policy, the most you would find is that China is a ‘systemic competitor’. But recognition is not a strategy; at best, the review indulged in ambiguity, or perhaps obfuscation. The Prime Minister wants good relations with China. Who doesn’t? Certainly, a new Cold War would be disastrous, for us and for the CCP. But if we do not set clear boundaries, we risk being manoeuvred into a state where ‘Chinese communism has the superior position over Western capitalism’, as Xi Jinping himself prescribed in his first policy speech to the Politburo in 2013.

How the West can avoid Beijing’s propaganda trap

This time next year the Winter Olympics will have drawn to a close. Beijing will have become the first city to have hosted both the summer and winter games. The Chinese Communist party’s (CCP) central propaganda department will have worked to ensure a gold medal performance in harnessing sport to bolster the party’s image (before we get too self-righteous about that, remember that all hosts use the games to boost soft power). Or maybe not. A year out, global momentum is gathering for an Olympic boycott in reaction to the genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang. Former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley has called on the Biden administration to pull the US out of the games to send a message to Beijing.

The truth about China’s genocide against the Uyghurs

Last night, the BBC showed witnesses giving stomach-turning testimony about organised rape and torture inflicted upon Uyghurs in China’s far west region of Xinjiang. Victims and former guards, now abroad and willing to talk, spoke of electric batons inserted into women’s genitalia, gang rape by police, an organised rape in front of 100 other women forced to watch with those who looked away punished, and the forcible sterilisation of a 20-year-old. As one witness said: ‘Everyone who leaves the camps is finished.’ In January, both the outgoing and incoming American Secretaries of State confirmed their view that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) treatment of Uyghurs constituted genocide. Not some analogous ‘cultural genocide’.

How the UK can help Hong Kong

Those of us who spent our formative China-watching years reading Chinese Communist party publications learnt early on that the word ‘basically’ was a synonym for ‘not’. ‘The party has basically succeeded in…’ meant that there was a problem. Hong Kong is basically an autonomous region. Xi Jinping is satirised by liberal Chinese as the ‘Accelerator-in-Chief’, whose policies are hurtling the CCP’s regime towards collapse. This could be wishful thinking on their part. Certainly, he has sped up the demise of the ‘one country, two systems’ concept. Article Five of the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s ‘constitution’, promises ‘50 years without change’, implying that the city would be governed differently from other Chinese cities until 2047.

The US is right to rethink its relationship with China

Anyone who has worked in an office has fantasised about destroying it. As someone who has taken a sledgehammer to his office and fire to his papers – leaving the Libyan embassy in 2011 – I experienced a twinge of nostalgia on seeing Chinese diplomats burning papers after being given 72 hours to leave their consulate in Houston in July. Inevitably, the inevitable tit for diplomatic tat came, and American officials were sent packing from their consulate in Chengdu. Since then, relations between the US and China have deteriorated further, with Donald Trump pledging this week to ban the Chinese video app TikTok for national security reasons. This breakdown in relations looks like the confluence of two currents in US politics: electoral politics combining with an ideological hostility to China within the White House, which aims to stop China’s rise.

How Xi Jinping plans to crush Hong Kong

The Hong Kong government has recently extended its Covid regulations banning gatherings of more than eight people until 4 June. How convenient. Last year, according to organisers, 180,000 people gathered to commemorate the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre on 4 June 1989. In future, being an organiser may well land you in court under a new national security law, which Beijing announced last week at its annual National People’s Congress. Perhaps we should have expected it. After all, the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s ‘constitution’, lays down that the Hong Kong government should enact such a law, and the big party meeting in October told us that the ‘legal systems and implementation mechanisms for protecting national security’ would be set up.

Why we’ll regret the Huawei gamble

It is apparently fine for China to ban western technology from its telecommunications network but quite unacceptable for us to prioritise our national security. The decision to allow Huawei into the UK’s 5G network is the first of many tough choices in the new technological era. And we've flunked it. Why is it a new technological era? Because we no longer simply buy goods in return for money. Increasingly we pay not just in coin, but in data as well; not just in a one-off transaction, but in a perpetual transfer of bytes back to the vendor. And when it comes to 5G, since it will underpin so much more of our lives than 4G, you need to trust that vendor. Huawei has been designated a ‘high-risk vendor’. So it is. It is irrelevant whether or not it is a private company or even that China’s national security laws mandate compliance with all requests from the security services.

Britain will regret doing business with Huawei

Imagine the following medieval conversation: King: “We need to build a castle at Dover. ‘Tis the key to England.” Courtier: “Sire, the French build excellent castles at fantastic prices. Of course, we should not allow them anywhere near the keep, but no harm if they construct the moat and curtain walls.” Returning to the 21st century, 5G might be said to be the ‘key to England’. Many times faster than 4G, the network will be the technological foundation of our society for the next few decades. It will carry many of our communications, enable the operation of systems, including driverless cars, and be indispensable to our military and our security. Today comes the news that the government has decided to allow Huawei a role in building parts of the UK’s 5G network, despite the reported opposition of several ministers.

The fourth weapon

Chairman Mao talked of ‘three magic weapons’ for seizing power: the united front, the armed struggle and construction of the Communist party itself. Now the priority for China’s government is to remain in power. To ensure that, President Xi Jinping’s party is developing a fourth ‘magic weapon’. The social credit system is a part of this, but the ‘weapon’ also extends far beyond it. By combining big data, artificial intelligence, recognition technology and other police techniques, China’s government intends to create a comprehensive method of political and social control. It may not live up to everything that is promised: after all, government-implemented computer systems rarely work as well as intended. But it will affect — is already affecting — Chinese society and human rights more profoundly than any other reform or development instituted by the party.

Today

Thursday

Friday

Sunday

Friday

Friday

Wednesday

Thursday

Tuesday

Thursday

Wednesday

Wednesday

Thursday