China is engaged in a hidden war against the West. For the most part, this battle goes on in secret. But every so often, the aggressors are exposed.
As the Mail reported yesterday, it has emerged that Beijing hacked into the Ministry of Defence’s payroll system.
An estimated 270,000 records belonging to nearly all members of Britain’s armed forces were exposed in the breach. I was rung yesterday morning to be told my own details were among those assumed to be stolen.
But this appalling assault is just the latest of China’s attacks.
The Government believes a Chinese state-hacker group stole vast amounts of data from the UK Electoral Commission between August 2021 and October 2022, one of the most significant information heists in history. They have conducted similar attacks in the U.S. to pilfer information on federal employees — a database that could be of immense value in a new Cold War, or a hot war.
Make no mistake: a hostile government sees the West’s freedoms as a threat to its own existence and is determined to undermine our economies and democracies by stealth. The Chinese people, needless to say, are not the issue, but China’s Communist masters are.
The extent of the regime’s war on the West goes far beyond cyber attacks and espionage. Beijing is chipping away at our social fabric by using elements of our everyday lives — smartphones, electric cars, even our sports.
From disinformation campaigns against the Princess of Wales to the distribution of highly addictive and frequently lethal drugs, and from multi-billion-dollar ‘trade dumping’ — flooding foreign markets with cut-price goods — to the domination of the increasingly critical genome industry, we are under threat.
Readers will be aware that counterfeit postage stamps printed in China are flooding the British market. The manufacturers are selling sheets of first and second-class stamps, in batches of 20,000, for as little as £2 for 50 stamps.
This is state-sponsored crime: because China is an autocracy, the ploy has almost certainly been approved at the highest level.
Needless to say, the Communists don’t care about the British victims who had to pay a £5 penalty to collect their letters if a forged stamp had been used. The goal is simply to cause economic disruption.
This example of hostile economic policies is the tip of an iceberg that could sink countless British businesses and institutions. China has openly stated that it does not want to live in harmony with the West, but to dominate it. Western nations are viewed in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) literature as ‘hostile foreign forces’ intent on damaging Beijing.
Democracy is a ‘false ideological trend’. In particular, independent journalism and any historical accounts not approved by the regime are not tolerated. The concepts of free speech and universal human rights have also been denounced by President Xi Jinping.
His regime is thinking many years ahead. Around the world his agents are working to secure dominance in precious minerals and ‘rare earths’, to help it control the tech industries of the future. China thinks long-term — but too often Western leaders, encumbered by those pesky elections, think short-term. Our own Government is beginning to see the threat, but there is more to do.
Britain belatedly kept China out of our 5G networks only after a concerted battle fought by me, together with MPs including Iain Duncan Smith and Tim Loughton. Now, Beijing is seeking to take over the critical field of ‘cellular modules’ — the vital components on computer circuit boards.
That is typical of their far-sighted but ruthless approach. Last year, the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) warned that China has penetrated every part of the UK economy in a ‘whole of state’ assault.
We still do not understand the breadth of this hidden war — and we need, above all, a coherent policy. Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden is doing more than any of his predecessors, but the challenge is one that we have never faced before.
There is also an insidious cultural element to their cyber aggression. There are credible allegations that Chinese ‘troll farms’ amplified poisonous online rumours about the Princess of Wales, prior to her announcement that she was being treated for cancer.
Meanwhile, Beijing has expanded its authoritarian state into the UK using ‘Confucius Institutes’, which provide Chinese-language teachers to UK classrooms to spy on students while its consulates and embassies house Chinese police stations. And take the wildly popular app TikTok. Put simply, inside China it is designed to make kids smart. Outside China, it is designed to make kids dumb.
For young people in China, its use is rationed each day and
its content is curated by the CCP, with science experiments and teachers being celebrated — totally unlike the drivel posted by ‘influencers’ in the West.
‘The algorithm is vastly different, promoting science, educational and historical content in China while making our citizens in the West watch stupid dance videos, with the main goal of making us imbeciles,’ Nicolas Chaillan, ex
U.S. Air Force and Space Force Chief Software Officer, said last year.
And it is not only cyber addiction that is coming out of China, but drug addiction, too.
Chinese suppliers to the U.S. are delivering the lethal and highly addictive opioid fentanyl in vast quantities for the illegal market. It is now the leading cause of death for Americans under 45, and China is also the primary source of its basic ingredients or ‘precursor chemicals’.
Similar high-strength drugs called ‘nitazenes’ have been linked to at least 54 deaths in the UK in the six months to January. These, too, are imported from China.
The Chinese digital conglomerate Huawei — the company once involved in our 5G networks — is a perfect example of a company allegedly built on questionably acquired Western technology.
Its strategy is to resell its wares to the West at rock-bottom prices, undercutting the competition and driving rivals out, to achieve future dominance with a stranglehold on our tech businesses.
Western security officials are increasingly concerned about China’s growing interest in acquiring large datasets of DNA. According to the ISC, China sees DNA mapping biotech as another strategic resource.
Who controls DNA will control the future of healthcare for humanity, as well as future prosperity and security. That’s because genetic information is crucial for producing new drugs, tackling diseases and developing resilient crops. UK government departments with access to genomics data and technology, as well as academia and businesses, are prime targets for the leading Chinese biotech companies, BGI Group and its affiliate MGI Tech.
The firms are seen as national champions for the Chinese government and represent a global DNA ‘collection mechanism’.
The Pentagon has listed BGI Group as a ‘Chinese military company’, and the U.S. government has twice blacklisted the group’s subsidiaries for their role in the collection and analysis of DNA that enabled China’s repression of ethnic minorities such as Uighur Muslims.
Human rights groups say the CCP is trying to create a database of DNA information for genetics-based surveillance and law enforcement.
Fears around BGI using the Covid pandemic to collect genomic data around the world has prompted the U.S. Congress to put forward bipartisan legislation to ban both BGI and MGI Tech from public contracts.
Meanwhile, one high-tech market where China is already exerting control is the so-called ‘information superhighway’ or ‘internet of things’, the network of devices that talk to each other — from doorbells to electricity meters, even the lights in our living rooms and the thermostats on our radiators.
These gadgets rely on ‘modules’ that connect the equipment to the internet. China supplies the West with more than 60 per cent of these modules.
Because they can be updated remotely by the manufacturer, it is practically impossible to ensure they are not spying on us and sending data back to their source.
If this sounds paranoid, bear in mind that TikTok is currently under FBI investigation after its Chinese parent company ByteDance used the app to monitor the activities of some American journalists.
More chilling still is the prospect that our cars could be controlled remotely, their electronic modules taken over by a hostile state.
Cars could be tracked — the Mail reported last year that such a device had been reported inside a UK government car — or chaos, injuries and death caused if thousands of electric vehicles simultaneously ceased to be under the control of their drivers. China exports cheap models worldwide.
It is also flexing its economic power to undermine the West by dumping goods such as steel onto the world market — that is, producing far more than it needs and then selling abroad at a loss.
As with Huawei, the goal is to take long-term control by absorbing short-term losses.
When China was admitted to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), we hoped liberalisation of trade would lead to peaceful co-existence. Under President Xi, the opposite is happening. China, the world’s second-largest economy, accounting for 18.6 per cent of global wealth, is still classed as a developing country by the WTO.
While its middle classes have grown massively, China has also built part of its economy on forced and slave labour.
The oppressed Muslim region of Xinjiang has significant coal reserves, providing cheap electricity. This makes the region attractive for polysilicon production, used for making photovoltaic components in solar panels which the West, in its quest for Net Zero, is buying.
In 2020, China’s share of polysilicon production was at around 82 per cent. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that ‘nearly every silicon-based solar module — at least 95 per cent of the market — is likely to have some Xinjiang silicon in it’.
In other words: the ‘greening’ of our energy is being done on the backs of Chinese forced labour.
And in sport, too, China is moving into new territory, such as the takeover of historic football club West Bromwich Albion.
Its new owner, Guochuan Lai, pledged to keep ‘the Baggies’ safe — then took out a £20 million loan at high interest, using the stadium as collateral.
Guochuan also borrowed nearly £5 million from the club to boost the coffers of a company he owns called Wisdom Smart, despite the fact that its annual statements reveal it already has reserves running into tens of millions of pounds. Fans fear their beloved club is being deliberately run into the ground, while others are concerned China’s increasingly doctrinaire Communist state is in direct control of it.
So what’s to be done?
First, we need to get real and understand how to expose this hidden warfare and explain it better to the public.
Second, we have the right — and indeed duty — to protect our interests, including the data and DNA of our citizens.
Third, our diplomats have to toughen up. If they lack the basic desire to defend our democracy or don’t believe in the national interest, they are part of the problem, not the solution.
Fourth, the UK must work with the U.S. and others to introduce tougher rules to prevent China dumping goods.
The WTO needs to re-designate China as a developed, not developing, nation so that it plays by the same rules as the rest of us.
I am working on a project with the Civitas think tank to produce a coherent policy across Government departments that recognises the Chinese threat as one that is different from anything the Soviet Union presented — equally hostile but more insidious.
We need a new national consensus. That means spending on hard power; the Army, Navy and RAF, but also a much more assertive defence of our interests and understanding how decades of subversive conflict, across culture, business, sport and science, can threaten our people.
The use of AI and big data, DNA sequencing and advanced propaganda techniques, will only make that threat worse.
We are in a battle for the future of humanity, between democracies and authoritarian states, and that conflict is being conducted in myriad subtle ways. But if we fail to grasp the importance of the challenge facing us, we will pay dearly for it in years to come.
Bob Seely is Conservative MP for the Isle of Wight, holds a PhD in International Security Studies from King’s College London and sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee.