In the past 12 months, the British government has quietly expelled three suspicions of Chinese spies posing as journalists, according to a British official.
The rare case of a spy journalist, first reported by the British newspaper Telegraph and not officially announced by London, is the latest sign of deteriorating relations between two countries that, just a few years ago, heralded a “golden age” in connections.
The three worked for the Chinese Ministry of State Security, but arrived in the country claiming to be employees of three separate Chinese media entities, the official said, confirming the Telegraph report. Their real roles were discovered by the British counterintelligence agency MI5 and sent home, according to the report and confirmed by the official. Media organizations are not identified.
Attention in Western countries to Chinese influence is growing beyond the economy, such as trade imbalances and intellectual property protection. Increasingly, Western decision-makers, including in the US, see China’s links to the media, telecommunications and education as a threat to national security.
British officials say they have had to adapt in recent years to what they call a severe and growing threat of espionage from China, which has long targeted trade secrets but is increasingly seeking government information. They did not describe the activity as aggressively as Russian espionage, which had been a British accent for decades.
Earlier this week, the UK communications regulator removed the Chinese state news network CGTN from its broadcasting license, a key hurdle in Europe for China’s main international news channel.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has upset British Broadcasting Corp. for news reports of Beijing’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and its treatment of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Beijing has also denounced Britain’s move to provide a path to citizenship for some Hong Kong residents, while the two sides are exempting personal freedoms from the former British colony.
In the United States, accusations of Chinese espionage and influence pressure increased during the Trump administration. He relied on universities to shut down Beijing-funded Confucius Institutes, worried they were distributing propaganda, and asked major Chinese news publishers to register as foreign missions, equating them with government outposts. When he ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston, former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called it “a spy pit.”
The Chinese media is a special challenge for Western governments, as they are led by the state, blurring the lines between gathering information for journalistic purposes and state purposes.
As a means of verifying espionage through the media, the 2017 US-China Economic and Security Review Commission recommended that Washington designate employees of Chinese Chinese news and television groups in the US as foreign government agents, “given that Chinese intelligence gathering and information warfare are known to involve the staff of Chinese state media organizations ”.
Speaking about the latest case in the UK, a spokesman for a group of critical lawmakers in Beijing, called the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, said: “It is not surprising that a regime that discards journalists by keeping them as propagandists would take it a step further and hide spies among them. ”
In recent days, Beijing has criticized what it described as the British efforts to conquer the Chinese government and undermine its interests.
The Foreign Ministry said on Friday that it had lodged a complaint with the BBC’s Beijing office over news reports of Covid-19 and Xinjiang’s response, calling on the BBC to “deliberately stop destroying and attacking China”.
The ministry has also threatened to retaliate against Britain’s cancellation of the CGTN’s broadcasting license.
“The Chinese side urges the British side to immediately stop its political manipulations and correct its mistakes,” ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said in a routine briefing on Friday.
He did not challenge the British regulator’s ruling that the CGTN is ultimately controlled by the Communist Party of China, saying instead that the British authorities had long been aware of how China, as a socialist country, managed its masses. mediate.
The response of the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman was less to the accusations of espionage journalism. Mr Wang told reporters that he was not aware of this, but reiterated Beijing’s position that the UK-based Chinese media was operating legally.
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