China

On 3 July a Chinese man, Xu Zewei, was arrested in Milan to face extradition on nine charges relating to the hack carried out by a group called Haf-nium during the Covid pandemic. Western companies had secrets stolen in 2020 and 2021 when a weakness in the Microsoft Exchange servers was exploited. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of GCHQ, later said 70 British firms had fallen victim to ‘a malicious act by Chinese state-backed actors’. The court documents claim that officers of China’s ‘Ministry of State Security and the Shanghai State Security Bureau directed Xu to conduct this hacking’. China is constantly probing for ‘weaknesses’ in British defences

From Thailand to Brazil, a surge of imports from Chinese electric vehicle (EV) producer BYD has the familiar pattern of being followed by the destruction of domestic automotive jobs. The UK is unlikely to be the exception. This week’s news that Britain has become the number one market for BYD should ring alarm bells. Our domestic automotive producers, that have already announced thousands of job losses this year, are unlikely to emerge unharmed. BYD increased its sales in the UK by 880 per cent in September For two years, analysts and policymakers have warned of the economic risk Chinese EVs pose to the legacy automotive industry through a new wave of deindustrialisation and

The antics of Keir Starmer and his top security adviser over the collapsed China espionage case bring to mind the slapstick British movie Carry On Spying – which is precisely the message it will have conveyed to Beijing. Instead of Bernard Cribbins, Kenneth Williams and their team of fictional incompetents, the real-life Whitehall farce has Jonathan Powell on a single-minded mission to appease China. Powell, Starmer’s national security adviser, has been accused of torpedoing the trial to avoid embarrassing China at a time when he is leading efforts to rebuild diplomatic ties with Xi Jinping. One can only imagine the despair in Britain’s security agencies and the Crown Prosecution Service,

Xi Jinping effectively vanished in July and the first half of August. Some China watchers speculated that his unexplained absence was a sign that he was losing his grip on power. But he has since reappeared and been very visible again. At the end of last month, he visited Tibet, then indulged in a high-profile, back-slapping meeting with Vladimir Putin and the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Tianjin. He capped off his busy fortnight with the 3 September military parade in Beijing and a second meeting with his star guest Putin, this time accompanied by Kim Jong-un. So, a great triumph for the neo-Maoist leader and the new Axis

‘They’re vampires’ was my first thought. I had just heard the news that Putin and Xi were discussing how to prolong their lives, as they walked toward their places at the Tiananmen Square military parade. On the official news footage, Putin’s translator could be heard saying in Chinese: ‘Biotechnology is continuously developing.’ And then: ‘Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality.’ Xi responded: ‘Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old.’ Kim Jong-un was there too, but is not known to have contributed to the conversation. Maybe the blood-sucking image came to

The massive military parade in Beijing today definitively marks the end of the post-World War Two era. Nominally, the 80th Anniversary of China’s victory in ‘The War against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War’, it has been used by China’s president Xi to, in the words of Reuters, ‘…demonstrate Xi’s influence over nations intent on reshaping the Western-led global order’ – an order that began with the end of World War Two. Sharing the podium with Xi – but not invited to review the parade – were presidents Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-un of North Korea. Their client status to China is also clear: without China’s financial and industrial support, Putin

When analysing authoritarian states, not least North Korea, most of the time we have to read between the lines. But on other occasions, things are more obvious. Today, China celebrates eighty years since its victory over Japan in the second world war. Xi Jinping has invited Western and non-Western leaders past and present, but all eyes will be on the guest list’s top two invitees: Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. Marking the first multilateral gathering of all three leaders since the Cold War, today’s spectacle aims to send a clear signal to the West. Xi, Putin, and Kim might have their differences in foreign policy priorities, their relations may fluctuate,

It is generally agreed that Britain needs to improve its China capabilities. That a greater understanding of Chinese culture, history and language is needed in the UK was one of the few tangible findings from the government’s ‘China audit’, the bare bones of which were published earlier this year. But what happens when institutions responsible for building those capabilities are compromised by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? That is the worrying question arising from a report published this week into the state of China Studies in British universities, which details a chilling pattern of spying, intimidation, harassment and self-censorship at the hands of the CCP. The report, by UK-China Transparency,

It’s still lunchtime in Taipei but the streets are strangely quiet. A few people are running with their bags, despite the sweltering summer heat, desperate to get somewhere before 1.30 p.m. I’m enjoying the air-conditioning in a local supermarket when an announcement politely informs me and the only other customer still in the shop that we need to hurry if we want to buy something. The checkout assistant rushes to hand me my change, and I head back out into the heat. The Taiwanese government is certainly taking the risk of an attack by China seriously At precisely 1.30 p.m., my phone buzzes with a yellow alert in Chinese and

This week’s Nato summit could not come at a more pivotal moment. As recent months have shown, the challenges to contemporary global security are no longer limited to the individual threats posed by Moscow, Tehran, or Pyongyang. What makes the current situation even more concerning for the West is the multiple threats posed by the heightened bilateral and trilateral collaborations between these actors, alongside those with Beijing. Whilst the so-called CRINK (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) does not yet constitute any formal strategic alliance, it would be naïve and dangerous to dismiss their ties as merely superficial. On his visit to the United Kingdom on Monday, Volodymyr Zelensky called

China is growing its nuclear arsenal at a faster pace than any other country on the planet, according to new figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). It estimates that Beijing now has more than 600 nuclear warheads and is adding about 100 per year to its stockpile. That means that by 2035, it will have more than 1,500 warheads, still only a third of the arsenal of each of Russia and the US, but nevertheless an enormous increase and a marked shift away from its proclaimed policy of ‘minimum deterrence’. To facilitate this expanding arsenal, China is building fields of new missile silos in its western desert

Coming from an American politician, the accusations would have been unsurprising. Beijing is unwilling to ‘live within the constraints of the rules-based international system’ and its trade policy is one of ‘distortion with intent’. It splashes subsidies with abandon, undercuts intellectual property protections, and as for China’s membership of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), that was probably a mistake too. It is bold of von der Leyen to raise the WTO, and it will be intriguing to see how she is greeted at the EU-China leaders’ summit Yet this tirade came not from an acolyte of Donald Trump, but from Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission