Why do the Chinese need spies? Western companies are selling the Chinese their latest technology which can be reverse engineered.
More important are the parts that the Chinese have inserted into products used by the West from the military to telecommunications to energy. The Chinese building a nuclear bomb, sorry power plant, in the UK? Has no one read the story about the Trojan Horse? What are they teaching in Classics courses these days?
And UK universities are falling over themselves to offer high fee yielding places to Chinese students; the students are the another pack of Trojan horses. We should severely limit our exposure to China, much like the Japanese did to the West in the 16th century.
Last edited 7 months ago by William Edward Henry Appleby
That is the main “feature” of the West.
Because of nature of our political, social and economic system, we allow enemies of the West to gain knowledge and technology to defeat us.
Lenin “usefull idiots”.
In addition how many former British civil servants, politicians and business people are employed to advance Chinese interests to detriment of uk and the West.
Yet, Unherd still publishes article by usual Chinese stooges who claim nothing can be done to stop Chinese dominated world.
Uttern nonsense.
West was doing perfectly well without China till 20 years ago.
ITT:
People from the UK referring to the actual practical realtiy of modern day China with strong, explicit, corse derision as “socialist”
the simple fact that there are more “state owned enterpriseS” organized in a legal and regulatory environment that provides more control to the state sharehodler/partner/owner than is common in western nations is UTTERLY irrelevant.
as is the 1 party autocracy….. Governance and economy are distinct topics.
Indeed: The current practical nature of the Chinese economy is *VERY* close to the European norm.
Chinese people’s lives, in regard to employment, ownership of property or assets, ability to *build wealth through savings and investment*, and access to taxpayer funded services and play out ALMOST IDENTICALLY to the lives of British, French, Norwegian (Speically included due to their notorious sovereign wealth fund).
Again: the fact that these people have no true political franchise or even ability to break through and participate is IIRRELEVANT (Prove to me that the average citizen of the UK, or the US *truly* possesses this ability as more than a statistical outlier)
edit: the “social credit score” ratings creaed by government contractors in China compare quite favorably to the opaque private sector “regular? credit score” ratings that private companies assemble from the data that they purchase from facebook and Amazon in the US, and which are used for the same reason (to enable and facilitate the economic and legal liability mechanism that underlies the enforcement of contracts and social/cultural norms, by providing risk quantification, always and forever based on *all available information* accessible by the rating agency and and a reference scale to measure from)
Last edited 7 months ago by rod gartner
Malcolm Webb
7 months ago
All Socialist and other autocratic regimes are corrupt and bound eventually to fail – but that obviously does not mean they are not extremely dangerous in the meantime. People aiming to be governed though representative democracy.should resist and counter attempted Socialist incursions into our body politic, and our economy in general, at every step of the way. Treating Chinese Communists as being “just like us” is certainly a grave mistake.
Aren’t we lucky to have Capitalism and all those nice food banks, and soaring inflation, and wealth transfer, and crumbling schools and infrastructure and disappearing services etc. We’re so lucky..
Simon Blanchard
7 months ago
My worry in all of this is the demonisation of ordinary Chinese people. Such as the kindly old couple running the ping pong table repair shop in my parents’ village next to the American airbase in Lincolnshire.
Beware the Yellow Peril and the Reds under the bed and the Bogeyman.. it’s a miracle we’ve escaped them these last 75 years.. but they’re definitely coming to get us.. I can feel it, even through my tinfoil hat!
Andrew Boughton
7 months ago
Nice work. Even according to a rather embarrassed Telegraph lead the day after the sensationalist story, the alleged Westminster Chinese agent appears to have been a ruse engineered by opponents of Sunak’s engagement with China. If so, would the original allegation not have been callous toward one of our own dedicated staffers, but a sign of hysteria across our political leadership? So, where has the tale turned most lately, does anyone know?
Reginald Duquesnoy
7 months ago
I spy with my little third eye…do only the paranoid survive, as claimed Bob Noyce? Certainly the military-industrial complex thrives on it. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
Chris Hayes
7 months ago
It is nigh on impossible for open, democratic societies to eliminate espionage. We do, however, make it rather easy for the Chinese. We’ve impoverished our educational establishments, forcing them to establish campuses abroad and accept increasing levels of foreign students: and once they are here, the students gain entry into our educational, research, and technological establishments and from there into industry and politics.
I suspect the numbers over here are more that we could possibly imagine.
The CCP is the most oppressive police state ever to exist. It is engaged in active genocide, and mass religious persecution. It harvests organs from live political prisoners to sell to rich Westerners. It unleashed a devastation pandemic that killed tens of millions through sloppiness at what very well may be a bio-weapons lab.
Said regime has been robbing the West blind of its technology and intellectual property for 30 years, abetted by global corporations. It has infiltrated our Universities, corporations and Gov’t. It is planting “bugs” in the technology it sells us.
Sorry, what did you say was the name of that movie? You forgot to mention it..is it called : Beware the Yellow Peril? or Check for Reds under the Bed? Best stop using that China tea set.. it’s probably spying on you!
Last edited 7 months ago by Liam O'Mahony
Samir Iker
7 months ago
The problem is that the West isn’t paranoid enough.
Can you imagine anyone suggesting during the cold war that the Russians should be allowed to pilfer high level defense and state secrets, that the West transfer and build advanced industrial plants to Russia and let them gain a monopoly in industries such as rare earths, or that US telecoms use Russian build chips with Russian software.
You would be considered a lunatic at best and might be arrested as a traitor very likely for even harbouring such thoughts.
The problem is, Western leaders, bureaucrats and academics are stuck in the past and too impressed by their own supposed intellect.
Otherwise, it might have occured to them that China is their enemy and preparing for a showdown within decades at most (check out the pace at which they are churning out warships), or for instance mass illegal immigration or wokeism in corporates can have consequences.
Dumetrius
7 months ago
Before we start blaming China for promoting Western forms of cultural Marxism, it’s worth remembering that this stuff is a world away from errr,.’Marxism style Marxism.’
Does China even have the skills and positioning to promote it?
And China won’t touch that stuff with a bargepole in its own country.
Right because Marxism is just an “economic system” not a religion of social progress that creates fluid vocabulary to trick gullible idiots into defending it.
The cadre of the CCP sitting here with me says that in ‘Marxism style Marxism’, vocabulary certainly is not fluid.
James Kirk
7 months ago
Let it be known we feed them false information so they distrust the real info they acquire. In fact, forget that, tell them everything so they can make it and sell it back to us at a tenth of the price our own robbers would charge us. What? They already do that? Oh…
Samir Iker
7 months ago
“persistent rumour in China is that the PLA Rocket Force generals had taken money Xi handed them to expand China’s nuclear arsenal and pilfered it instead”
Real life is way more hilarious than any Hollywood comedy movie script can be.
Howard S.
7 months ago
How much money does the CCP pump into the Asia Society Policy Institute to keep it afloat?
Spot on. At least a 50% likelihood that the writer works for a CCP front group.
Dougie Undersub
7 months ago
I think the author has somewhat missed the point. It’s not the bog standard espionage that should surprise us, it’s the infiltration into every aspect of public and commercial life.
The universities are obvious examples but let’s not forget Chinese manufactured security cameras in government departments, the joint GCHQ/Huawei unit set up to demonstrate that it’s safe to have Huawei kit in our mobile phone networks, nuclear power station construction, Chinese purchases of UK companies in critical industries, unofficial Chinese police stations in our major cities, commercial espionage.
The establishment has been asleep at the wheel for two decades at least.
Ana Cebrian
7 months ago
I read the Mitrokhin Archive, some time in the mid 1990s, and one thing stood out: In spite of all of this sort of Cold War rhetoric, it was pointed out that the Soviet KGB had been founded as a revolutionary organisation (called the Cheka, I think), so it’s primary goal was to encourage and enable revolution.
It did of course try and find out the diameter and muzzle velocity of a new western power’s gun, but it equally spent time working to cause the collapse, from the inside, of the west.
Having similar roots, I would think that the Chinese intelligence service is much the same.
Looking at the suicidal tendencies of western governments, one might conclude that either they’re succeeding rather nicely, or that Douglas Adams’s “shoe shop intensifier ray” wasn’t really about shoe shops at all.
T Bone
7 months ago
Mao was instrumental in jumpstarting the Western Woke Revolution aka Hippie Neopaganism blended with racial solidarity movements in the 60s. Communism is inherently subversive. The CCP have always seen the west’s multicultural and multiracial democracy as a condition to be subverted for ideological struggle. And hey, we’ve had plenty of Western academics that acquiesced! The disciples of Western Marxists are only starting to realize that Communism isn’t what it claims to be.
I understand that you want to project being a “reasonable centrist” and pointing out the Maoist origins of Critical Social Justice offends the Centrist caricature you’re portraying but it doesn’t negate that Woke is Maoist.
I never said Mao was Neo-Pagan. I’m citing the Critical Social Justice movement back to campus radicals of the 60s; many of whom were Neopagan and enamored by Mao.
Mao was too busy killing tens of millions of his citizens in the Great Leap Forward and then Cultural Revolution to concern himself unduly with events outside of his Empire. The false perception of his idyllic system of equality and justice no doubt influenced some in the West, but not in a serious way.
Respectfully, Communism is a global struggle. It has always been Globalist in ambitions and always will be. That Mao sought solidarity with “racial liberation” ideologues in the West so they would rise up is not under dispute.
I just plucked this article so you can criticize the source but Mao’s speeches and stances are public record.
Ex- “Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung delivered this speech on August 9th, 1963 prior to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In it, he expresses support for Black Americans’ struggles against racial discrimination and calls upon peoples of the world to unite against U.S. imperialism. Targeting the peoples of Africa, Latin America, and Asia as his primary audience – rather than Americans – this speech was part of Mao’s Cold War propaganda strategy to undermine the image of the United States globally. It was disseminated via radio broadcast and newsprint across nearly all the key battle regions of the Cold War, including Central Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.” (World History Commons).
Tyler Durden
7 months ago
The discourse coming from the United States will always be pro-China in essence despite posturing from politicians. The PRC is responsible for the health of the US corporate sector owing to outsourcing; in embracing green corporatism, for instance, this Democrat administration is basically subsidising China’s renewable energy exports.
US federal and institutional cultural policies increasingly align with those of the CCP, and, gender aside, the march through the institutions of the modern identitarian Left is towards the destination almost precisely where authoritarian China has arrived.
There are even murmurings that the State Department’s Ukraine project has had unexpected benefits in driving Russia towards China as a moderating partner.
Graff von Frankenheim
7 months ago
I would like to suggest a sentence to be included somewhere in the final paragraph of this article: “The West should also beef up its counterintelligence capabilities at least back to where they were during the Cold War but preferably better because even then there were dozens of undiscovered East Bloc spies in Western intelligence and diplomatic circles. Bring back the spirit of Angleton!”
Johan Grönwall
7 months ago
Apart from the fact that China is a fascistoid country bent on world domination that must be contained for the sake of democracy (where spying is one method) there is also the chinese speciality of trolling by using whatsboutisms, of which this article is yet another example. Also predictable is accusing the West of rascism, which we see in some comment (these kinds of articles are always commented on by other trolls). Unherd should refrain from allowing these covert propaganda pieces.
Gordon Arta
7 months ago
The author is a key figure at an Institute which promotes left of centre policies ‘infused with critical race theory principles’, is supported by the Chinese Government’s Confucius Institute Headquarters, and gets funding from Soros. The column is one of a number by different authors, now appearing in MSM outlets, and is clearly part of a campaign by China’s stooges to head off the West’s growing realisation that China represents an existential threat.
Why do the Chinese need spies? Western companies are selling the Chinese their latest technology which can be reverse engineered.
More important are the parts that the Chinese have inserted into products used by the West from the military to telecommunications to energy. The Chinese building a nuclear bomb, sorry power plant, in the UK? Has no one read the story about the Trojan Horse? What are they teaching in Classics courses these days?
And UK universities are falling over themselves to offer high fee yielding places to Chinese students; the students are the another pack of Trojan horses. We should severely limit our exposure to China, much like the Japanese did to the West in the 16th century.
That is the main “feature” of the West.
Because of nature of our political, social and economic system, we allow enemies of the West to gain knowledge and technology to defeat us.
Lenin “usefull idiots”.
Terrible! The Us or UK would never stoop so low as to do anything like that …would they??
In addition how many former British civil servants, politicians and business people are employed to advance Chinese interests to detriment of uk and the West.
Yet, Unherd still publishes article by usual Chinese stooges who claim nothing can be done to stop Chinese dominated world.
Uttern nonsense.
West was doing perfectly well without China till 20 years ago.
ITT:
People from the UK referring to the actual practical realtiy of modern day China with strong, explicit, corse derision as “socialist”
the simple fact that there are more “state owned enterpriseS” organized in a legal and regulatory environment that provides more control to the state sharehodler/partner/owner than is common in western nations is UTTERLY irrelevant.
as is the 1 party autocracy….. Governance and economy are distinct topics.
Indeed: The current practical nature of the Chinese economy is *VERY* close to the European norm.
Chinese people’s lives, in regard to employment, ownership of property or assets, ability to *build wealth through savings and investment*, and access to taxpayer funded services and play out ALMOST IDENTICALLY to the lives of British, French, Norwegian (Speically included due to their notorious sovereign wealth fund).
Again: the fact that these people have no true political franchise or even ability to break through and participate is IIRRELEVANT (Prove to me that the average citizen of the UK, or the US *truly* possesses this ability as more than a statistical outlier)
edit: the “social credit score” ratings creaed by government contractors in China compare quite favorably to the opaque private sector “regular? credit score” ratings that private companies assemble from the data that they purchase from facebook and Amazon in the US, and which are used for the same reason (to enable and facilitate the economic and legal liability mechanism that underlies the enforcement of contracts and social/cultural norms, by providing risk quantification, always and forever based on *all available information* accessible by the rating agency and and a reference scale to measure from)
All Socialist and other autocratic regimes are corrupt and bound eventually to fail – but that obviously does not mean they are not extremely dangerous in the meantime. People aiming to be governed though representative democracy.should resist and counter attempted Socialist incursions into our body politic, and our economy in general, at every step of the way. Treating Chinese Communists as being “just like us” is certainly a grave mistake.
Aren’t we lucky to have Capitalism and all those nice food banks, and soaring inflation, and wealth transfer, and crumbling schools and infrastructure and disappearing services etc. We’re so lucky..
My worry in all of this is the demonisation of ordinary Chinese people. Such as the kindly old couple running the ping pong table repair shop in my parents’ village next to the American airbase in Lincolnshire.
Beware the Yellow Peril and the Reds under the bed and the Bogeyman.. it’s a miracle we’ve escaped them these last 75 years.. but they’re definitely coming to get us.. I can feel it, even through my tinfoil hat!
Nice work. Even according to a rather embarrassed Telegraph lead the day after the sensationalist story, the alleged Westminster Chinese agent appears to have been a ruse engineered by opponents of Sunak’s engagement with China. If so, would the original allegation not have been callous toward one of our own dedicated staffers, but a sign of hysteria across our political leadership? So, where has the tale turned most lately, does anyone know?
I spy with my little third eye…do only the paranoid survive, as claimed Bob Noyce? Certainly the military-industrial complex thrives on it. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
It is nigh on impossible for open, democratic societies to eliminate espionage. We do, however, make it rather easy for the Chinese. We’ve impoverished our educational establishments, forcing them to establish campuses abroad and accept increasing levels of foreign students: and once they are here, the students gain entry into our educational, research, and technological establishments and from there into industry and politics.
I suspect the numbers over here are more that we could possibly imagine.
They’re everywhere.. run for your lives!
The CCP is the most oppressive police state ever to exist. It is engaged in active genocide, and mass religious persecution. It harvests organs from live political prisoners to sell to rich Westerners. It unleashed a devastation pandemic that killed tens of millions through sloppiness at what very well may be a bio-weapons lab.
Said regime has been robbing the West blind of its technology and intellectual property for 30 years, abetted by global corporations. It has infiltrated our Universities, corporations and Gov’t. It is planting “bugs” in the technology it sells us.
The West is NOT NEARLY paranoid enough.
Sorry, what did you say was the name of that movie? You forgot to mention it..is it called : Beware the Yellow Peril? or Check for Reds under the Bed? Best stop using that China tea set.. it’s probably spying on you!
The problem is that the West isn’t paranoid enough.
Can you imagine anyone suggesting during the cold war that the Russians should be allowed to pilfer high level defense and state secrets, that the West transfer and build advanced industrial plants to Russia and let them gain a monopoly in industries such as rare earths, or that US telecoms use Russian build chips with Russian software.
You would be considered a lunatic at best and might be arrested as a traitor very likely for even harbouring such thoughts.
The problem is, Western leaders, bureaucrats and academics are stuck in the past and too impressed by their own supposed intellect.
Otherwise, it might have occured to them that China is their enemy and preparing for a showdown within decades at most (check out the pace at which they are churning out warships), or for instance mass illegal immigration or wokeism in corporates can have consequences.
Before we start blaming China for promoting Western forms of cultural Marxism, it’s worth remembering that this stuff is a world away from errr,.’Marxism style Marxism.’
Does China even have the skills and positioning to promote it?
And China won’t touch that stuff with a bargepole in its own country.
Right because Marxism is just an “economic system” not a religion of social progress that creates fluid vocabulary to trick gullible idiots into defending it.
The cadre of the CCP sitting here with me says that in ‘Marxism style Marxism’, vocabulary certainly is not fluid.
Let it be known we feed them false information so they distrust the real info they acquire. In fact, forget that, tell them everything so they can make it and sell it back to us at a tenth of the price our own robbers would charge us. What? They already do that? Oh…
“persistent rumour in China is that the PLA Rocket Force generals had taken money Xi handed them to expand China’s nuclear arsenal and pilfered it instead”
Real life is way more hilarious than any Hollywood comedy movie script can be.
How much money does the CCP pump into the Asia Society Policy Institute to keep it afloat?
Spot on. At least a 50% likelihood that the writer works for a CCP front group.
I think the author has somewhat missed the point. It’s not the bog standard espionage that should surprise us, it’s the infiltration into every aspect of public and commercial life.
The universities are obvious examples but let’s not forget Chinese manufactured security cameras in government departments, the joint GCHQ/Huawei unit set up to demonstrate that it’s safe to have Huawei kit in our mobile phone networks, nuclear power station construction, Chinese purchases of UK companies in critical industries, unofficial Chinese police stations in our major cities, commercial espionage.
The establishment has been asleep at the wheel for two decades at least.
I read the Mitrokhin Archive, some time in the mid 1990s, and one thing stood out: In spite of all of this sort of Cold War rhetoric, it was pointed out that the Soviet KGB had been founded as a revolutionary organisation (called the Cheka, I think), so it’s primary goal was to encourage and enable revolution.
It did of course try and find out the diameter and muzzle velocity of a new western power’s gun, but it equally spent time working to cause the collapse, from the inside, of the west.
Having similar roots, I would think that the Chinese intelligence service is much the same.
Looking at the suicidal tendencies of western governments, one might conclude that either they’re succeeding rather nicely, or that Douglas Adams’s “shoe shop intensifier ray” wasn’t really about shoe shops at all.
Mao was instrumental in jumpstarting the Western Woke Revolution aka Hippie Neopaganism blended with racial solidarity movements in the 60s. Communism is inherently subversive. The CCP have always seen the west’s multicultural and multiracial democracy as a condition to be subverted for ideological struggle. And hey, we’ve had plenty of Western academics that acquiesced! The disciples of Western Marxists are only starting to realize that Communism isn’t what it claims to be.
Well done, back to woke in the first sentence. What the hell would we talk about without it!
I understand that you want to project being a “reasonable centrist” and pointing out the Maoist origins of Critical Social Justice offends the Centrist caricature you’re portraying but it doesn’t negate that Woke is Maoist.
Mao was a neo-pagan?
Or where did he acquire the skills to jumpstart such a movement?
Finicky thing, neopaganism.
I never said Mao was Neo-Pagan. I’m citing the Critical Social Justice movement back to campus radicals of the 60s; many of whom were Neopagan and enamored by Mao.
Mao was too busy killing tens of millions of his citizens in the Great Leap Forward and then Cultural Revolution to concern himself unduly with events outside of his Empire. The false perception of his idyllic system of equality and justice no doubt influenced some in the West, but not in a serious way.
Respectfully, Communism is a global struggle. It has always been Globalist in ambitions and always will be. That Mao sought solidarity with “racial liberation” ideologues in the West so they would rise up is not under dispute.
I just plucked this article so you can criticize the source but Mao’s speeches and stances are public record.
Ex- “Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung delivered this speech on August 9th, 1963 prior to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In it, he expresses support for Black Americans’ struggles against racial discrimination and calls upon peoples of the world to unite against U.S. imperialism. Targeting the peoples of Africa, Latin America, and Asia as his primary audience – rather than Americans – this speech was part of Mao’s Cold War propaganda strategy to undermine the image of the United States globally. It was disseminated via radio broadcast and newsprint across nearly all the key battle regions of the Cold War, including Central Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.” (World History Commons).
The discourse coming from the United States will always be pro-China in essence despite posturing from politicians. The PRC is responsible for the health of the US corporate sector owing to outsourcing; in embracing green corporatism, for instance, this Democrat administration is basically subsidising China’s renewable energy exports.
US federal and institutional cultural policies increasingly align with those of the CCP, and, gender aside, the march through the institutions of the modern identitarian Left is towards the destination almost precisely where authoritarian China has arrived.
There are even murmurings that the State Department’s Ukraine project has had unexpected benefits in driving Russia towards China as a moderating partner.
I would like to suggest a sentence to be included somewhere in the final paragraph of this article: “The West should also beef up its counterintelligence capabilities at least back to where they were during the Cold War but preferably better because even then there were dozens of undiscovered East Bloc spies in Western intelligence and diplomatic circles. Bring back the spirit of Angleton!”
Apart from the fact that China is a fascistoid country bent on world domination that must be contained for the sake of democracy (where spying is one method) there is also the chinese speciality of trolling by using whatsboutisms, of which this article is yet another example. Also predictable is accusing the West of rascism, which we see in some comment (these kinds of articles are always commented on by other trolls). Unherd should refrain from allowing these covert propaganda pieces.