Europe is getting a little more serious about challenging China’s vast espionage campaign against the West.
On Monday, the United Kingdom charged two Britons, Christopher Cash, a 29-year-old parliamentary researcher, and Christopher Berry, a 32-year-old former teacher, with spying for China. The two men were first arrested more than a year ago, but U.K. prosecutors have been considering their evidence file since December. Both men had previously spent a number of years in China, with Cash studying there and Berry teaching English. If guilty of the charge against them, namely providing China with information useful to an enemy, they were almost certainly recruited by the Chinese intelligence services during their time in China. Nearly all Americans and Britons who spend any significant time in China can expect some form of intelligence recruitment approach.
Cash’s situation is a particularly serious one, given that he had fostered close links to members of Parliament from the ruling Conservative Party, including government ministers. Cash appears to have used these contacts to help shape security policies related to China. That activity would make sense from the Chinese intelligence services, which prioritize the recruitment of Britons who then go on to work in politics, the advanced technology sector, or the U.K. intelligence community.
Cash aside, it appears China may be having success in this regard. The British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee last year identified weaknesses in security vetting for applicants to join the U.K.’s signals intelligence service at Government Communications Headquarters. Regardless, the scale of China’s effort to recruit or otherwise manipulate British citizens is vast. In 2023, the head of the U.K.’s MI5 domestic intelligence service noted that at least 20,000 Britons had been covertly approached by Chinese intelligence officers on websites such as LinkedIn.
This isn’t the only news related to Chinese espionage in Europe this week.
On Monday and Tuesday, Germany arrested four people accused of spying for China. They include a parliamentary aide to the top candidate of the hard-right AfD party for the European Union’s parliamentary elections in June. The aide, identified only as Jian G., is said to have passed information to Beijing in relation to EU parliamentary negotiations. He is also accused of spying on Chinese dissidents in Germany. The other three who were arrested are accused of operating a front company to provide militarily valuable technology to China.
These arrests are a positive development. Nevertheless, they represent only the tip of a far larger Chinese intelligence iceberg. They also reflect an overly cautious stance by European powers toward addressing China’s threat. The British government remains determined to balance China-related security concerns with avoiding action that might risk Chinese investment. China banks on this weakness to create space for its aggression. That said, the U.K.’s timidity is nothing compared to that of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Just consider the hilarious timing of these arrests, one week after Scholz made yet another trip to China. Scholz was in Beijing to beg Chinese leader Xi Jinping to import more German cars and reduce China’s automobile export competition with Germany’s global car export market. Of course, Xi will do nothing of the sort. He knows that Germany is caught between the increasingly rare import scraps he offers and systemic economic decline. That Germany waited to make these arrests until Scholz returned home only proves to Xi that Europe’s largest economy is utterly unserious about confronting his threats.
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Evincing as much, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is in total denial mode. On Tuesday, a ministry spokesman declared that “recent reports about so-called China’s spying in Europe are all hypes aimed at smearing and hitting China. … We firmly oppose such hype and we urge relevant parties to stop spreading disinformation about so-called ‘China spy threat’ and stop political manipulation and malicious smears.” Pushed by the BBC, the spokesman emphasized that “the claim that China could be stealing UK intelligence is a groundless accusation and malicious smear.”
This is basically China’s way of saying, “You got us. Now shut up about it or we’ll cut trade.” The problem for Xi, even if Angela Merkel and Scholz’s catastrophic economic mismanagement prevents Germans from admitting it, is that much of the world is increasingly looking beyond China for trade and investment. In turn, it’s time to be far more robust in confronting Beijing’s many legions of spies.