When the news broke, on Wednesday, that three men had been arrested in the UK on suspicion of spying for China – including the husband of the Labour MP Joani Reid – many in Westminster reacted with shock. But this is exactly the sort of scenario that UK intelligence agencies have been warning about for years. Last November, MI5 issued an espionage alert to UK parliamentarians and their staff warning that Chinese spies were actively trying to “recruit and cultivate” people with access to the inner workings of the government. The most recent example at the time involved two individuals, named as Amanda Qiu and Shirly Shen, who were said to be working with China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) and using LinkedIn to “conduct outreach at scale”.
Qiu’s LinkedIn profile described her as the chief executive of a Beijing-based headhunting firm, BP-YR Executive Search, which “connected visionary companies with world-class talent”. Shen’s biography said she was a “Global Headhunter” based in Hong Kong and co-founder of InternshipUnion, which had “helped hundreds of students come China do their internship”. Both LinkedIn profiles featured headshots of beautiful young women, although it is not clear whether the photographs were real. They have both since disappeared.
This is not a new phenomenon. In 2023, Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, warned that more than 20,000 UK citizens had been approached by Chinese agents on LinkedIn or similar sites over the past two-and-a-half years, double the number in the previous period. Nor is this limited to the UK. Then FBI director Christopher Wray said that his agency was running thousands of investigations into alleged Chinese espionage activities across the country and opening a new case file “roughly every 12 hours”. Many of these cases involve economic and corporate espionage including sophisticated efforts to gain access to technology and cutting-edge research. But both countries – and many others including Australia, Canada, and New Zealand – have seen concerted efforts in recent years to recruit human sources, particularly those with connections to politics. (Beijing denies these allegations.)
“It is not just parliamentarians who should be concerned by this,” security minister Dan Jarvis told the Commons after the MI5 warning in November, “parliamentary staff, economists, think-tank employees, geopolitical consultants and Government officials have all been targeted for their networks and access to politicians.” He pointed to an ongoing pattern of “covert and calculated” efforts by China to “interfere with our sovereign affairs in favour of its own interests”.
This includes a cyber-attack by Chinese state-affiliated actors that targeted MPs’ emails in 2021 and alleged “political interference” by a lawyer named Christine Lee, that led to an “interference alert” to parliament in 2022. MI5 claimed Lee was operating on behalf of the United Front Work Department, an organ of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tasked with neutralising opposition to the party and managing relations with foreign actors. Xi Jinping has called the United Front a “magic weapon for the victory of the party’s cause”. (Lee denied the accusation made against her.) Chinese state-linked hackers have also been accused of targeting the Electoral Commission between 2021 and 2022 in a “malicious” cyber-attack that extracted the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every registered voter in the UK between 2014 and 2022, and another attack that accessed the payroll records of most of the British armed forces.
In the US, groups of Chinese state-linked hackers known as Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon have infiltrated critical infrastructure and communications networks. Wray warned in 2024 that China was attempting to gain access to a wide swathe of American infrastructure, including energy grids and water treatment facilities, as part of a “broad and unrelenting” effort to gain the capability to “physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing”. The Chinese government has rejected all allegations of wrongdoing in both the UK and the US.
While the British security services have been warning for years of the scale and scope of Chinese espionage efforts, parliament seems only belatedly to have acknowledged the urgency of the threat, passing the UK National Security Act in 2023 to replace the Official Secrets Act from 1911. To date, there have been no reported convictions of anyone in the UK on charges of spying for China. The case against two British men – Christopher Cash, a parliamentary researcher, and Christopher Berry, a teacher and consultant – who were accused of spying for China between 2021 and 2023, was dropped last year due to a lack of evidence, triggering a political firestorm in Westminster over who was to blame for the prosecution falling apart. (Both men always maintained their innocence.)
The recriminations that followed brought renewed attention to China’s activities in the UK and reignited the controversy over whether the government should grant permission for China’s new “super embassy” on the site of the old Royal Mint in London. Critics argued it would become a major hub for Chinese espionage. The government granted permission for the embassy just before Keir Starmer’s visit to China in January, prompting accusations that he was compromising national security in the pursuit of badly needed economic deals and reciprocal permission to rebuild the UK’s embassy. Residents who live near the future embassy site are now seeking a judicial review to block the government’s decision.
Despite Beijing’s repeated denials, it should surprise nobody that Chinese spies are targeting the UK. China spies on the UK, just as the UK spies on China. Both countries have an interest in trying to understand the political decision-making and the military capabilities of the other. As one of the US’s closest allies (at least historically), a founding member of Nato, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and the world’s sixth largest economy, China’s intelligence agencies have undoubtedly been tasked with monitoring the inner workings of the British government and tracking, perhaps eventually attempting to influence, the country’s political trajectory.
Beijing has an obvious interest in understanding how British parliamentarians view issues such as the fate of Taiwan, the crushing of democratic freedoms in Hong Kong, and the outlook for the war in Ukraine – as well as more prosaic concerns like how long Labour MPs think Starmer has left in office, and who is the most likely leader to come next. (And what are their views on the above.) Even gossip about who is having an affair with whom could be useful information for a foreign intelligence service. As Jarvis warned in November, “China has a low threshold for what information is considered to be of value, and will gather individual pieces of information to build a wider picture.”
China’s intelligence gathering apparatus has the advantage of sheer scale, alongside its technological capabilities, which gives it the ability to target vast numbers of potential assets, including junior figures, some of whom might rise to senior roles over time. Recent approaches on LinkedIn to people in the UK have reportedly included offers of lucrative part-time work and consulting opportunities that involve providing geopolitical analysis and “insider” information. It is not exactly the stuff of John Le Carré, but useful, nevertheless, to Beijing.
Their counterparts in the UK will presumably hope that the recent spate of Chinese spying allegations will alert the public, and parliamentarians in particular, to the risks the country faces and the many forms contemporary Chinese espionage can take, from sophisticated cyber-attacks to low-tech efforts to recruit individual sources online. Britons should be wary of “a tempting online job advert in your sector [that] is just too good to be true,” McCallum, the head of MI5, warned last year. Qiu and Shen have long since vanished from the internet, but there will likely be more efforts to use the same approach. It costs very little to set up an online profile and target tens of thousands of people. The rewards for China’s spies, if only a few respond, could be valuable.
[Further reading: How the China spy scandal engulfed the government]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment