People don’t like being spied on. We can take that as a given. When Edward Snowden revealed in the early 2010s that the US and others had been systematically, and covertly, looking at emails and other data from online activity by citizens, there was an international outcry.
If you add to that the fact that the party accused of spying is one that is also framed as sometimes hostile and unaligned to the target’s values, things get even worse. This gives some context therefore to the huge controversy over the last few weeks of claims that two British spied on behalf of China. It is an issue that makes people feel uneasy and fearful. It gets under their skin.
This is not just something vague and abstract. Britain has strong historic reason to be nervous when such claims surface. Through the 1930s into the 1960s, individuals called `moles’ – Burgess, McClean, Philby being the most prominent – leaked vast amounts of the most sensitive material from deep within the British state to its greatest international foe, the Soviet Union. The memory of that betrayal still lingers today.
Before we get pulled into a maelstrom of fear and anger about the possibility that Britain has been subject to spying, and that the case of Mr Cash and Mr Berry indicates how deep and invasive China’s reach has been, we have to bear in mind some context.
China is not the Soviet Union. It poses far more complex questions. Soviet Russia had limited trade and technological links with what we now call the political west. While Britain and the USSR were allies at the end of the Second World War, before and after this unique moment there were clear, deep boundaries. With China it is currently the UK’s third largest trading partner, and the second largest research partner in terms of jointly authored peer reviewed academic articles. On fundamental issues from environment, to AI, to public health, the default of the UK and China is to co-operate. Today, there are over 100,000 Chinese students enrolled in British universities – an increasingly important lifeline at a time of deep budget constraints.
Nor does China seek to promote its own ideology and form of governance as a global model. Sinified Marxism Leninism is understood, even by elite Chinese leaders, as a bespoke, unique form of administration. It is hard to explain how this operates to the outside world, let alone get them to believe if offers a desirable model for them. Unlike the USSR, China is not a proselytizer for its own system, and those who believe it is so are simply ill informed or mendacious.
All of these factors means that relations between the UK and China involve calculation of opportunity costs far sharper and more impactful than with Russia during the depths of the Cold War. The UK can certainly beg to differ with China. But these days, China has ample other options to put its trade, technology and investment elsewhere. And as the country embarks on an unprecedented technological revolution, not having access to parts of this that might be beneficial to the UK is particularly problematic.
For the last few years, the UK has tried to solve this quandary by an increasingly complex framework, where, in one iteration of it at least, it talked of “cooperation, competition and challenge.” That tried to divide up the various dimensions of the UK’s approach to China in ways that balanced disagreements alongside areas of alignment. It was also an attempt to keep alongside the US and Europe as they experienced deeper competition and turbulence in their links with Beijing. The UK was, perfectly wisely, trying to avoid being exposed.
Despite this, there are specific aspects of what Britain is dealing with today that are unique and have a huge impact. One of the greatest changes in the bilateral relationship in the last three decades, and something that profoundly impacts it today, is the significant shifts in power balance between the two. Britain had a bigger economy than China’s till as late as 2005. It had a larger military and greater geopolitical networks even up to 2000. In terms of technological and intellectual capital too, Britain would have seen its universities, companies and research as more advanced than those of China. But today, in every dimension, this has changed. China’s economy is now five times larger than Britain’s; in vessel numbers, it has the largest navy in the world; with the Belt and Road, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, Beijing has a set of parallel diplomatic networks centred on its own interests, even as it participates in almost every other multilateral forum; its research budget in 2025 stood at about USD460 billion, dwarfing the USD25 billion of the UK.
It is easy therefore to see why British policymakers and security specialists might find the current situation overwhelming. A lot has happened in a very short period of time. China has changed more quickly in ways which were not expected. Its economy and development have advanced (despite facing some challenges in the last couple of years) even as any hint at political reform to a more pluralist system has been avoided. This was almost certainly not the situation that those promoting open engagement with China at the turn of the millennium expected. Back then, the `end of history’ logic was that the sort of reforms China was engaged with would ultimately lead to the demand by its citizens for more participation in decision-making. So far, that emphatically has not happened – or at least not in such a way that the government has felt compelled to respond to.
The claimed spy case in the UK (and it should be stressed that Mr Cash and Mr Berry were never found guilty, and the case against them was dropped) shows how hard it is for Britain to maintain some sense of balance and control when trying to devise a policy towards the world’s second largest economy, and the largest remaining state under a Communist party enjoying a monopoly on power. It is almost as though in public discourse at least, we are trying to use pre-Newtonian physics to deal with quantum mechanics. China is the world’s greatest paradox: a Communist state which practices perhaps the purest profit driven form of capitalism the world has ever seen. That makes its companies and its operations commercially highly competitive and probably poses the biggest challenge to players like Britain.
With the fallout over this case, we have proved that a sensible political and public consensus on what to do about a relationship which is unavoidable and necessary, but also frustrating and challenging, continues to remain elusive. As long as we remain conflicted and troubled by this issue, it is likely we will ever feel in control of it. The UK needs to convince itself that its relations with China are manageable, and sustainable. Otherwise, it will continue to be buffeted by fear, suspicion and evasion.
[Further reading: How the China spy scandal engulfed the government]
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