The United Kingdom’s spy agencies are reportedly taking a tougher line on China and urging the government to rethink its stance toward Beijing in the wake of China’s deceptions involving the coronavirus outbreak.
The British intelligence community believes the U.K. must “reassess its relationship with China” after the COVID-19 pandemic has passed, according to the Guardian, which added that “intelligence agencies have been urging a greater emphasis on Chinese activity for months.”
The report said intelligence officials believe the British government should reevaluate whether “tighter controls are needed” in strategic industries such as the high-tech and 5G fields increasingly dominated by Chinese big-tech firm Huawei. The questions of whether to “restrict” Chinese takeovers of digital companies or artificial intelligence firms and whether to “reduce” the access that Chinese students have to research at British universities are also reportedly being “aired” by spy agencies.
The news comes as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was released from the hospital this weekend following a serious battle with the coronavirus and echoes a Daily Mail report from late March wherein British intelligence agencies assessed China was continuing to “downplay” the scope of the coronavirus problem. That article also claimed there was “fury” within the British government’s leadership thanks to China’s “misinformation blitz” surrounding the coronavirus. The piece said the U.K. was rethinking its relationship with China, and one government source claimed, “There has to be a reckoning when this is over.”
The U.S. intelligence community also suspects that China misled about the initial coronavirus outbreak and continues to lie about its cases and death toll.
There is well-documented evidence that China tried to cover up the existence and the spread of the coronavirus, muzzled whistleblowers, misled the World Health Organization, and attempted to block outside health experts. At least one study indicated that, if the Chinese government had acted more quickly, the coronavirus’s global spread would have been greatly reduced.
Reports show Chinese doctors knew in about late December and early January that human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus was occurring and that the Chinese government silenced medical professionals who attempted to make the evidence public.
The WHO tweeted on Jan. 14 that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in Wuhan, China.” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus repeatedly praised China’s response, including after a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in late January.
“Some of the reporting from China was not clear about the scale, the nature, the infectiousness of this,” Michael Gove, a British Conservative member of Parliament and the minister for the cabinet office, told BBC One in March.
Damian Green, another Conservative member of Parliament, said that same month the “irritation” of the British government with China “both for the delay in informing international bodies of the arrival of the coronavirus and for its slightly dubious attitude to statistics” is obvious.
The U.K.’s House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee concluded in April that “disinformation about COVID-19 has already cost lives.” The committee added that “China should have played a central role in collecting data on its spread and enabling scientists around the world to develop a fast and effective response,” but, “from the outset, China has sought to obfuscate the data.”
The Henry Jackson Society, a British foreign policy think tank, released a report in April that concluded that, “as a direct consequence of the CCP’s decision to not share information about the initial stages of the outbreak of COVID-19, the disease spread far faster than it would otherwise have done.”
A group of Conservative members of Parliament, citing the report, called for the U.K. to shift away from China.
“Once the crisis has passed, we urge the Government to re-think our wider relationship with China,” they wrote, adding, “Over time, we have allowed ourselves to grow dependent on China and have failed to take a strategic view of Britain’s long-term economic, technical and security needs.”
The Guardian reported that MI5 and MI6, roughly the British equivalents of the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA, “still believe it was correct” for Johnson to allow China’s Huawei to gain access to the U.K.’s fifth-generation wireless network.
Huawei was designated a “high-risk vendor” by the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre, and the U.K. government said in January that it would ban “high-risk vendors” such as Huawei from “core” 5G infrastructure but would allow Huawei to build the network and would let its equipment handle up to 35% of the nation’s 5G “periphery” system.
Huawei has denied cooperating with Chinese intelligence.
“There has been groundless criticism from some about Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s 5G rollout,” Huawei said over the weekend. “Disrupting our involvement in the 5G rollout would do Britain a disservice.”
The United States is engaged in an all-out effort to convince the U.K. to reject Huawei, warning of the national security risks posed by potential backdoor access by China. The U.S. has long sought to convince allies not to use Huawei, threatening to stop sharing intelligence with countries that don’t ban the company from their high-speed wireless networks.
The Justice Department charged Huawei in a global racketeering scheme linked to Iran and North Korea in February, and the Trump administration has redoubled its efforts to limit Chinese access to the U.S. telecommunications network.
Several Tories in the House of Commons are trying to ban Huawei from the U.K.’s mobile networks entirely by the end of 2022.
Attorney General William Barr said in February that national security is dependent on pushing back against China’s dominance in 5G technology. He noted China “can monitor and surveil” countries that use 5G equipment from Chinese-backed companies. Barr said China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law “requires Chinese companies, such as Huawei and ZTE, to support, provide assistance, and cooperate in China’s national intelligence work, wherever they operate.”
