A surprising contact on LinkedIn. An offer of work from a recruiter, probably a female agent, operating from the Asian nation. The chance to earn perhaps £20,000 on the side writing a handful of geopolitical analyses for a Chinese company peppered with “non-public” or privileged information. Payment in cryptocurrency or physical money favored.
It may seem clear, in this scenario, that something about this approach would be suspicious. However, China’s influential intelligence agency still considers it worthwhile to deploy headhunters to try it – prompting MI5 to warn repeatedly about their operations online.
Large-Scale Contact Attempts on Social Media
Last year, the head of MI5 Ken McCallum said operatives from China were contacting Britons on the platform on an unprecedented level, at a frequency of 10,000 over the preceding two and a half years, attempting to obtain governmental, commercial, defense and technological secrets. But a new initiative targeting politicians and parliament has prompted the intelligence service to take further action.
A spying alert was issued on Tuesday via the administrative teams of the Commons speaker and his Lords counterpart: a single slide after the repeated efforts of Shirly Shen and other operatives to reach out to MPs, peers, their staffers, economic experts, thinktanks – anyone who might become a source.
Intelligence Approach and Legal Changes
In the curious manner of UK security services, there was no official release of the protective guidance from MI5 or the Home Office. But the service knew its advisory document would leak once it was emailed out to parliament. Sharing it in the press helps the wider public more easily recognize communications with a deceptive purpose.
The alert has the effect of flushing out more information from in and around Westminster, though that is not the agency's main objective. The service aims for people in public life to recognize that just because exchanges on professional networks are not as toxic as on X or Facebook, it doesn't imply they are completely safe.
Nor is internal security service understood to have been responding to a particular event in parliament, although the recent actions occur after the embarrassing failure of the prosecution of a ex-assistant Christopher Cash and his friend Christopher Berry on a legal detail earlier in the autumn.
Both individuals had been charged of spying for China – a charge they denied – but inability to successfully conclude a trial under the now repealed previous legislation resulted in warnings that British democracy had been left unprotected.
Revised Laws and Beijing's Strategic Interests
Legislation has now been changed, and the MI5 slide contains a reminder of its successor: “Those engaging in espionage activity risk substantial criminal penalties under the National Security Act.” It is a criminal offense if a person participates in behavior that could potentially “materially assist a foreign intelligence service”.
A natural question, though, is what Beijing has to achieve. A politician who is outside ministerial roles will have limited access of classified material, and an associate of theirs even less. Yet the Chinese government is particularly focused in parliament: for a period, in 2020 and 2021, the UK’s China policy on issues such as the telecom firm or the human rights situation or alleged atrocities was being driven by parliamentarians.
Methodological Differences and Persistent Digital Risks
In part there are distinct approaches as well. Authoritarian governments like China’s export information gathering methods and the scale of its intelligence apparatus is enormous, employing three hundred thousand people. A former US official, a US national cyber director under president Joe Biden, commented it was occasionally assessed that “China have greater linguistic capacity engaged in this than Western agencies have personnel with language skills”.
Beijing is willing to cultivate people over the long term and sometimes even the intelligence services have found it difficult to distinguish between genuine connections and espionage. “Beijing has a minimal requirement for what information is considered to be useful,” security minister Dan Jarvis informed parliamentarians on this week, but a sudden turn in the political cycle may result in someone rapidly marginal becomes significant.
Another way to think about the continuous efforts at covert intelligence collection is in the wider context of the international competition between Beijing and the Western nations at a level under the level of direct conflict. China has stepped up its cyber operations, with the one campaign infiltration of phone and data networks in 80 countries, and the Volt Typhoon compromise of countless connected equipment.
Beijing is involved in relentless efforts to find covert sources on UK politics via digital means because it seeks to be challenging, to display influence and because it has the capability.
