A friend of mine was approached on LinkedIn recently by a Chinese national: “Based on your background, I think you would be a great fit for our client”, ran the script. They hadn’t done their research on my friend, a hard-line sceptic who had driven nearly every recent Beijing-critical effort in the European Parliament. The notion that any Chinese client would want to be in a room with him was more than a little implausible. He didn’t reply.
Not so with many other targets. Sir Ken McCallum warned in 2023 that as many as 20,000 Britons have been approached on LinkedIn by profiles linked to Chinese state actors. The phenomenon hit the news last month when MI5 issued a formal parliamentary alert about two individuals accused of using LinkedIn to approach people in the parliamentary ecosystem on behalf of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS).
The genius is in the banality of it all. The choreography of modern recruitment is designed to look normal: a polished message, a flattering invitation to write a short “policy” paper, an honorarium, a paid trip, a promise of future “opportunities”. These approaches are not crude entrapments, but the hooks for what become long-term grooming campaigns that escalate slowly and exploit everyday vulnerabilities. It’s a low-cost, high-impact option for Beijing’s operatives. LinkedIn does the reconnaissance. Tens of thousands of invitations can be sent. And a single lead can justify hundreds of dead ends.
On its own, a single approach may not pose much of a risk to national security. At scale, the threat is very real. This work is a part of a broader effort to shape UK institutions to be less resistant to the aims of the Communist Party, and to help Beijing assert its dominance by all and any means necessary, lawful or illicit.
And, yes, people fall for it. The CIA famously groups espionage motives under the acronym MICE: money, ideology, coercion, ego. It remains unerringly accurate, especially the ego factor. Flattery, exclusive invitations and the promise of being “the expert” are consistently reported as powerful accelerants. The MSS’s recruiters cultivate status and belonging. It works especially well with mid-career specialists who feel overlooked by their institutions. Of course, these motives rarely appear in isolation. The MSS’s success lies in shaping multiple pressures over time, turning a benign connection into routine cooperation. Even journalists have been shown to be susceptible.
But the threat ranges far beyond LinkedIn. Let’s widen the lens a little. The MSS is not just a spy agency in the narrow sense, but a key instrument in upholding the unchallengeable authority of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is itself foundational to the “new China”. The old China, by contrast, is the China of the “century of humiliation” which, in both Nationalist and Communist folklore, was bullied and suppressed by Japan and by European powers including Britain. The Party is the means of liberation — the architects of a People’s Republic that will achieve the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, and restore China to its natural position at the centre of the world order. This presupposes, of course, the end of what the CCP sees as a Western-imposed order. Any criticism, anywhere in the world, which challenges the legitimacy of the Party is therefore a threat to national security and to China’s destiny that must be managed, if not eliminated. To that end, the MSS is among the Party’s chief tools.
But the MSS is only one part of China’s intelligence apparatus. You may remember the Prince Andrew “spy” scandal, where the courts refused a visa to Chinese national Yang Tenbo on national security grounds. Yang had grown close to some of Prince Andrew’s charitable efforts, and dozens of photos of him looking chummy with the former prince surfaced. Those following closely may also remember that Xuelin Bates (neé Black), now married to a Tory peer, was found to have set up “talent acquisition centres” for Beijing. The FBI says that China’s talent schemes “incentivize members to steal foreign technologies needed to advance China’s national, military, and economic goals”. Both Yang and (now) Lady Bates were accused of being affiliated with the “United Front”, a loose and sprawling association of organisations and individuals using their positions to soften opposition to the CCP.
Successive leaders have termed the United Front an “important magic weapon” to “defeat the enemy, govern, and rejuvenate the country”, and Xi currently sees it as a key component of advancing the Party policy. The United Front mobilises non-Party forces, such as overseas Chinese, intellectuals, religious groups, minorities, businesspeople, to align them with CCP goals, strengthening national unity, broadening the Party’s social and influence base.
Its methods are almost impossible to detect, and rarely illegal: coded threats to dissidents; services offered to overseas Chinese which enable the party to exact control at a distance; preferential business offers with invisible strings attached; infiltration of institutions across the UK economy and civic institutions; calling in favours earned over long periods of careful grooming. This list barely scratches the surface. It’s not a homogenous body. Jelly is more easily nailed to a wall than is the amorphous blob of the United Front, and that’s by design, of course.
The MSS and United Front projects are distinct, but two branches of the same tree. They can and do interact and reinforce one another as part of China’s broader strategy for political influence and security. Together, they form complementary pillars of the Party’s mechanism to maintain internal cohesion, project influence abroad, and secure its long-term political dominance.
Not only that, as Alex Joske’s painstaking research has pointed out, they are the apparatus at the centre of a deliberate strategy to blur influence and intelligence collection, showing how united front networks of diaspora groups, academic ties, and business associations provide institutional cover and plausible deniability, enabling the co-option of civic and academic structures into state purposes. The line between “normal” outreach and state targeting is intentionally fuzzy.
Those downplaying the risk often argue: “It’s normal for nations to spy on each other”. Or: “We are just as bad”. But they spectacularly miss the point, revealing shocking ignorance of the scale and intent of China’s intelligence operations in the process.
For context, both organisations have gargantuan budgets. In the financial year 2022-23, we spent £3.6 billion on GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 combined. While there are no reliable figures for the MSS cashflow (predictably), one publication put the figure at $20 billion. Turning to the United Front, the Jamestown Foundation found in 2020 that the spending on institutions core to the United Front well exceeded that of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ entire budget, with nearly $600 million set aside for offices designed to influence foreigners and overseas Chinese communities alone. These are regarded by analysts as “floor” figures — highly conservative, with the likely spending much higher.
“In sum: China has the means, manpower, and intent to reshape our way of life.”
In sum: China has the means, manpower, and intent to reshape our way of life. The UK neither has the desire nor ability to do this. In the Chinese model, human intelligence, technical collection, and influence operations fused into a single national effort. It’s a behemoth.
Now, China would not put it in such stark terms, but the logic is plain enough. Their mandate is to protect the unchallengeable authority of the CCP and its aims. This requires and demands narrative control abroad. This, in turn, necessitates the adaptation of life in the UK to the extent that it poses any risk to CCP authority and its stated aims. That means that our values and freedoms, and our open, pluralistic society and institutions, are under threat.
So there’s a whistle-stop tour on what we are dealing with: an adversary with an intelligence apparatus that is “almost certainly the largest in the world,” composed of “hundreds of thousands” of officers and paired with a highly capable cyber-espionage arm. Don’t take my word for it. These are quotes from Parliament’s most senior committee.
Where does all of this leave the UK? My assessment would be that we are fighting a house fire with a syringe filled with lighter fluid. The syringe being the resources available to contain the threat, and the lighter fluid being the UK government’s seemingly irrepressible desire to make things worse.
Consider the National Security Act. Former security minister Tom Tugendhat designed a scheme to help police and intelligence deal with the problem of Chinese interference, called the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (FIRS). The idea was that certain countries would be put in the “Enhanced Tier” and be subject to more stringent registration requirements. Then, the theory goes, those working on behalf of the CCP who fail to register properly would have committed an offence, and the police would have legislation to charge them (not currently the case). The scheme was launched this year, with Iran and Russia placed in the top tier. No prizes for guessing who’s still not in it: the country it was actually built for: China.
This isn’t a party-political point. The last government’s approach to China could be charitably characterised as schizophrenic, with different departments pursuing mutually contradictory approaches. We’ve had an intelligence community screaming from the rooftops about the threat, while ministers made concessions to Beijing in order to pave the way for begging bowl trips to China and Hong Kong.
Indeed, across both Conservative and Labour administrations we have only ever seen movement in the direction of China realism when the backbenches have demanded it. Even then, it’s been tough going, with heavy campaigning to extract the smallest concessions. Huawei, Hikvision, the Genocide Amendment campaign. Every time it has been a slog, which became harder when latent divisions among China hawk MPs were worsened by someone who would be later accused of Chinese espionage.
I write as a long-standing member of the Conservative Party who had to spend the past five years criticising the government’s obstinate unwillingness to address the problem. It is a dereliction of duty to leave the defence of the realm against our more acute security threat to a merry band of backbench MPs and activists. At the very least, it cannot be described as a meaningful China “policy”. More “path of least resistance” capitulation, whether to the backbenches or to Beijing.
That said, it is also true that the UK has begun adjusting its legal architecture, even if in a piecemeal way. I’ve mentioned that the National Security Act 2023 introduced offences criminalising the obtaining or disclosure of trade secrets for a foreign power and other espionage-related acts, addressing a prosecutorial gap that previously made economic espionage difficult to pursue. But legislation is only one pillar: MI5’s warnings, parliamentary briefings to MPs and peers, and the creation of protective institution signal that there is some desire for the state to shift from ad-hoc alerts to system-wide resilience.
Yet we remain miles away. According to MI5, one of the most targeted aspects of the UK economy is business, yet I am not aware of a single MI5 alert having been issued to the business community. We should not be surprised, therefore, when City of London institutions pop up to lobby the government in favour of, say, keeping China out of the top tier of FIRS.
Our response must be precise, grounded in clarity, not ignorance or xenophobia. Britain’s strength is in our openness: universities, collaborative research and cross-border professional networks are national assets. Overreach risks pushing communities away from cooperation and falsely equating ethnicity with threat. The landmark Intelligence and Security Committee report on China explicitly cautions against conflating the Chinese state’s activities with people of Chinese heritage. Effective policy therefore balances targeted intelligence and security measures with safeguards for civil liberties and community cohesion.
But there can be no meaningful response which fails to recognise the strength of the adversary, or to signal willingness to address it. The power of China’s interference apparatus lies in its cinematic scale; the genius lies in the subtlety of its tools, and the danger lies in its intent. That subtlety is what makes the operation both potent and hard to see. We should be alert and robust in our countermeasures, honest about the scale and sophistication of the challenge, and disciplined.
The lines between sunlight and shadow, and between Party and people, have been blurred by design. Recognising that fact is the prerequisite to defending an open society against a whole-of-state adversary that prefers the appearance of normality to the drama of the cloak-and-dagger.
But, right now, we are barely on the playing field, invincibly ignorant for fear of diplomatic detriment. We lack the China expertise and political courage to face reality. This is clearly unsustainable. We are already feeling the pain of naivety. Just recall the British Steel fiasco, bought by Chinese company Jingye and mismanaged so drastically that nationalisation was the only option. As so often, the short-term allure of Chinese investment made us forget the risk, anyway costing us more in the long-run. And yet the Treasury remains convinced that a country which targets the majority of its foreign direct investment towards UK critical infrastructure, and with which the UK has a gaping trading deficit, is somehow going to help save our economy.
Just as the obstinacy of the Westminster bubble over migration policy led to the splintering of the political spectrum and yielding of the microphone to the political fringe, so refusal to address the intensifying threat from China will strengthen the CCP’s narratives, and hobble the UK. If we don’t get this right, it will be British-Chinese people who will pay the price as the UK lurches for a nationalist answer to the Beijing question.
The UK should exchange its lighter fluid-filled syringe for the biggest hosepipe we can find. Our security services are superb, but until we kill the governmental culture of anticipatory obedience, and stop denying the police and intelligence services the tools they need to address the problem, we will not succeed in constraining China’s interference behemoth. This really is urgent. Our universities and private sector have already been compromised, and civic institutions, including even Parliament, are now also being targeted. Act now, or future generations will inherit a different Britain.
