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Rh organisations—from central Government departments to trade associations—to ensure that our efforts were appropriately targeted. We produced 17 new pieces of guidance and a range of material to support the ESPs [Essential Service Providers] and advise on how to reduce their cyber risk.

NCSC noted that *** and that the pandemic also caused it to work much more closely with the UK's Health Critical National Infrastructure given the greater interest shown in it as a result of Covid-19. This has included working with the Department of Health and Social Care to tackle the range of cyber threats that have emerged, and NCSC notes that ***.

During the pandemic, sectors not traditionally considered 'critical'—such as organisations working on a vaccine, supermarkets, logistics, haulage and medical equipment supply companies—became essential to the UK's response. The support of the Intelligence Community was key to protect the vaccine supply chain and to counter the interest shown in these 'critical' areas by hostile foreign actors

China is well documented as a generous lender to developing countries. While exact figures are difficult to obtain, it is thought that China lends extensively across Africa, South America, the Middle East, and South East Asia. As noted in the main body of this Report, China has taken advantage of developing countries, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, but this is not without its drawbacks. The JIC Chair noted that:

the debt issue is a problem for China. China has loaned a lot of relatively poor countries a lot of money to do infrastructure projects, and they have wanted it, on the whole. Now they are reaching the point where, partly because of Covid-19, they cannot actually meet their repayment obligations. So China is facing a reputational problem with those countries.

If you looked in the Financial Times, earlier this week, you will have seen the Finance Minister of Ghana, a Commonwealth country, saying, yes, China is an important lender in Africa but it is problematic that they want to renegotiate bilaterally, rather than within a multilateral framework, because what that means is that Western countries are reluctant to do deals because they think that will just let the Chinese off the hook.

So this is not all up-sides for China. There are real reputational problems. You will have seen some of the reputational hits that China took over the distribution of sub-quality protective equipment in the context of Covid-19. So it is, as I say, quite a complex picture.