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PART ONE: THREAT AND RESPONSE

China's national imperative is to ensure that the Chinese Communist Party remains in power. Everything else is subservient to that.

However, it is its ambition at a global level—to become a technological and economic superpower, on which other countries are reliant—that poses a national security threat to the UK.

China views the UK through the optic of the struggle between the United States and China. When combined with the UK's membership of significant international bodies, and the perception of the UK as an international opinion-former, these factors would appear to place the UK just below China's top priority targets.

China views the UK as being of use in its efforts to mute international criticism and to gain economically: this, in the short term at least, will temper China's targeting of the UK.

China is seeking both political influence and economic advantage in order to achieve its aims in relation to the UK. It seeks to acquire information and influence elites and decision-makers, and to acquire Intellectual Property using covert and overt methods to gain technological supremacy.

China almost certainly maintains the largest state intelligence apparatus in the world. The nature and scale of the Chinese Intelligence Services are—like many aspects of China's government—hard to grasp for the outsider, due to the size of the bureaucracy, the blurring of lines of accountability between party and state officials, a partially decentralised system, and a lack of verifiable information.

The Chinese Intelligence Services target the UK and its overseas interests prolifically and aggressively. While they seek to obtain classified information, they are willing to utilise intelligence officers and agents to collect open source information indiscriminately—given the vast resources at their disposal. In more ways than one, the broad remit of the Chinese Intelligence Services poses a significant challenge to Western attempts to counter their activity.

To compound the problem, it is not just the Chinese Intelligence Services: the Chinese Communist Party co-opts every state institution, company and citizen. This 'whole-of-state' approach means China can aggressively target the UK, yet the scale of the activity makes it more difficult to detect ***.