Page:ISC-China.pdf/40

CHINA

To compound the problem, there is not just the ChIS to consider. The UK Intelligence Community assess that: "The Chinese government is agnostic about the means employed to achieve its objectives. It is willing to pull on whichever lever is most likely to succeed, often employing multiple levers at the same time." In practice, this means that Chinese state-owned and non-state-owned companies, as well as academic and cultural establishments and ordinary Chinese citizens, are liable to be (willingly or unwillingly) co-opted into espionage and interference operations overseas. SIS told the Committee:

''when you look at the kind of threat surface, it is very big and the people gathering information will not always be intelligence services. So every state institution in China is ultimately subsumed to the Chinese Communist Party and the state and their military interests. So a university, with no formal link to the intelligence services, could be being used to gather information on technologies which China deems critical to its future place in the world. So it is a very, very big subject.''

This 'whole-of-state' approach will clearly be more difficult to detect ***. Nevertheless, the sharpest, or most challenging, elements of China's acquisition programme will always be placed in the hands of the ChIS. SIS warned that China has "a whole service effort geared to Chinese strategic advantage and will seek to penetrate and potentially disrupt … the UK to secure that advantage over time". This is the area that poses the greatest acquisition threat to the UK, whether via cyber intrusion, covert agents, penetration of HMG or collection of defence technology.

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 ***.