Page:ISC-China.pdf/92

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The JIO, working with NSS and JSTAT, told this Inquiry that they were working to 'map' foreign interference ***.

FF. The UK Intelligence Community have been open with the Committee about the challenges of detecting Chinese interference operations. ***

One of the factors in the lack of understanding is that, until recently, the Agencies did not recognise that they had any responsibility for countering Chinese interference activity in the UK, since they considered that the policy community had mandated them to focus on other threats. In 2019, they told the Committee that ***:

"Responsibility for mitigating the more overt aspects of the [Chinese] threat to the UK rests with government policy departments ***."

Historically, this resulted in an intelligence gap as it meant that not only were the Agencies not taking responsibility for tackling it, they were not even proactively seeking to identify it. Instead, it 'fell through the cracks' as the Government was relying on government departments to identify and then tackle the threat posed by China on their policy areas. (This was not unusual—we reported a similar historic problem in our Russia Report.) Yet the whole-of-state approach used by China meant that various UK government departments were trying to tackle different versions of the same problem—that of Chinese nationals, whether employed by the Chinese Communist Party or private individuals, actively working for China's benefit. For example, at the time of taking evidence, the Department for Education (alongside the (then) Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) was responsible for identifying and tackling Chinese interference in UK Academia.

However, there is no evidence that Whitehall policy departments have the necessary resources, expertise or knowledge of the threat to investigate and counter the Chinese whole-of-state approach. The nature of China's engagement, influence and interference activity in the UK is difficult to detect, but even more concerning is the fact that the Government may not previously have been looking for it. ***.