South Holland and the Deepings MP Sir John Hayes writes about the cross-party Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee report on China

MP Sir John Hayes pens his latest column about his role in the cross-party Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee report on China...

When my father was born in 1916, China was a distant, almost mythical, land of which most Britons knew little.

During my childhood, as that country was closed off under Chairman Mao, there was little understanding on our shores of the horrors of the famine inflicted upon millions of Chinese people by their communist oppressors.

Later we learned more about the terrifying purges of the Cultural Revolution, when children were encouraged to turn on their own parents in the wicked cause of revolutionary zeal. Such terror felt remote from us at a time when concerns about the nuclear stand-off with the Soviet Union dominated Western thinking.

Though the immediate threat to western Europe’s stability today comes from the reckless expansionism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the menacing influence of the Chinese Communist tyranny has been growing for ages. The so-called “Golden Era” of Sino-British relations that it was hoped would follow our departure from Hong Kong has turned into tarnished base metal.

China’s aim is chillingly clear - to become a technological and economic superpower on which other countries, including our own, become reliant, their ‘whole state’ approach being designed to deploy all available resources to that end.

Just as the threat now is different from that of the Cold War, so the response must be too. We could not easily completely disentangle ourselves from China even if there was a political will to do so. The Western economic model is underpinned by excessive foreign imports - indeed, China is the UK’s third-biggest trading partner. A glance around houses or workplaces reveals that many of the products we take for granted are made there. When the lockdowns affected Chinese ports, we very quickly noticed the shortages on shelves here.

Last week the cross-party Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), of which I am one of just nine members, published a report detailing China’s national security threat to the UK, setting out examples of “aggressive” behaviour including exerting influence over UK academic institutions, theft of intellectual property, and running a “highly capable and increasingly sophisticated cyber-espionage operation”.

The ISC’s report found that China is targeting key industrial sectors in which the UK has particular expertise, warning that “without swift and decisive action, we are on a trajectory for the nightmare scenario where China steals blueprints, sets, standards and build products, exerting political and economic influence at every step”.

The report criticises the UK’s “completely inadequate” response to the threat from China, and calls it “unacceptable for the Government still to be considering Chinese involvement in the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure at a granular level”, including our nuclear industry.

For too long, Britain has sought the short-term economic benefits of Chinese investment without properly dealing with the long-term security costs of a deeper relationship with the world’s largest authoritarian state - one which, in the words of my committee, envisions “a future in which it could be ‘the’ world power”.

The ISC is a Parliamentary committee, independent of Government, which oversees the work of the UK’s intelligence agencies, where senior Parliamentarians are granted access to highly classified material, with our proceedings taking place in secret. As a result, our reports draw on classified evidence.

I’ve written in this newspaper previously that China should be held to account for its role in the pandemic, given both the terrible human cost and economic damage.

Taking a longer term, strategic view would allow Britain to become less dependent on China.

It ought not to have taken a pandemic for Western democracies to act together to keep undemocratic China in check, but now we must work to do so or suffer the consequences.