LONDON (AP) — The head of Britain’s cyber-intelligence agency on Tuesday accused China of trying to “rewrite the rules of international security,” saying Beijing is using its economic and technological clout to clamp down at home and exert control abroad.
Jeremy Fleming, director of GCHQ, said that despite war raging in Europe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Beijing’s growing power is the “national security issue that will define our future.”
In a rare public speech to the Royal United Services Institute think tank, Fleming alleged that Beijing’s Communist authorities want to “gain strategic advantage by shaping the world’s technology ecosystems.”
“When it comes to technology, the politically motivated actions of the Chinese state is an increasingly urgent problem we must acknowledge and address,” Fleming said. “That’s because it’s changing the definition of national security into a much broader concept. Technology has become not just an area for opportunity, for competition and for collaboration, it’s become a battleground for control, for values and for influence.”
He argued that the one-party system in Beijing seeks to control China’s population and sees other countries “as either potential adversaries or potential client states, to be threatened, bribed or coerced.”
Relations between Britain and China have grown increasingly frosty in recent years, with U.K. officials accusing Beijing of economic subterfuge and human rights abuses.
British spies have given increasingly negative assessments of Beijing’s influence and intentions. Last year the head of the MI6 overseas intelligence agency, Richard Moore, called China one of the biggest threats to Britain and its allies.
In 2020, then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson followed the United States in banning Chinese tech firm Huawei as a security risk, ordering it to be stripped out of the U.K.’s 5G telecoms network by 2027.
