One of the men, a young Briton known for his hawkish views on China, worked as an aide to a senior member of the British Parliament. Another, a German citizen of Chinese origin, was an assistant to an MEP representing the German far right.
Although they come from different countries and have seemingly divergent backgrounds and perspectives, the two men grew angry this week over accusations of spying on behalf of China – and over a growing backlash in Europe against China’s malign influence in politics and trade.
A total of six people in three separate cases were charged this week in Europe with spying for China: two in Britain and four in Germany.
The espionage cases in Britain and Germany, the first of their kind in two countries that once enjoyed warm relations with Beijing, have served as eye-catching exclamation points in Europe’s long and often agonizing break with China.
Shortly after British and German officials announced that six of their citizens had been charged with espionage, Dutch and Polish authorities raided the offices of a Chinese security equipment supplier on Wednesday as part of a sweep of crackdown by the European Union against what it considers unfair trade. practices.
It was the first time the bloc’s executive body, the European Commission, used a new anti-foreign subsidies law to order a raid on a Chinese company.
In early April, Sweden expelled a Chinese journalist who had resided in the country for two decades, saying the journalist posed a threat to national security.
After years of regular trade conflicts followed by reconciliation, Europe “has lost patience with China,” said Ivana Karaskova, a Czech researcher at the Association for International Affairs, an independent research group in Prague, which served until ‘last month as an advisor to the Association for International Affairs. the European Commission on China.
China still has loyal friends in the European Union, notably Hungary, she added, in “the multidimensional chess game” between the world’s two largest economies after the United States. But Europe, Ms. Karaskova said, has moved from a position of “total denial” in some quarters about the danger posed by Chinese espionage and influence operations to “adopting a less naive view and wants to defend the European interests vis-à-vis other countries. China.”
Accusations this week that China was using spies to penetrate and influence the democratic process in Germany and Britain caused particular concern because they suggested a desire to expand beyond the already well-known subterfuge linked to affairs, covert political interference, which was previously considered a largely Russian specialty.
But Chinese experts say these accusations and this week’s series of accusations indicate not so much that Beijing is stepping up spying but rather that European countries have stepped up their response.
“Countries have been forced to become realistic,” said Martin Thorley, a British China expert and author of “” Everything that shines “ a forthcoming book detailing how what London touted a decade ago as a “golden age” of Sino-British friendship under David Cameron has made it easier for China to subjugate politicians and businessmen. The “Golden Age” was widely ridiculed as a “golden mistake.”
Mr Cameron, who is now Britain’s foreign secretary, has become a vocal critic of China in recent months. “Many facts have changed,” he said during a visit to Washington in December, declaring that China had become “a defining challenge of our times.”
His turnaround reflects a broader shift in attitudes in much of Europe toward a rising superpower that has long relied on European countries, particularly Germany, to resist what it denounces. as “anti-China hype” emanating from Washington.
Germany’s security services have been publicly warning about the risk of trusting China since 2022, when, shortly after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the head of its domestic intelligence agency, Thomas Haldenwang told parliament: “Russia is the storm, China is climate change.”
The agency, known by its German acronym BfV, said in an unusual public warning last summer: “In recent years, the Chinese state and party leadership have significantly stepped up efforts to obtain high-quality political information and influence decision-making processes. abroad.”
However, until this week, the German political leadership has been much more equivocal. Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently made a state visit to China, Germany’s largest trading partner, to discuss trade and market access.
But Germany’s interior minister this week gave a blunt assessment of China’s activities. “We are aware of the considerable danger that Chinese espionage represents for business, industry and science,” said Minister Nancy Faeser. “We are examining these risks and threats very closely and have issued clear warnings and raised awareness so that protective measures are strengthened everywhere. »
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs respond by rejecting the accusations as unfounded “slander and defame China,” demanding that Germany “stop malicious hype” and “end anti-China political drama.”
Mareike Ohlberg, a China expert and senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, said that “for a long time, China was spared major public warnings.” Today, she said, German authorities are “more willing to denounce things, or no longer have the patience to denounce things.”
Three of four people arrested in Germany this week, a husband, a wife and another man, appear to have been involved in economic espionage using a company called Innovative Dragon to transmit sensitive information about German marine propulsion systems – of great value to a superpower interested in strengthening its navy. They also used the company to purchase a high-power dual-use laser, which they exported to China without authorization.
The fourth person, in what prosecutors called a “particularly serious case,” was Jian Guo, a Chinese-German accused of working for China’s Ministry of State Security. His regular job was as an assistant to Maximilian Krah, a member of the European Parliament for the far-right Alternative for Germany party – a rising political force favorable to China and Russia – and its main candidate in the June elections.
Since then, the Dresden prosecutor has opened a “pre-investigation” to find out whether Mr Krah knew of his employee’s links to China. On Wednesday, his party decided to continue supporting Mr Krah’s bid for re-election to the European Parliament, but withdrew him from its election campaign.
When Mr. Xi visits Europe next month, he will avoid Germany and Britain and instead visit Hungary and Serbia, China’s last two staunch allies on the continent, as well as France.
Mr. Thurley, the British author, said the espionage cases had raised the alarm about Chinese activities, but represented only a small part of China’s efforts to gain influence and informations. Even more important than traditional espionage, he explained, is China’s use of a “latent network” of people who do not work directly for the Ministry of State Security but who, for for commercial and other reasons, are vulnerable to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party and its myriad offshoots.
“It hasn’t been good for a while and it’s been going on for too long,” he said.
The two men accused in London of spying for China, Christopher Cash, 29, and Christopher Berry, 32, were arrested in March last year but released on bail and were only named publicly after their indictment this week.
Mr Cash was a parliamentary researcher with links to the ruling Conservative Party and a former director of the Chinese research groupan organization that often takes a hard line on China and podcast hosts with criticism of Chinese interference.
His former colleagues include Alicia Kearns, a member of the ruling Conservative Party and head of Parliament’s influence programme. Foreign Affairs Committeeand his predecessor in this position, Tom Tugendhat, who is now Minister of Security.
In a statement this week, London’s Metropolitan Police said Mr Cash and Mr Berry were accused of breaching the Official Secrets Act and providing information “intended to be, directly or indirectly, useful to an enemy”. He added: “The foreign state to which the above accusations relate is China. »
“It’s taken a long time to wake up, but we’re finally seeing some movement,” said Peter Humphrey, a British citizen who China accuses of illegally obtaining personal information while carrying out due diligence work. for the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, and who spent two years in a Shanghai prison with his wife.
He was in prison and suffering from cancer when Mr Cameron visited the city in 2013 with a delegation of British businessmen. “It was sickening,” recalls Mr. Humphrey, an external scholar at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. “No one at senior levels of the British government,” he said, “wanted to hear bad things about China because of commercial interests.”
