The British government is considering tightening rules on investment in China after the US president announced new measures aimed at limiting the dollars and expertise flowing into sensitive technologies in the country. Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday that authorises the US treasury secretary to prohibit or restrict US investments in Chinese entities in three sectors: semiconductors and microelectronics; quantum information technologies; and certain artificial intelligence systems. The US government has said the measures are designed to address national security risks. China said on Thursday it was gravely…
Tag: Politics
HSBC executive apologises for calling UK weak over China
A senior executive at HSBC has apologised after saying the “weak” UK government had caved in to the US in its approach to doing business with China. Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the bank’s head of public affairs and a former British diplomat, said sorry after “sharing his personal views” on Britain’s policy towards Beijing at a private event, a spokesperson for HSBC said. They added that Cowper-Coles’s comments were made under the Chatham House rule, a longstanding convention that means those in attendance cannot attribute remarks at an event to individual…
How can the west best tackle the threat from China? First, it must stop panicking | Kerry Brown
In the figure of Xi Jinping, with his dominant political personality and assertive communicative style, many in the west have found the autocrat they always feared would one day confront them. For Xi and the people around him, combatting what his administration calls “western universalism”, and western attempts to infiltrate China’s politics through economic and cultural engagement, has been a major task. Now the Xi threat has come right into our own back yard. A recent report by the British parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC) defines the nature of…
China: Qin Gang mystery intensifies as articles wiped from ministry site reappear
The mystery surrounding the fate of China’s former foreign minister has intensified, as references to him that had previously been scrubbed from the foreign ministry’s website started to reappear. Articles about Qin Gang’s activities were removed from the foreign ministry’s website after he was replaced by his predecessor, Wang Yi, on Tuesday. Qin, who has not been seen in public for a month, remained as a state councillor, leading to confusion about what, if any, disciplinary action was being taken against him. But early on Friday morning Beijing time, articles…
Labour plans new taskforce to target contractors linked to hostile nations
Contractors linked to hostile foreign powers such as China will be targeted by a new security taskforce if Labour wins the next general election. In a joint initiative from the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, and the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, the new body will aim to anticipate risks to Britain’s national security. It comes just days after the deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, said China represents the “largest state-based threat” to Britain’s economic security. The government intervened in eight attempted takeovers of UK firms by Chinese buyers last year…
David Cameron’s appointment to investment fund ‘part engineered by China’
David Cameron’s appointment as vice-chair of the £1bn China-UK investment fund and Sir Danny Alexander’s appointment as vice-president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank were in part engineered by the Chinese state, parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC) found. Their appointment was to lend credibility to Chinese investment as well as the broader Chinese brand, according to confidential evidence given to the intelligence watchdog. Both Cameron as prime minister and Alexander as Treasury chief secretary were at the heart of the plan to usher in a golden age in Anglo-Chinese…
Fifth of UK universities’ income comes from overseas students, figures show
One in every five pounds received by UK universities last year came from international students, according to Guardian analysis that reveals the scale of the sector’s growing dependence on overseas tuition fees for financial survival. With the annual dash to allocate university places for the next academic year about to begin, there are fears UK students could lose out to their overseas counterparts, whose higher fees have become critical to university budgets. Tuition fees from international students now make up a third or more of the total income at some…
Committee report is rightfully scathing on UK’s China strategy
If there is one constant in the UK’s policy towards China over the past three decades it has been its short-termism and inconsistency, the scathing intelligence and security committee report on China rightly finds, comparing Britain’s endless course corrections with Beijing’s capacity to think strategically about how to advance the global interests of the Chinese Communist party. If Downing Street thinks in terms of the next news bulletin, China has a planning cycle that in some of its documents takes it to 2049, as the ISC was told by one…
China engaged in ‘whole of state’ assault on UK, report says
China’s state institutions are aggressively targeting the UK, putting the country on course for a nightmare scenario that represents not just a commercial challenge but an existential threat to liberal democratic systems, parliament’s influential all-party intelligence and security committee has found. The inquiry – launched in 2019 and subject to various delays was completed in May – is scathing about the failure of the UK to wake up to the scale of the systemic challenge posed by the Chinese government’s “whole of state” assault on the British economy, politics, civil…
We’re a Tory MP and a Hong Kong pro-democracy activist, and China is trying to silence us both | Finn Lau and Tim Loughton
We are from two different backgrounds and political traditions – you’d think we might have little in common. Yet China has sought to silence us both, and we have seen at first hand how the state is trying to exert more and more power abroad. Finn Lau woke up in London on Tuesday morning to the news that he had received an arrest warrant, and that the Beijing-controlled Hong Kong authorities were offering a HK$1m bounty for any information that could lead to his arrest. Seven other Hongkongers who fight…